The research statistics* show a 42% increase in women-owned businesses from 1997 to 2006. Why am I interested? Well it’s two-fold: I am the majority owner of my company and a woman. As a business person, I realize the need to be always benchmarking our company performance to others in our industry and to take an outside look here and there and see what others are up to.
So, when I dug deeper into the numbers from the Center for Women’s Business Research 2006 Fact Sheet concerning majority-woman-owned businesses, a lightbulb went off!
What I did not see was an increase in sales comparable to the increase in the number of women-owned businesses. There was only a 4.4% increase in sales and a 0.4% increase in number of employees over the same time period. So, yes, the number of firms rose by almost half, but the market share barely increased. Shouldn’t the real goal be to increase revenues?
Well, that’s one of our main goals at SmartSamantha.com: to increase the revenues of women-owned businesses and all small and medium businesses, by building companies and – add to that – profitable ones!
How? The SmartSamantha team has calculated, just for our members, an Industry Insight SmartCard. This card provides a detailed scorecard of key metrics to give you the smarts you need to analyze both the profitability and capital needs for several major industries.
Add to that our Sane-O-Meter and you have two smart tools to benchmark your business performance!
So check out the arrows on my SmartSamantha Industry Insight SmartCard in this week’s Bizdom. Next week you’ll find it in my Brains section.
Let’s really start growing some businesses!
*http://www.cfwbr.org/national/index.php