Liz Sara serves as board chair at the National Women’s Business Council and running the consulting firm Best Marketing LLC. Liz provides her insight on several topics including how to attract and sustain more female entrepreneurs and how technology plays a key role. Plus she gives key advice on some fundamental things to consider if you plan on starting a business.
In my early days, I was working at a non-tech company in D.C. when I read a book called Megatrends that outlined 10 different trends that were poised to transform our lives in the future. One of those big trends was technology and I decided I wanted to get involved in the industry.
What was interesting about the companies I was involved in early on in my career is we did not consider ourselves a start-up. While today start-ups is a common term we just thought of ourselves as a new type of company. It wasn’t until the dot-com era that consumers began to hear about what was going on in the tech space. It was a lot of hard work to convince people that the way they were doing things could now be done in a new way and why the new way was going to be better for them.
Fast-forward to the early 2000’s I launched BestMarketing to provide consulting services to technology companies. The biggest challenge most technology companies face is how to describe their product in terms of benefits and advantages to their end-users. It’s about helping a company understand the value they are providing and creating messaging that speaks to their target audience.
Today I serve as the chair for the National Women’s Business Council whose mission is to support women business owners and female founders around the country. Every year we make recommendations to Congress, the White House, the Small Business Administration, and other federal agencies aimed at helping foster women entrepreneurship.
Access to capital is universally the biggest obstacle I see women entrepreneurs face. For whatever reason, women entrepreneurs seem to find it difficult to get loans or raise venture capital. Thus, many of the items we are working on at the National Women’s Business Council focus on addressing the issue of helping women get the needed capital to start and grow their business.
What we find is many women-owned businesses tend to be main street businesses and those have been hit hard during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the bright side when we look at the number of women-owned small businesses in the country, they represent 42 percent of all small businesses which is fantastic to see when we compare that to 1977 when women-owned businesses were first counted and it was only 4.6 percent.
The primary advice I give to aspiring entrepreneurs is you cannot be an expert in every part of the business. Whatever your skills are look for others to round out the team and that will help you be more focused and not waste time doing things that don’t make sense because they’re not your competency.
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