I took this photograph of the Grand Canyon when vacationing in Arizona years ago. It inspires awe to think how the tiny Colorado River carved out this magnificent canyon over thousands of years. It is similar to the entrepreneurial process; a little effort applied consistently over time can yield unimaginable results. If you are thinking of small business as your path to independence, consider the publicity and marketing benefits of small business competitions. My other business, Childs Capital LLC, benefited from being named the 2008 winner of the International Woman’s Entrepreneurship Challenge of the Chambers of Commerce, the 2007 Woman Business Owner of the Year of the National Association of Women Business Owners, the 2006 Optimist Award of the Mirassou Wineries, a 2006 Finalist of the Small Business Advocate of the Year of the National Small Business Association, the 2005 Entrepreneurial Rising Star Award of the Business and Professional Women’s Association, the 2003 Real People, Real Success Award of the U.S. Postal Service and the 2002 Signature Award of the New York City Group of the National Association of Women Business Owners. This recognition can help your business build its profile and expand sales and it costs nothing to accomplish.
Posts Tagged ‘Social Entrepreneurship’
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 10 of an Occasional Series
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009Tags:Bootstrapping, Social Entrepreneurship
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Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 9 of an Occasional Series
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009As this economy prompts more and more people to look at bootstrapping their way to small business independence, I thought it helpful to share my own experience. One of the issues that is quickly surfaced in the entrepreneurial process is the need for more education. As someone else’s employee, your responsibilities are likely narrowly defined. Large corporations have functional departments to deal with every need, whether it be the company website or the marketing department. As a small business owner, you have to become a Jill-of-all-trades and manage everything. And your prior corporate experience has left you unequipped to do it! So you need to learn and need to learn fast. With 50% of small businesses failing in the first year of operations, you have little margin for error. But how do you finance this education when resources are scarce? That is where entrepreneurial creativity comes in. In an earlier blog posting, I described how I took Saturday classes for eighteen months to become proficient in website design. That was part of my education. I took a week-long executive education program at the Harvard Business School, Strategic Finance for Smaller Businesses, paid for by a grant from the Families of Freedom Foundation. The Foundation provided scholarship assistance to those in the immediate impact zone of the World Trade Center on 9-11-01 for which I qualified.
Thereafter, I participated in Owner President Management, a program of the Harvard Business School for founders of fast-growing entrepreneurial enterprises. OPM, as it is known, met three weeks a year for three years on the HBS campus and was truly a tranformational experience. A Professional Development Grant of the American Association of University Women covered part of the cost. I also participated in “Strategic Thinking and Management for Competitive Advantage” at the Wharton School of Business with my tuition and all expenses paid as the winner of the (ft-summer-school-2003) “summer school” competition of the Financial Times newspaper. The image attached to this posting, by the way, is a sign at a school crossing, showing a boy and a girl holdng hands to safely cross the street. I took this photograph in Guinea, a French-speaking country in Sub-Saharan Africa when I was working on a project there. “École” is the French word for school. African parents make tremendous sacrifices to send their children to school, where school fees can be quite onerous for the poor. They do so because they want better futures for their children. This image always inspires me.
Tags:Social Entrepreneurship
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Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 7 of an Occasional Series
Saturday, June 27th, 2009One of the most memorable projects of my first business was working in Guinea for Land O’Lakes. You likely recognize that company as a brand of butter, cream and other dairy products. What is less well known is that Land O’Lakes consists of more than 1,000 member-cooperatives serving more than 300,000 agricultural producers. Land O’Lakes members assist international development by sharing their expertise in farm-to-market agribusinesses. The farmer-to-farmer model is critical to providing technical assistance to small-scale farmers in developing countries, including Guinea, a French-speaking country in sub-Saharan Africa. Its fertile soil and sunny climate notwithstanding, the country imports about 80% of its food. Improving the productivity of the agricultural sector, which consists almost entirely of small family farms, is critical to the country’s efforts to lift itself out of poverty. I worked on a project with Land O’Lakes in Guinea to assist in technical training and human resource development. Although Guinea is one of the most desperately poor places on earth, the experience was very uplifting. This is one of my favorite images; a photograph I took in Conakry, the country’s capital. The juxtaposition of the dirt road and poor sanitation with a glamorous marble mosque that would look at home in Beverly Hills captures the country’s dilemma. This little girl is smiling because she is on her way to school, a rare treat for girls in her part of the world, where illiteracy rates are about 80%. The smiling optimism of the child captures the look of a better future, which is why this is one of my favorite photographs.
