Female Entrepreneur Success Stories
Female entrepreneurs are the fastest-growing segment of business owners in many developed countries, including the U.S. With entrepreneurship being a hot topic these days, many impressive stories of success are created to inspire the new generations of people who want to go from “zero to hero.”
Women’s Entrepreneurship 2016/2017 Report created by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor provided the following data on the state of women’s entrepreneurial activity:
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In 63 economies out of 74 featured in this report, overall female total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) increased by 10 percent.
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TEA rates range across the world, from 3 percent in Italy, Jordan, and Germany to 37 percent in Senegal.
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Women control more than $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and the number is projected to increase by almost $10 trillion in the next several years.
Unfortunately, in this vast pool of entrepreneurship stories, women don’t get enough attention, even despite accounting for almost 40 percent of new entrepreneurs in the U.S., according to Statista.
Gender Composition of New Entrepreneurs in the U.S. in 1996 and 2016, source: Statista
This should be fixed because female entrepreneurs have some of the most amazing stories of perseverance, talent, and achievement.
We thought we’d share some of them in this article.
Alyza Bohbot, Alakef Coffee Roasters
Alyza is an example of a perfect brand repositioning that turned into tremendous success. A daughter of immigrants, she was faced with a major decision whether to sell her parents’ coffee business or take over it. She was preparing for a career in school counseling and didn’t even think about running a coffee business.
However, she made a decision to take over and engaged in a crash course to learn the business from the scratch. While she was doing that, she also learned about a serious gender inequality in the coffee industry: women had minimal ownership of the business despite producing almost 70 percent of the coffee.
Bohbot had two vital options: cling onto the old branding methods or rebranding with a new vision. “Apparently, rebranding is the correct choice, but to do it correctly, one has to avoid changing the brand too dramatically,” says Martha Love, a marketing expert from AWriter. “In this case, one can wind up creating a messy brand that doesn’t mean anything to target audience.”
Bohbot made the right choice and made a perfect transition. She came up with a great idea of rebranding their parents’ business, and City Girl Coffee was born. Instead of being a typical coffee brand, she turned it into a young, hip, female-focused brand that cooperates only with farms and partners owned and managed by women.
Takeaways:
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“Be genuine.” Customers will see disingenuous and phony product right away.
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“Use ideas that are organic to your brand.” You don’t need to be an inventor and come up with original ideas every time.
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Alyza Bohbot. Source: Courtesy City Girl Coffee Instagram
Pamela Slim, K’é, Business Coaching Services
The path to success for Pamela Slim was unique in the sense that she was preparing for an entrepreneurial role by working 15 hours per day for ten years. Her typical day involved working in the office during usual business hours, volunteering for an executive director for a non-profit martial arts school, and then doing administrative work before bed.
When she was 29, she got pneumonia from the crazy working pace, and realized that it was time to move on up the career ladder. Slim wasn’t successful at securing a new job, so she had no choice but to contact her old manager who had changed her job at the time and moved to HP.
The knowledge she obtained earlier helped her to take off and build a thriving business coaching practice. Now, she is a successful business coach with lots of clients from all over the world and author of best-selling books.
Takeaways:
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We want things to be effortless, easy and fun, but remember one thing that leads to success: “Do the boring stuff. Every day.”
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Forget your own way to entrepreneurship and learn the things before they define your success.
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Pamela Slim. Image Source: Escape from Cubicle Nation
Stacey Minton, Cruise Planners: Stacey & Christine
Stacey Minton, a CEO at Cruise Planners / Destination Dreamz, started her career working in telecommunications companies. He was a high-performing employee and spent 7 years moving up a career ladder. However, she realized that even though she had a nice salary she was essentially in the same position, but with more authority.
So, Minton decided she didn’t want to continue her career in a company that wasn’t going to help her grow. She had no idea what she wanted to do but she knew she wanted something fulfilling. After months of figuring things out, she started a travel business that turned into 70+ hours per week commitment and sleepless nights.
Now, she runs a successful business with tremendous reputation for quality, service, and competitive pricing.
Takeaways:
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One of her famous quotes is “In my journal, I remind myself of who I am as well as who I want to be.”
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The most courageous thing a person can do is to quit full time job and go all in on own business and more importantly themselves.
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Stacey Minton. Image Source: Stacey Minton’s Facebook page.
Closing Thoughts
These are just three amazing stories of brave, talented, and skilled women who turned their lives around by doing what they loved. For them, reaching success meant going a long, difficult way, but in the end, their talent, hard work, and dedication produced happy customers and great stories of success that everyone can learn something from.