Women own more than 40 percent of all businesses in the United States, but only a small fraction of those companies are manufacturing firms.
That statistic will change if the National Education Center for Women in Business has its way.
One of the primary goals of the new center, at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, Pa., is to provide women the wherewithal to enter manufacturing.
The center was founded last August with a $1.8 million grant from the Small Business Administration’s Office for Women’s Business Ownership. The SBA has committed another $3.2 million for the center over the next four years.
Its purpose is to get more women interested in entrepreneurship at a younger age and to persuade women-owned businesses to expand, particularly into manufacturing.
Most women’s companies are service- or retail-oriented because those are the areas with which women are the most familiar, said center director Cynthia Iannarelli.
“What we need to do is to suggest to the woman who owns an apparel shop to hook up with someone who has talents in sewing so she can make her own designs. We have to get women thinking in that direction,” Iannarelli said.
“One of our big pushes will be to prepare women business owners to do more than they are doing, to take $1 million and turn it into $2 million.”
Iannarelli, 34, who holds a doctorate in entrepreneurship from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, became an entrepreneur during her junior year in college.
When her father died, Iannarelli, her younger brother and her mother took over her father’s dry-cleaning business and have expanded it into real-estate development.
She witnessed the problems women business owners experience as she watched her mother’s difficulty in getting financing to expand and saw employees of her father refuse to take orders from her mother.
The center will sponsor a variety of programs to help female entrepreneurs in cities across the country. It also will be heavily involved in the curriculum at Seton Hill, a Catholic women’s college with an enrollment of about 900.
To spark entrepreneurial interest among girls long before college, the center sponsored its first business-management plan competition for female junior and senior high school students this spring.
The winners got scholarships to the center’s Camp Entrepreneur, an innovative summer camp for girls ages 13-19 who are interestedfor female junior and senior high school students this spring.
The winners got scholarships to the center’s Camp Entrepreneur, an innovative summer camp for girls ages 13-19 who are interested in owning their own businesses someday.
In addition, the center will allocate about $250,000 each year for research on such topics as the difference between male and female management styles and the success and failures of widows who take over their husbands’ businesses.
The professional programs, which Iannarelli hopes to bring to Chicago by March or April, 1994, will include seminars on how to expand businesses and the use of computers that can simulate the economic environment for specific types of businesses.
The computer will allow women to test their plans for expanding their businesses or starting new ones. It will allow women to explore new ideas, including manufacturing, without investing the capital.
Another program, called Strategy 2000, intends to educate bankers, engineers, insurance salespeople and other service providers on the benefits of doing business with women.
In the past, many female-owned businesses failed because bankers and other service providers were unwilling to work with them, Iannarelli said.
Now, with the SBA estimating that by the year 2000 women-owned businesses will make up 50 percent of the companies in the nation, it makes sense for service providers to see the importance of working with female entrepreneurs.
In its first attempt, however, the Strategy 2000 effort proved only mildly successful. At a May 4 seminar held in Pittsburgh, 50 people showed up. But only a handful were men. Most companies sent a high-ranking female executive even though Iannarelli hired a male graphic designer to produce an invitational brochure that would appeal specifically to men.
It was designed in the image of a golf course, the stereotypical deal-making grounds for businessmen, with a different topic introduced at each tee.
On the Seton Hill campus, the center will educate all women, regardless of their majors, in the principles of business ownership.
The center also will encourage young females to pursue majors in the sciences to increase their chances of becoming involved in manufacturing firms, said JoAnne Boyle, Seton Hill president.
“We need to get the girls into chemistry class or biology class or get them to decide to become an engineer. The heart of getting to where you want to be is to be able to imagine it. That’s what we want for these students,” Boyle said.
It was in fact, the lack of examples about women in business that planted the seed for the center.
About six years ago, Boyle said, faculty in the college’s management department became concerned that there were no references to women in business in the textbooks and case studies used in the curriculum.
With a $25,000 grant from Household International, the management faculty was able to research and write a proposal for the center.
Boyle and other colleges officials started trying to sell the idea locally and later in Washington. It took about two years, with the help of several members of Congress, to get the funding for the center.
“Every single person we talked to said this is the best thing we’ve heard of. No one was doing anything for women in business, and the SBA had all this raw data, but no one was analyzing it or turning it into anything that was meaningful,” Boyle said.
“A program like this is based on the pedestals of research information and education so this was the obvious place to look. We have all of these resources and now someone (Iannarelli) who can do something with it.”