Tags:Guinea, Land O'Lakes, Social Entrepreneurship
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Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 6 of An Occasional Series
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Warrilow & Co., a consultancy that advises corporations in marketing to small businesses, recently reported that 29% of small business owners are more tenured than people realize. Roughly one-third of small business owners reported that their businesses grew out of “ramp-up, not start-up”. They maintained their traditional employment while incubating a small business on the side as a secondary source of income. Only when that business could sustain the proprietor as a primary income source did he or she formally incorporate the business at which point it was officially recognized in the small business statistics. So many small businesses are more mature than they appear and often grew out of the owner’s personal passion or hobby. That was certainly my experience and frankly I think it is a less risky approach than trying to jump into the entrepreneurial waters after losing traditional corporate employment. This is particularly true in a market as choppy as this one. I would advise would-be entrepreneurs to think about securing an income stream while putting their small business plans in place over the longer haul. That is what I did as I explored my passions by doing volunteer work for charitable projects while being employed elsewhere full-time. Then when I was ready to start my own business, I had a clearer sense of direction. This photograph, by the way, was a gift to me and to the other women recognized by Glamour magazine as “Women At Their Best” for the charity work we had done for our respective causes.
Tags:New Businesses, Social Entrepreneurship
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Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 5 of an Occasional Series
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009I took this photograph when I lived in Switzerland and worked for Swiss Re. It is the Lion of Lucerne, commemorating the valor of the Swiss in battle. Mark Twain described it as the “most moving piece of rock in the world”. I took the photograph to show the small pond in front of it, to convey the serenity of the space. The two German women tourists facing the rock give a sense of scale. I learned a great deal about life and health insurance, property-casualty insurance and reinsurance from my experience at Swiss Re and Swiss Re, my former employer, became a client of my small business. Poor people in the developing world usually lack access to basic financial services, such as insurance to protect against contingencies. A drought affecting the small family farm, or a flood, can be catastrophic, as can illness or unemployment. The poor typically don’t have insurance for life, health, property or unemployment to provide coverage. One of the areas in which my business worked was to try to develop such solutions that would be cost-effective on a micro-scale for many small policyholders.
Tags:Micro-Insurance, Social Entrepreneurship
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Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 4 of An Occasional Series
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009As many Americans are re-evaluating their career decisions at this difficult time and contemplating entrepreneurship as a solution, I thought it might be helpful to share my own experience. After a more traditional corporate career, working for the Swiss Reinsurance Company in Zurich, Switzerland, I returned to the U.S. for family reasons. My mother had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as a consequence of a ruptured aneurysm and I took some time off to care for her and for my father as well. I was starting my own small business to marry my experience in insurance and finance with the needs for social insurance and access to finance for the poor. And so I founded Childs Capital LLC. Actually, the original name of the business was Chrysalis Capital LLC, but another Chrysalis had filed to trademark that name just a few days before I did. Because of the long backlog in entering applications at the Patent and Trademark Office, the existing Chrysalis did not come up when searched. No matter. I kept the logo we had designed and went with Childs Capital instead since no one could protest the use of my own name. The image shown here is the prototype for the homepage of the website I designed and built for the business.
