A weekend retreat with my EO Forum mates in the Muskokas provided a wonderful opportunity to take a deep dive into our businesses and our workings, exploring what things get in the way to our greater productivity. Facilitator Colin Collard kept us on our toes to the wee hours of 4am. A highlight of the retreat was a mountain bike trek through the woods in pouring rain which tested our stamina and entrepreneurial perserverence. A hot shower never felt so good afterwords. A great moment in time is caught in this photo. From left to right: Brad, Bill, Ron, Thomas, Elizabeth, Richard, Jody and Holt. (Anthony stayed back at the fort to get our cocktails ready)

When I was a little girl my father used to whistle, and sometimes sing, this annoying song. The lyrics were “…she’ll learn to cook and to sew. What’s more she’ll love it I know…” but when I borrowed 10k from him to start a business and paid it back in two weeks I got his attention and our relationship changed.

My father was a lawyer and detail guy and I was a visionary, builder type. Our conversations were the same “what if” and “but have you thought of..” for many years. He was a balance for me. One of the last times I saw him in the nursing home he was having a moment of clarity “Bid! (the nickname he used to call me). How is that guy doing in Toronto you hired?” He had forgotten so much of his life at that point that it was amazing he had remembered my business expansion. The last thing he said to me as he pushed his wheelchair towards the nursing station was “I will hand in my room key and check out, you fetch the car”.

I have always wondered how my Dad, in his good days, might have advised me when a billion dollar company, one of Canada’s greasiest cultures, a monopoly with government ties, the only supplier in a industry, and run by a egotistical man who did not like me or successful women, deliberately orchestrated the overbilling of my company and forced me to shut down my successful company. Would Dad have rallied the legal team to take on the bullies defying the logic of the lawyers at that time that who strongly recommended against taking on a billion dollar company? They said at the time: “It doesn’t matter about the evidence of this wrong doing the legal fees to pursue justice will sink you”. I think he would have. He was a man of principal. Well one thing thing I learned is that when the legal system fails to defend, believe in natural law because it does not decern based on money and it always delivers.

The challenges of founding and growing a business as a woman entrepreneur are far different than those faced by men, for one thing you realize you are alone and are stuck small if you don’t have “Dad” or a suitable stand-in to accompany you to the bank. When I was awarded Woman Entrepreneur of the Year  http://pcminteractive.com/woman_ent_2008.html for Manitoba I thanked my all male management team because if I didn’t have them I would not have made it. A key ingredient to our success at that time was putting in place the financial instruments to support our growth. I hired a guy who arranged our million plus operating line at 4% because Dad was no longer available.

For a woman entrepreneur trying to find proper financing, whether that is start-up capital, a term loan,  or receivables funding, the chance of success is akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack. It is astounding that only 3-5% of women-owned businesses get any Venture Capital funding and over 95% of all Venture Capital funding goes to companies with NO women founders. Yet women are driving the entrepreneurial sector. There are 7.6 million women entrepreneurs in the United States, generating over $1.2 Trillion in revenue each year. 40% of all privately owned businesses are owned by women. So why are we so badly ignored?

I don’t know. Perhaps it is time “…to learn to cook and to sew…” (I can hear that annoying whistling in my mind’s eye. UGG!).

On the other hand maybe there is hope. Here’s a educational video initiative supported by some trailblazing women in the US including Janet Hanson, the founder of 85 Broads in New York. As one of Goldman Saks’ first female directors, a survivor of breast cancer, Janet is a trailblazer and a supporter of women and women entrepreneurship all over the world. I attended a breakfast in New York several years ago and was amazed by her presence.

This 9 year old boy built an arcade at his father’s auto parts company. The sheer creativity and detail in the product and service is astounding. There is a part in the video where Caine is sitting quietly on the chair waiting for a customer. He did this every day. He never lost the belief that one day a customer would show up. To be an entrepreneur you have to believe when others don’t. It is an amazing story of entrepreneurship but with a very interesting twist.

In 1998 I had the belief that to really grow my national business I needed to design a technology marketing solution that would set us apart from the larger competitors and streamline operations. To achieve the mission I found a programmer who knew the language of the web and of servers (msql at the time) and from little boxes drawn on the paper tablemats in a Chinese restaurant, along with an investment of 3k an early CMS was developed.

It was fantastic. The business grew from a couple of clients and 250k in revenue to 3mil almost overnight. Clients were wowed by the fact that they could request ad changes and approve their ads (often 100 of them at one time) all electronically. They were also amazed that their requested ad changes were made in what appeared “real time”.

What they didn’t know was that on top of being the owner and sole employee of the company at the time I was also the “real time” marketing strategy. This meant I was on call 24 hours a day to perform the ad changes from wherever I was, including from a picnic table, via Satellite internet, from a remote outpost location, and with the aid of generator power.

These were the early days of the Internet and technology marketing solutions. Now technology marketing solutions are much more complex because the amount of information businesses collect on customers has increased exponentially in terms of volume, variety and complexity.  Commonly used software tools to capture, manage and process this data are for the most part inadequate.

Technology has clearly expanded the strategy canvass. Everyday 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. To those who embrace the new game of technology marketing there are new ways of doing things and new things to do. While this is a challenge for some companies others are leveraging the opportunity to drive their businesses to gain greater competitive advantage and higher profits. Managing Big Data like managing Big Hair requires a clever design and maintenance strategy to be successful. At the end of the day the value of Big Data is in finding the information that is critical to your company’s success.

If you have a child who exhibits entrepreneurial traits or if you want to foster entrepreneurial traits in your children this is a marvelous presentation made by Cameron Herold at TED. It is never too late to get started. Entrepreneurs not only create a job for themselves but also for others. It is time to stop grooming more lawyers, doctors and accountants and start grooming more creative business builders. Our economic future depends on it.