March 24, 2007
Women's Congress to start Thursday
By STACEY MYERS
STAFF WRITER, CAPE COD TIMES
Yarmouthport resident Stephanie Reeve got her latest job through informal networking.
She bumped into Mary Wall-Straub, the fiancée of one of her husband's colleagues and CEO of New Generation Event Solutions in Connecticut.
Straub also happens to be co-founder of The Women's Congress, which will hold its inaugural women's business conference next week in Boston. And she and her partner, Karen Vogel, needed help organizing the two-day event, which is expected to attract several thousand women from across the country.
''She said maybe there's a way for you to get involved,” Reeve recalled during a recent telephone interview.
The conference will, among other things, provide an opportunity for women to network. It also includes more than 65 workshops.
The event has already helped Reeve make a career change.
Reeve, who has a bachelor's degree in fashion design from the Parsons School of Design in New York, has spent most of her professional life in the apparel industry and marketing, including working for The Limited Inc. and J. Jill Group in Quincy.
She signed on as conference director after talking with Straub, and for the better part of the year she has been signing up guest speakers. There are more than 160 speakers and roughly half of them are from the Boston area, Reeve said.
Though Reeve had no previous experience with event planning, she said her experience managing people has helped her.
The conference has three tracks: entrepreneurial and growth; corporate leadership; and the business of philanthropy, according to Reeve.
Among the event highlights are speeches by Sharon L. Allen, chairman of Deloitte & Touche USA, who is on Forbes' list of the 100 most powerful women, and Sheila C. Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and CEO of Salamander Hospitality Chain.
(Published: March 24, 2007)
Contest offers million bucks, and many more
By Jennifer Heldt Powell/ Small Business Matters/The Boston Herald
Friday, March 2, 2007 - Updated: 09:20 AM EST
Jennifer Hill has big dreams - million-dollar dreams to be exact.
The graphic designer launched her own line of paper products last fall and she wants to drive sales into the seven figures. She is one of hundreds of applicants in a contest that could give her the financing and mentoring she needs to make it.
The contest, “Make Mine a $Million,” is sort of an “American Idol” meets “The Apprentice.” Its purpose is to give female business owners the boost they need to break through the million-dollar barrier, said organizers.
It is an indication of how far women have come in business and yet how far they have to go.
“Make Mine a $Million” grew out of the efforts of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, a nonprofit organization that gives small loans to women-owned businesses.
Nell Merlino, co-founder of Count Me In, was struck by how few women-owned businesses have made it big. Out of 9.1 million, just 243,000 have hit the $1 million milestone. On the other side of the gender line, 813,000 of 13.2 million businesses have sailed past that mark.
Merlino said at Count Me In, she heard from a lot of women who were just stuck.
“They had a good product or a good service, but they weren’t sure what their next step should be,” she said.
She worked with American Express Open for Business to develop the Make Mine a $Million contest. Started two years ago, it tours the country offering female entrepreneurs an opportunity to win financing, marketing services and coaching.
The contest is generally held as part of a multiday event full of seminars and workshops to educate and motivate entrepreneurs. It’s coming to Boston in conjunction with the Women’s Congress, a conference for entrepreneurs taking place March 29 and 30.
There are already more than 400 applicants for this round, but signups are open through Monday.
Women-owned businesses have come a long way to garner the attention of big companies like American Express. Clearly, this is a huge potential market for them.
This is significant considering that women couldn’t get loans for a business in their own names until the late 1960s. The government didn’t even track women-owned businesses until 1978.
But the contest highlights how far behind women still are.
“The fact is that women-owned businesses tend to be smaller and they tend to grow slower,” said Candida Brush, chairwoman of Babson College’s Entrepreneurship Division.
Some are small because the owner doesn’t want them to grow or because of the sector they’re in. But others aren’t growing because their owners can’t get financing or aren’t tapped into the right networks.
“Make Mine a $Million” hopes to change that, Merlino said. It’s not just a contest, it’s a movement to raise awareness. Its ultimate goal is to help at least 1 million women make at least $1 million by 2010.
Sheila Murray, another contest applicant, says she’s ready to be one of them. She runs HealthConnections International, an agency that places American health-care workers overseas. She wants to expand into more countries and move the office out of her Back Bay home.
The contest appealed to her because of the package it offers. “The financing is a big issue,” she said, “But also, it’s the support.”
