YBI opens door to prove women mean business

The explosive growth in women-owned businesses clearly ranks among this nation’s greatest economic success stories of recent years.

In that trend, the Mahoning Valley is indeed fortunate to find itself on the cutting edge thanks to an exciting and promising initiative of the Youngstown Business Incubator, itself an exemplary model of success as the No. 1- ranked institution of its kind in the world.

Earlier this week, the YBI graduated its first class of 12 students from its budding Women in Entrepreneurship program. WE, established last year, aims to create economic opportunities for women through entrepreneurial education, training, mentoring and networking.

According to WE Director Stephanie Gilchrist, the program is designed to empower women to achieve their business visions and to know they can achieve whatever they set out to do.

HARD WORK FOR PARTICIPANTS

But positive results do not come without commitment and hard work. The inaugural class went through an intensive nine-week set of classes with each member matched with a professional mentor to guide them through the intricacies of entrepreneurship. Each developed a solid business plan to steer their enterprises toward success and profitability. The first collection of business plans unveiled at the graduation transcend the traditional technology-based mission of the incubator and range from hair and body-care product merchandising to an arts-education cafe in Hubbard.

To be sure, the WE program arrived at an auspicious time. Earlier this year, a Forbes magazine article heralded 2016 as the year in which “The Force Will be With Women Entrepreneurs” as female-owned businesses are expected to experience exponential growth.

The 2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses reinforces that assertion. It reports that the number of women-run companies has surpassed 9.4 million, representing more than 30 percent of all American enterprises. It also notes that each day, women are launching 887 businesses in this country, 11/2 times more than the overall national average.

What’s more, according to the 2015 Kauffman Index on Startup Activity, “women entrepreneurs are more adept than their male counterparts at seeing gaps in the market and seizing those opportunities.” That finding gives an updated and profitable new meaning to the age-old value of a woman’s touch and a woman’s intuition.

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Yet despite these successes, challenges abound for prospective women entrepreneurs. Just as in closing lingering gender-based pay gaps, women must also still play the catch-up game with men in entrepreneurship. For every 100 male business owners, there are only 69 female-headed companies, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Women’s Report, released in 2015.

Even more troubling, however, is the fact that women-owned businesses are failing to achieve revenues even remotely close to those of male-owned firms. The U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce reports that even though women-owned businesses account for more than one-third of all U.S. companies, they produce only 4.23 percent of all business revenues.

As Margaret Dorfman, chief executive officer of the WCC, put it, “These struggles translate into massive opportunity losses for business owners, their employees, families and communities. It behooves every American to call upon political, governmental and business leaders to take action to open the doors to opportunity for women-owned firms.”

Fortunately, for enterprising women in the Mahoning Valley, the YBI has opened that door of opportunity wide. The success of this spring’s class of WE students has paved the way for planning for a fall class to be based out of the Raymond John Wean Foundation in downtown Warren.

That class reportedly will place a heavier premium on all things financial surrounding business startups, training that could work to narrow that disturbingly wide revenue disparity between the genders.

As the WE program grows, and we have no doubts whatsoever that it will continue to grow, it will play an increasingly important role in opening vast new arenas for women to make their marks in expanding this region’s and this nation’s business vitality and economic expansion.