Tips for businesswomen

Entrepreneurial Winning Women ambassador Diane Foreman believes successful female entrepreneurs need to help others. Photo / Natalie Slade

Programme aims to help female entrepreneurs scale up their business.

Hard on the heels of EY's inaugural Entrepreneurial Winning Women leadership programme in May, applications are already arriving for 2015 - though we're not officially asking for them until February next year. There is a passion and energy about entrepreneurs that is infectious.

Once again, we'll be targeting successful female entrepreneurs with high growth potential and turnover of at least $2 million in the previous two years. Typically, their businesses will be stuck and struggling to reach the next level, though research shows women start businesses at a higher rate than men and, initially at least, grow faster. Our mission: to help them scale up.

Last year we received 60 applications for the 12 places in the programme. We finally selected 20, including some who did not meet the financial criteria but were clearly going places.

Entrepreneurial Winning Women is a global EY programme, which has been running in the US since 2008. To date it has been launched in 10 countries, including Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey.

Beth Brooke, an EY global leader and global vice-chair of public policy, visited New Zealand in February to help launch EWW here. Brooke says women entrepreneurs get stuck in "the middle" of their development, for the same reasons that women in the corporate world hit the so-called glass ceiling: lack of visibility, and no access to networks and the inner sanctum of the business world. Add to that the difficulties in accessing funding, lower self-confidence, and a lack of role models, mentoring and opportunity to hone their business skills.

As Brooke sees it, entrepreneurship is the clearest path to progression for women in business. Independent studies show those who have gone through the EWW programme have experienced on average annual revenue growth of 49 per cent.

But while women own about 40 per cent of US businesses, only about 5 per cent of all equity capital investment goes into businesses headed by women, and just 3 per cent receive venture capital funding.

In New Zealand EWW was specifically tailored by successful local businesswomen to meet local needs. Topics included navigating growth, market leadership, finance, transactions and risk, sales and marketing services to drive asset values, revenue growth and market share, market validation, equity and debt funding, valuing businesses and governance.

Programme ambassador and steering group leader Diane Foreman, from Emerald Group, was joined by other entrepreneurs who presented during the two-day boot camp, including Annah Stretton, Roanne Parker, John Barnett, Jennifer Parker, Dr Leith Oliver, Duncan Ledwith, Wynnis Armour and Sarah Paykel. Grainne Moss shared her experiences of swimming with the sharks, Dame Rosie Horton spoke about "being yourself" and Petra Bagust shared her media insights.

Foreman's view is that it's not sufficient for successful women to "leave the ladder down" for others to climb up. "We need to actively help them, as they climb each rung of the ladder."

Entrepreneurial Winning Women operates alongside EY's global Entrepreneur Of The Year programme. The two are separate but it's expected EWW will provide a pipeline of country winners to compete in the annual EOY finals in Monaco.

Joanna Doolan is the New Zealand programme director for Entrepreneurial Winning Women. joanna.doolan@nz.ey.com

Exuberant feedback

In their own words - feedback from participants in the Entrepreneurial Winning Women programme:

• "There is no limit to what I can achieve and how far I can push my business and myself. My biggest limiter is me."

• "Since coming to the amazing EWW two-day event I have been on cloud nine!"

• "Words cannot do justice to how exhilarating and empowering those two days were for me. I have definitely emerged having experienced a paradigm shift."

• "I have such an increased confidence and faith in myself, my business - way beyond what I could have ever achieved by myself. The presenters were outstanding, highly motivating and completely invigorating as were the other women in our group."

• "It was a 'wow' event through and through. I just loved every minute. In terms of topics and speakers, I think hearing from anyone who has been in the trenches but come out on top and been hugely successful is always beneficial."

• "It has certainly given me a kick up the pants. It helped identify areas that need a bit of work and I am working on those. I was floundering a bit with what I was going to do next. Now I am fired up and it is all stations are go here."

• "Networks and networking are actually important. Being technically good at stuff isn't enough if nobody knows you do it."

• "Tell people when you have important and interesting things to say business-wise. Don't write great articles and leave them on your desktop because you are too afraid to release them."

• "I need to up my level of understanding financial jargon terms."

• "It was filled with happiness, honesty, love, joy, sharing, genuine caring and wisdom - not to mention the invigoration and motivation to get out there and go for your dreams."

• "The clarity I received was phenomenal."

• "All I can ask is how can this be repeated? I have been so inspired by meeting you all and listening to such wonderful people on business challenges and initiatives to improve our businesses."