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Business Link has seen a big jump in the number of women entrepreneurs coming through our doors. The Equality and Human Rights Commission issued their annual Sex and Power report in September this year. Twenty-four pages later, and the outlook wasn’t all that rosy – apparently the glass ceiling is hardening for women in business.
Conversely, Business Link has seen a big jump in the number of women entrepreneurs coming through our doors in recent years. In 2007-2008, we supported 49% more women owned businesses across the Capital than the previous year – a significant jump indeed. London alone is home to over 55,000 women- owned businesses, a figure that’s growing all the time.
Put these two facts together and it seems setting up a business is one of the biggest opportunities for talented business-women today. Running your own business is increasingly becoming the only sure-fire way for women to break through that glass ceiling.
Leading from the front
So why do women thrive in the small business sector? The obvious answer is the lack of prejudice that you face when you lead from the front. The whole idea of running your own business is that there is no glass ceiling. In fact, there’s no ceiling at all – the sky is very much the limit and you have complete freedom to succeed or fail based purely on your own efforts.
But there’s more to it than that - the success of women entrepreneurs isn’t down to the lack of prejudice in the small business market alone. A key factor is the flexibility that a career as an entrepreneur allows.
A key trigger for a lot of women to start their own business is the birth of their first child. Running your own business is now seen as one of the most viable and effective ways of combining motherhood and making money. Home businesses in particular have been proven to be a very successful way of doing this.
A 2006 study claimed around one in three expectant women were planning on starting their own business from home – that figure has likely increased since then.
Another key factor that has driven this growth in successful women entrepreneurs is the proliferation of good role models. Ten years ago, you’d have to do some serious digging to uncover a high profile business woman. Today, the media landscape is still littered with high powered men, but people like Deborah Meaden from Dragons Den and Julia Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, have begun to give women a glimpse of what can be achieved.
Support services
The growth in women-owned businesses has seen business support services change as well. Two years ago, there was a real and immediate need to better tailor business support services to nurture, encourage and advise women entrepreneurs. Since then, a huge amount of work has gone into building better links between advisory services like ourselves and the female business community.
That work has meant proactively going out and engaging with women. Holding events of all types, as well as visiting thousands of women owned businesses, has helped shape services like ours to deliver on the key issues they face. Ensuring our advisors have a clear picture of that landscape and are well trained to help add to it has also been vital in delivering the right kind of support in recent years.
That effort sees us arrive at the situation we have today – a thriving population of women entrepreneurs helped effectively and appropriately by a strong support network.
Future growth
The current economic climate is adding a significant cloud to any silver lining we see in the small business community right now, and women owned businesses are no different. Yes, consumers and businesses will be spending less and credit will be harder to come by.
None of that, though, overshadows the confidence that is still pervasive amongst women owned businesses.
Every day, we’re continuing to work with thousands of women owned businesses that remain upbeat about the future, and rightly so. The strengths of the small business sector – flexibility, ability to react quickly, loyal customers, quality products and services, specialist offerings – are all still there. All the conversations we’re having and all the research we’ve done to assess the confidence of women owned businesses point towards one thing; the future remains bright.
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