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Membership News THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA What do 'hot mamas' want? Access to capital, markets
BY ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
Even before I entered the ballroom of the Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel, I could feel the heat rising inside. The air-conditioning was on full blast. Yet pulses of warmth emanated from hundreds of high-spirited women business leaders.
I was there to talk about confidence and success with members of the Commonwealth Institute (TCI), a national mentoring and networking organization that began in Boston to help entrepreneurial women grow their businesses. (I'm a founding board member.)
Enthusiastic chatter throughout the meal showed that the hunger to connect is stronger than the drive to eat. These women are passionate about their ideas. They want to create as well as procreate.
I've felt the heat at similar events nationwide. Women show up in droves to share tips, business cards and innovative visions. Most balance families along with checkbooks.
Kathy Korman Frey, who runs a Washington consulting business while enjoying her babies, calls such entrepreneurs ''hot mamas.'' A Harvard Business School MBA, Frey represents many women with advanced degrees whose imaginations are as fertile as their wombs. She is sick of the media pounding on the difficulties of combining work and family or declaring that highly educated thirty-something females inevitably opt out.
'Hot grandmamas,' too
TCI's Miami members are certainly ''hot.'' They melt myths, including that women compete to attract men. It's ancient history that Helen of Troy's beauty launched a thousand ships. Today, women entrepreneurs' brains launch a thousand businesses, with other women's help.
By 2004, women were majority owners of an estimated 6.7 million privately held firms in the United States with $1.2 trillion in aggregate sales and 9.8 million employees, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. In Greater Miami, more than 76,000 women's businesses represent nearly 30 percent of all privately held firms.
South Florida's women business heads come from every background and ethnic group. What they have in common is creative drive.
Carole Ann Taylor, named one of Miami's top 25 black businesswomen, runs Little Havana To Go, a shop and e-tailer promoting Cuban-American products. ''Hot'' is a good description of the delicious orange background and Latin music on her company's website. The founder and CEO of ClickPharmacy.com, Gloria Rodriguez markets products over the Web delivered by a network of local community pharmacies, leveraging her industry knowledge from years running a small pharmaceutical company.
Some are ''hot grandmamas,'' such as Ann Rosenberg, widow of Dunkin Donuts founder Bill Rosenberg. Her new retail concept, ''Let's Make Wine,'' enables consumers to choose among grape varietals in the store, wait 30 days for fermentation, then bottle and label their own cases of wine.
Women entrepreneurs marry and have families, yet they form lifelong bonds with their businesses, too. Joyce Landry and Jo Kling recently repurchased their Meetings at Sea venture (cruises for corporate meetings and reward programs), which they started in Manhattan in 1982, brought to Miami in 1988, sold in 1998 and reacquired in 2005.
TCI founder Lois Silverman, a former nurse and a mother of two, founded CRA Managed Care to provide rehabilitation services under insurance contacts. She took her national chain public and now chairs the board of the hospital where she became a nurse. Silverman wants to help other women achieve similar success.
TCI role models include Pat Moran, whose JM Family Enterprises (Forbes' 15th largest privately owned U.S. company), runs the world's largest private Toyota distributorship. Moran has three children, four grandchildren and numerous grateful employees -- JM made Fortune's list of ``the 100 best companies to work for.''
Toni Randolph founded a private label manufacturer that included Wal-Mart among its prestigious customers; she is an advocate for women of color. Other South Florida mentors include investment bankers, telecom executives, medical communication pioneers and specialty-food magnates.
Women entrepreneurs want the same things men want -- access to capital, training and markets. But women with businesses of $1 million or more are twice as likely as male counterparts to seek advice from a mentor and they want to be taken seriously.
That's why women's business networks matter, in South Florida and throughout America. They give hot mamas the chance to turn up the heat and keep the economy cooking.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a Harvard Business School professor and author of Confidence.
© Copyright 2006 by the Miami Herald and Rosabeth Moss Kanter THE MIAMI HERALD AND NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS, JANUARY 12, 2006
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