Being an entrepreneur and a small business owner is really all about bootstrapping and skill-building. As a corporate employee, you specialize in a particular role. As an entrepreneur, you have to be a Jill-of-all-Trades. For me, this involved, among other things, learning how to design and build a website. The September 11th Fund provided training grants for owners of small businesses in the immediate impact zone of the World Trade Center on 9-11 (sadly, we qualified) to take certain professional training programs. I enrolled in the Desktop Publishing and Website Design Certificate Program at the Continuing and Professional Studies Division of Baruch College within the City University of New York. The September 11th Fund provided the tuition waiver. For eighteen months, while running my business, I spent nearly every Saturday from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. in classroom learning website design. Classes met from 9:00 to noon, with a one-hour lunch break and then an afternoon class would follow from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Completion of the certificate required that I take classes in Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, Typography and Fonts, HTML coding, Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Javascript – 12 classses in all. A grant from the Sumasil Foundation paid for the software I purchased. And that is how I learned to design and build a website. I did all of the illustration, photography, design and coding myself. I find one of the most enjoyable aspects of running a business to be broadening my skills sets, as everything I do in support of the business is a labor of love. And now I have mastered WordPress for this blog!
Tags:Social Entrepreneurship, Website Design
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Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 3 of an Occasional Series
Monday, June 22nd, 2009Research shows that longevity is positively correlated with having a purpose in life. For many people, the current recession is a challenge to re-examine the purpose and meaning of work. After reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about professionals performing volunteer work to transition into new careers, I thought I would share my own experience of merging my interests in the non-profit sector with my corporate career to start my own business. As an investment banker working with insurance industry clients, I was given the opportunity to join one of them. I relocated to Zurich, Switzerland to become a senior executive of the Swiss Reinsurance Company. This photograph, by the way, is one I took of a shop window in Zurich. It is Heimatwerk, a shop of hand-crafted Swiss goods. While working at Swiss Re, I continued to volunteer my time and business experience for charitable projects, including working with Opportunity International. I served on its Board of Governors, helping with fundraising and other needs. Opportunity International is a non-profit organization sponsoring microfinance operations in 25 developing countries. Microfinance is the provision of small-scale loans to poor people to allow them to start their own businesses and work their way out of poverty. Opportunity International was my introduction to microfinance. I could see the connection between the work I was doing for Swiss Re and the need for broader social insurance protection for the poor who are employed in the informal sector.
Tags:Social Entrepreneurship, Volunteerism
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Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 2 of an Occasional Series
Saturday, June 20th, 2009After reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about professionals undertaking nonprofit work to make career changes, either voluntarily or involuntarily in this economy, I thought it might be helpful to share my own story. My business represents the marriage of my corporate career with my parallel work in the nonprofit sector. As I described in an earlier blog entry, I began my career as a research associate at the Harvard Business School, during which time I developed a business plan to provide homecare services for frail senior citizens. I moved to New York and was soon working as an investment banker in the financial institutions group of Goldman Sachs. My clients were insurance companies, which helped build expertise that would prove critical when I would start my own business. While at Goldman, I volunteered my annual vacation allowances, four weeks at a time, to charitable projects. In one year, I traveled to Stavropol, Russia to work on a project sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Stavropol is located about 600 miles east of Moscow and is the location of Avtovaz, the manufacturer of the famous Russian car, the Lada.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Avtovaz lost its principal export market as Eastern European countries began to deal with some of the environmental issues that were the legacy of communist rule. At the same time, they lost their domestic market to more fuel-efficient Volkswagens. Unemployment in the region soared to 40%. Avtovaz Bank, the financing arm of the car manufacturer, sought to convert the company’s financials into U.S GAAP to make them comprehensible to foreign investors. At that time, Avtovaz was in discussions with both Fiat and General Motors. (This was more than one decade ago.) My responsibility was to teach classes on bank accounting and risk management for 40 hours a week for several weeks to an association of Russian bankers. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. This photograph, by the way, was taken in Stalin’s bunker. It had been sealed since World War II and had only recently been accidentally discovered by school children playing. In the photograph I am flanked by the Mayor and by one of my escorts. The photographs of the “three heroes” (Lenin, Marx and Engels) were placed on the wall to inspire Stalin.
Tags:Social Entrepreneurship
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