![\"By](\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/04_Challenges-6.jpg\")
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A close look at the business stories these women submitted to The Story Exchange during our 3-year project shows that most are primarily busy with the nuts-and-bolts of running their companies. If descriptions of their top challenge are any guide, bigger-picture strategic issues get much less of their attention.<\/p>\n The focus on tactical issues may well reflect a heavy representation of newer entrepreneurs and smaller companies in our data set — 69 percent of the companies owned by our 1,000 respondents have been in operation for 5 years or less, and 76 percent have 5 employees or fewer. In the early stages of a business, entrepreneurs are often \u201crunning every bit of the show, working <\/span>in<\/span><\/i> the business, rather than <\/span>on<\/span><\/i> the business — that old clich\u00e9,\u201d says Susan G. Duffy, executive director of the Center for Women\u2019s Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL) at Babson College, which partnered with The Story Exchange on the 1,000 Stories project.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cRight from the get go, you have to think about a bigger company,\u201d Duffy says, or you will quickly find \u201cyou don\u2019t have time to lift your head up and think bigger and strategically.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So are women business owners neglecting to lay strategic groundwork early enough in the lives of their ventures? Our data suggest many are struggling to see the forest for the trees. This situation, along with a tendency to set <\/span>lower growth targets<\/span><\/a> than men, could add up to a common reality where women do not build businesses of the size, strength and longevity they truly desire.<\/span><\/p>\n Day-to-day Work<\/b><\/p>\n Overall, the top challenges of women business owners in our project, in order, are sales and marketing (26 percent), personnel and management (17 percent) and finances and cost management (16 percent). <\/span><\/p>\n Across the board, sales and marketing is the No. 1 challenge, as it is for most business owners. <\/span><\/p>\n Promotion on a budget is <\/span>Tze Chun<\/span><\/a>\u2019s top challenge at New York-based Uprise Art, which has\u00a0an unusual art-sales concept. Her art gallery is an online one that connects art lovers with emerging artists. Free \u201cpersonal art advisors\u201d can help buyers find just the right piece, and those buyers can bring new treasures home right away, but pay for them over time.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have a marketing or advertising budget, so getting the word out about our gallery is always a challenge,\u201d she told us. Her solutions have been to build both \u201can online and offline community of artists and collectors that encourages people to spread the word about our events and follow us through social media.\u201d Uprise Art has done especially well on the art-minded Instagram social platform, amassing nearly 9,300 followers.<\/span><\/p>\n On the other side of the country in Los Angeles, <\/span>Doe Deere<\/span><\/a> faced a public-relations nightmare in 2014 when hackers broke into the website of her makeup company, <\/span>Lime Crime<\/span><\/a>, and stole customer data. \u201cRestoring customer trust in the brand was the hardest thing myself and my team have ever done. We rallied and worked tirelessly\u201d — and brought in experts to ensure the site would be \u201cthe makeup equivalent of Fort Knox,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat happened to us and our customers was awful, but I feel that we\u2019ve learned a lot.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Management and personnel is the No. 2 challenge area for 1,000 Stories participants overall, but a greater one for younger women (U.S. women ages 21-40 and non-U.S. women ages 31-40), who would tend to newer to staffing decisions, hiring and people management, tricky but vitally important parts of building an enterprise. <\/span><\/p>\n Denese Palmer<\/span><\/a>, owner of Southside Distributors Ltd., a 9-year-old food company in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, with 42 full- and part-time employees, says her biggest challenge is \u201cgetting the right staff on board who are trainable and adaptable to the food-processing environment.\u201d Southside makes and exports jerk sauce and jerk seasoning, among other products, and brings in annual revenue of more than $500,000.<\/span><\/p>\n To address her people issues, Palmer has added staff training sessions, including in areas beyond food processing like ethics. She has also restructured her job interview process to add practical tests designed to identify whether job applicants are ready to learn. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere is some improvement, but we have a far way to go,\u201d she says.<\/span><\/p>\n Managing Money<\/b><\/p>\n Finances and cost management are always big themes for business owners, and especially women, who face both systemic and personal barriers to accessing capital. <\/span><\/p>\n In many places in the world, women have trouble getting loans because they lack the collateral to back them. Overall, disparities in debt and equity access between men and women are well documented, but Amanda Elam, CWEL\u2019s research director, says the problem appears to have more to do with capital-access problems within the industries where women predominate than outright gender bias. For instance, beauty businesses have more trouble raising money than landscaping firms. <\/span><\/p>\n Whatever the roots of the problem, there is much work to be done to improve women\u2019s access to capital — and that work is being taken up by specialized funds and programs for women entrepreneurs emerging around the world. