More women than ever are starting their own businesses, embracing the title “entrepreneur.” More than 40% of american businesses are owned by women, according to a 2019 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report! OCEAN has curated advice and quotes for women entrepreneurs from experienced leaders who have been on stage at OCEAN events.
Entrepreneurship can be lonely, especially for women who do not have other women entrepreneurs as mentors. The unique challenges of starting a business go beyond normal “work” conversations with friends and family.
Rebekah Lyons, Nataisa Malihollo, Beth Troy, and Liz Bohannon have wisdom to share with women entrepreneurs. Learn from their experience and perspective. If you want to talk about entrepreneurship with other female founders, join us in our Mighty Networks community. We’d love to meet you!
“My advice to women entrepreneurs: make sure that you’re making time for your body, for your friendships and for your rest.” -Rebekah Lyons
I see a lot of women that are multitaskers. Somehow they can store a lot of things in their brain at the same time. So often they’re executing on all fronts. Usually they carry out responsibility in the home. They carry obviously responsibility outside the home, within their community, within their families, within their whole friendship circle and their work. But, women only have 24 hours, and so I do feel like it takes a bit of a proactive plan to have healthy rhythms, right? Here’s a rhythm I’d offer to help restore women entrepreneurs.
I would encourage women to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. Self-care is so vital in the “restore” rhythm because women will take on a lot and then all of a sudden it will just be a racing mind, but the body will be so fatigued. It cannot sustain the call and the assignment that’s on their life. And so make sure that you’re making time for your body, for your friendships and for your rest.
Read more from Rebekah, author of Rhythms of Renewal.
“The best advice that I could give other women entrepreneurs, especially women in tech, is to find a tribe.” -Natasia Malihollo
Find other women co-founders and entrepreneurs that you can talk to and be transparent … women with whom you can be very vulnerable, knowing they aren’t going to judge you but who are going to let you cry on their shoulders. They’ll celebrate your wins with you just as much as you would celebrate your wins. And then they’ll cry with you when things go wrong. …. And a lot of things go wrong in the entrepreneurship journey.
I’m part of a group of six women, and we’ve been kind of with each other now for two years. There’s a lot of difficulty in entrepreneurship, but we face them together. We pray with each other. We meet, we have dinner, we have lunches whenever we can.
“Make big, bold choices and real choices. Those yeses – those big yeses – require a lot of nos.” -Beth Troy
Today, women are naturally starting to identify with the term entrepreneur. Women are seeing that it is valid and it is okay to express who they are and their gifts through their work without any apology. But, I think the hardest thing that most women face is still advocating for themselves. I see women finding it difficult to make trade-offs,
And that is really where I would like to see women encouraging each other and saying, “Okay, you want to go do this big thing? What choices are you going to make?” Instead, I often find that women make non-choices. They just pile it all on and think, “Well, I’ll just keep doing everything.” It doesn’t work like that.
“As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to really lean in and look into your market and understand what are the actual problems and challenges that people are facing.” -Liz Bohannon
The opportunity is so ripe for women entrepreneurs as capable problem solvers. Depending on what industry you’re in, there’s a really good chance that men have been making the decisions and building the products and talking to the target audience.
If you come to the table knowing that you as a woman will have access to, and you will see, and you will hear really interesting problems in the market that may have been yet missed for decades, centuries … then you come to the table interested in solving that problem and open to what that solution might look like.
Then, you can create something that is really innovative and unique, and capture the opportunity that’s out there for women entrepreneurs as problem solvers.
Read more from Liz, founder of Sseko Designs and author of Beginners Pluck.
Below is a highlight video from the OCEAN Conference that Rebekah Lyons, Natasi Malihollo, Beth Troy, and Liz Bohannon. Our Youtube Channel has each of the individual videos that you can check out by clicking here!
