Live Your Life Be Free!

Well – it is official – yesterday was my last day working for my major client, which means for the first time in my 10-year career that I am not working full-time or contract for a major corporation (the smallest place I have worked is 2,100 employees). I packed my personal stuff away and am moving the desk in my home office to some space I leased downtown (King and Spadina)… one employee (myself) so far.

Now, I am starting a Web Marketing consultancy called Convert Marketing which focuses on strategically using Web Marketing in a number of creative ways.  More information will follow as I build it (it will be a week or so). I am really excited about this new independent life.

To get inspiration, I am reading an excellent book right now called How She Does It by five-time CEO Margaret Heffernan. It is about the rise of women entrepreneurs. Between 1997 and 2006, privately held businesses owned by women grew at three times the rate of all American privately held firms. The book explores why so many women are starting their own companies. I find this comparison to immigrants fitting:

Women starting new businesses have something to prove. They may need to prove to themselves that the companies that undervalued them in the past were wrong. They may need to prove their idea is right or that they really can repay a personal loan. They may need to prove that their values, their instincts, and their natural ways of working are just as good and just as effective. It may be all those things. Such women have a lot of psychic skin in the game. In this respect, women entrepreneurs remind me of a new wave of immigrants: driven out of a land they found hostile, taking big risks in their determination to create a New World where they can succeed on their own terms. America was built by such pioneers and, today, its economy continues to be enriched by the fresh thinking of women who don’t accept defeat. *

Heffernan follows hundreds of female entrepreneurs and comments on their stories. Interestingly, when women start companies they tend to hire for diversity, unlike men:

Perhaps the greatest test of all of whether a culture is fair or not can be shown in its hiring. Men’s companies hire predominantly men. Women’ s businesses hire men and women equally. The same applies to their boards of directors: Women appoint men equally, while men favor themselves at a rate of three to one. This may be because, having been on the receiving end of discriminatory hiring, women are determined to not repeat the mistake. **

So – more women-owned companies are better for all women! Hopefully mine will be too. To the New World I go .

*Pg 10-11 of this edition
**Pg 80