A League of Your Own

A look at the exploding number of women business owners and the increasingly sophisticated network of female advisors, mentors, and venture capitalists who are helping them succeed.

New evidence suggests that a reliable business network for women--providing capital, know-how, and encouragement--is finally achieving critical mass. Company builders like Fran Lent are the proof

Fran Lent knew exactly what it would take to start her business. After nearly 10 years at Del Monte Foods and at Specialty Brands, she had decided to do for herself what she had done for others for so many years--create and market a brand.

Inspiration had come in the form of several futile trips to local grocery stores. Lent, a working mother of two who lives in Burlingame, Calif., couldn't find healthful convenience foods for her young children. Other discerning parents confirmed her perception of a clear market need, and Lent, who had always viewed her corporate career as a starting block for entrepreneurship, began to feel a fusion of opportunity and passion. She would create her own brand of frozen-food entrées for children. Wildly ambitious? Absolutely. "The cost of doing business in this industry is huge," says Lent. "It costs most large companies $250 million to build a brand." She didn't have nearly that much money. But she had something better. She had a network.

Ten years ago Lent's idea might well have played itself out on a much less ambitious scale in her kitchen. Like it or not, back then her chances of success would have been exponentially higher if she had been male, but not for the reasons we have come to believe. Sure, sexism and discrimination were--and still are--alive and well, but they were never the biggest barriers for female entrepreneurs.

Consider that at its very heart, business is predicated on relationships and access to resources. Entrepreneurial success lies not just in the power of a great idea but in one's ability to finance it, bring it to market, grow it. This is never a solitary pursuit; it's an intricate dance in which the performers are plucked as they are needed from a cast that one spends a lifetime cultivating--one's own personal network. We look for those who possess the knowledge we lack but who also share with us a common frame of reference. For women in business, that has always been tricky, not so much because men have deliberately excluded them but because that common frame of reference was so often missing. Regardless of intention, the effect was the same: an unlevel playing field.

But as Fran Lent has discovered, things are changing. The National Foundation for Women Business Owners (NFWBO) reports that from 1987 to 1996, the number of companies owned by women increased by 78% nationwide, with employment and sales in those businesses growing by 183% and 236%, respectively. According to NFWBO's research director, Julie R. Weeks, the growth in the number of women's companies outpaces the growth of all businesses by nearly two to one. Are women smarter, more ambitious, or more entrepreneurial than they have been in the past? Probably not. Rather, their networks, though always present, have become increasingly sophisticated and are now ramped up to provide everything from the most rudimentary business advice to new financing avenues.

When Lent was ready to start her business, the network she needed to make it happen was solidly in place--former coworkers, local women's business centers, an enlightened venture capitalist, a respected woman entrepreneur who wanted to help open doors. True, Lent was lucky. But she was also the beneficiary of resources that didn't exist until recently. Some have been created solely to assist woman entrepreneurs, others have evolved as a direct result of women's growing presence in the workforce, and still others have burgeoned in response to a perceived market opportunity. Whatever their genesis, those resources effectively nurture fledgling enterprises like Lent's, not simply because they are woman-owned but because they represent a previously unserviced niche. The network doesn't only help explain the growth in female-owned businesses; it also sheds light on what it takes for just about anyone to start a company.

The Career Network
What I hear from a lot of women is that they've gone through their corporate days, they've built a career, and now they want to start a business of their own," says Amy Millman, executive director of the National Women's Business Council, a federal-government advisory panel in Washington, D.C. In fact, a new study reveals that 22% of women who have started businesses within the past 10 years have had senior management experience, compared with only 13% of those who started businesses 10 to 19 years ago, and 11% of those who started 20 or more years ago.

Fran Lent is part of that growing segment--women who come to entrepreneurship via corporate careers and bring with them a critical mass of knowledge and contacts. "If I hadn't worked for Del Monte for so long, I never would have been able to do this," concedes Lent. "I pulled together nine consultants and made a virtual company, and they were all from Del Monte or Specialty Brands."

Ada Chang and Debbie Bliss, former Del Monte executives, helped Lent with operations and marketing, respectively, and Lorelle Del Matto, formerly with Specialty Brands, signed on as her registered dietitian. Lent also outsourced her initial formula development to Del Monte's R&D department, where a team of people who knew her well "really went the extra mile for me."

Another business contact, from a local office of a worldwide ad agency, moonlighted to work on her packaging and print-advertising campaign, and a handful of business associates helped her brainstorm to come up with a name for her company, now called Fran's Healthy Helpings Inc. "Everything I did in my corporate career I did to help me start my own company," says Lent. "It made me work even harder because I was using it as a training ground."

She left Del Monte in January 1994 to take a job at Specialty Brands specifically because the company had a reputation for allowing its employees to be entrepreneurial. "It was the first time I was able to take responsibility for a whole project," she recalls. Her assignment was to reposition the company's Durkee Spice line, a project that required her to manage a team of 30 employees for a year and a half and to travel from California to Bethlehem, Pa., once a month.

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