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe have to unlock capital markets for women, because they can have great companies. And if they don\u2019t have access to funding at the right levels, they\u2019re going to get starved out of growth,\u201d says Duffy of CWEL. <\/span><\/p>\n Worse, they can go under. Even in the most developed countries in Europe and the U.S., where financial systems are large and sophisticated, financing issues accounted for half and one-third, respectively, of business closures for women, much higher proportions than for men, according to Babson\u2019s 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor <\/span>Women\u2019s Report<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Most of the women who participated in our project, like all business owners, used their own money (64 percent) or received help from friends and family (10 percent) to startup, a combined number roughly in line with Babson\u2019s research findings. Few have used bank loans (4 percent) or other types of debt (6 percent) or received equity investments (6 percent), most of which come later in a venture\u2019s life. <\/span><\/p>\n Rebecca S. Hage Thomley, a former clinical psychologist, has been CEO of Orion Associates since 2000. For years, she successfully self-funded Orion, which operates a family of seven companies that provide management services to for-profit and nonprofit social-services providers (the first of which was founded by her mother). But in 2013, when she shared <\/span>her story<\/span><\/a> with us, the Golden Valley, Minn.-based firm was launching a national expansion and needed more cash.<\/span><\/p>\n Thomley has not been keen to give up control to equity investors. And after gathering opinions from her advisory board and a consultant met at an EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women event, she decided to focus on negotiating a line of credit. Her small local bank had to partner with a mid-sized bank, which had to be educated about her complex business, but she ultimately got a $9 million credit line. Orion today brings in more than $110 million in revenue and has nearly 5,200 full- and part-time employees, including 210 in administrative teams in five states.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things we do very well is build relationships with our banks. They\u2019re not just someone we get money from, they are a partner,\u201d Thomley says. \u201cThey know me, and, in addition, we have created a pretty solid reputation. And I\u2019m really tough, and they know that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Crises and Confidence<\/b><\/p>\n Personal challenges ranked fourth among a dozen major themes we identified, though they were only mentioned by 12 percent of respondents. These challenges were primarily related to personal fears and confidence issues, but also to difficult events like personal or family health crises. Another 2 percent of respondents cited discrimination, including sexism.<\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, the self-selected women who participated in the 1,000 Stories project tend to be quite self-assured. The vast majority were \u201cvery confident\u201d in their abilities (92 percent), skills (90 percent) and knowledge (88 percent) . Perhaps they would not have volunteered to share their stories publicly, if they were not. <\/span><\/p>\n Nevertheless, this finding is interesting considering the fact that <\/span>research<\/span><\/a> shows that, around the world, women tend to register lower in their perceptions of their capabilities than men, and greater in fears of failure, despite often higher education levels. And confidence is an oft-discussed challenge at forums for women entrepreneurs. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI think women that start their own businesses don\u2019t identify as having confidence issues,\u201d Duffy says. The confidence conversation is colored by \u201coverconfidence in the male model,\u201d she argues. When women don\u2019t display overconfidence, \u201cthey\u2019re considered underconfident.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n The fact is women approach risk differently from men, she says, tending to take in a lot of information and weigh both the short- and long-term implications of decisions, rather than shooting from the hip. Meanwhile, the culture tells women \u201cyou have to be this Wild West, crazy, risk-taking entrepreneur. And that\u2019s not how entrepreneurs do it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Fuzzier Big Picture<\/b><\/p>\n Where women may have the greatest struggles — perhaps without knowing it — is with the big picture.<\/p>\n Only 5 percent of the women talked about work flexibility and work-life fit as a top challenge. M<\/span>anufacturing and operational issues were cited by 6 percent. <\/span>Strategic issues added up to only 11 percent — starting up (5%), scaling up (2%) business strategy (2%) and working with partners or third-parties (2%). <\/span><\/p>\n![\"Print\"](\"https:\/\/thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/TSE_1kStories_Logo_FINAL1-525x407.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>Sales and marketing, personnel and management issues, the almighty dollar — these are the top challenges for the women entrepreneurs who shared their stories with us as part of the 1,000 Stories<\/a> campaign. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"doe](\"https:\/\/cdn1.thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/24164140\/doe-2.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Challenges](\"https:\/\/cdn1.thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/24162018\/Challenges-ALL-525x370.jpg\")
<\/a>But money, at No. 3, ranks lower than might be expected in our study (though it ranks No. 2 for women aged 41-60). For instance, <\/span>an <\/span>Ernst and Young<\/span><\/a> survey <\/span>shows<\/span><\/a> founders face three main challenges: funding, people and know-how, and funding is No. 1 (know-how ranked low for our group, too, cited as a top challenge by only 6%). Add in <\/span>structural inequities women face and, often, their own reluctance to ask for money, or for enough money, and women would be expected to cite this challenge even more frequently.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Kari](\"https:\/\/cdn1.thestoryexchange.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/24162019\/kari_headshot-e1447384694531.jpg\")
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