Wise Woman Shining » women entrepreneur

Vegetarian Lasagna Recipe

caseydawes — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:18:34 +0000

Yes, a recipe for vegetarian lasagna is an odd choice for a business coaching blog. But I believe that our lives need health and balance–to many of the women entrepreneurs I see don’t have either. It’s kind of a strange recipe, too, more meandering than most. I hope it inspires you to create your own recipe for love, life and balance in your work.

Vegetarian Lasagna

I begin at the farmer’s market, selecting 3-4 vegetables that are in season. Saturday it was asparagus, carrots, chard and porcini mushrooms. In my freezer, I already had leftover homemade pasta that I’d picked up from the market a few weeks before.

A trip to Deluxe Foods (a non-chain market that supports the local schools, has lots of yummy and organic foods) yielded cottage cheese, fresh whole-milk mozzarella, garlic and a jar of organic tomato sauce. I’ve used cottage cheese instead of ricotta for decades–it’s moister. If I have it in the freezer, I’ll use home-made sauce, but we’re out of it this time of year.

Once home, I cook the vegetables as if they were a side dish. The chard was enhanced by the “Wilted Greens” recipe from The Girl and the Fig. I roasted the asparagus with a little olive oil, black pepper, salt and a combination of dried herbs created by my gardening friend and roasted 20 minutes at 425 degrees. The carrots and mushrooms were sauteed with olive oil and garlic.

Then I assembled the ingredients with the cooked pasta: pasta, veggies, cheese, sauce. Two layers covered with aluminum foil and baked for 1 hour at 350 degrees. Yum!

Leave your favorite recipe in the comments below!

Failure IS an Option for Women Entrepreneurs

caseydawes — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:54:35 +0000

My name is Casey Dawes and I am a serial entrepreneur. I’ve had good businesses, bad businesses and businesses in between. My current business has been all of the above over time. But quitting isn’t an option. Falling down flat on my face is not pretty, but sometimes it happens. As the old song goes, though, I “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.”

According to Jeretta Horn Nord, educator and author of a new book, A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit Volume II , many women entrepreneurs go through a series of companies before they build one that is successful. Now isn’t that a relief!

We have a hard time letting go, sometimes. We don’t live in a society that has much care for failure, implying that there is a moral failure whenever a business fails to thrive. The key to being able to let go of a business, as it is with anything, is within yourself. It means allowing yourself not to be perfect, to expect to fall down once in a while. Many of us watched our toddlers fall down and we encouraged them to get up and try again. We didn’t berate them for falling down. We need to do the same with ourselves.

The tragedy isn’t that we fail and try again. The tragedy is when we don’t make any changes between the first attempt and the second. If we see our business in trouble because of the current economic crisis, what can we do to save it? Should we save it? Or perhaps it’s time to find some trusted business friends and see what you have learned from running your business in these economic times. Were your reserves high enough? Did you depend on a market that was vulnerable to economic extremes? Are you nimble enough to adapt to changing realities?

Has your business ever failed? What did you learn? Comment below.

Why Women Entrepreneurs Need Holistic Business Management

caseydawes — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:31:59 +0000

I had a great experience launching my Holistic Business Management concepts at the Hatch Networking Meeting held at Sonya Paz’s Gallery in Campbell, CA. These are concepts I’m going to be developing over the next six months as I put together a book on the subject.

Many of my colleagues and clients struggle with work/life balance and often experience a overwhelm. Part of this is because, let’s face it, opening a business takes a great deal of work. However, there’s other factors at play here. The fundamental cause, I believe, of this unbalance, is trying to create a woman-owned business from a male-centric model. A better approach would be to learn how the business world functions now, take the important business lessons that men have learned over the past millenium, and leave the rest! Add in a dose of women’s wisdom and you have a business that’s much easier to run.

I believe that the lessons begin with money. Some women handle money quite well; far too many have skewed relationships with it. Financial language is the coin of the realm. (Perhaps if more of us understood it, we wouldn’t have had the financial disaster of the last years.) Small business owners have to deal with banks, accountants and pay taxes to government bodies. When it comes time to dissolve or sell our business, what it’s worth is how it’s measured. While I don’t believe that’s the way it should be, it’s the way it is.

And, in order to build your business on a firm foundation, you, the woman business owner, need to embrace a strong understanding of how financials apply to your business. And that doesn’t mean doing your own bookkeeping.

You see, one of the strengths that women have is an ability to pay attention to detail. It’s easy and it’s comfortable. We’d rather learn QuickBooks than read the reports it creates to get our minds around gross profit, cost of goods, net profit and other income. Yet, that’s exactly what we need to do.

Whether you are starting a business or have been in business for several years, make sure that you have a good grasp of your Profit and Loss Statement (sometimes called Income and Expense), Cash Flow and Balance Sheet. Read a book, talk to your bookkeeper, take a class. Make sure that you know what every number on those reports means to you and your business.

That’s what we can learn from men. Once we do that, we can apply our wisdom to the result.

Focus and the Woman Entrepreneur

caseydawes — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:09:46 +0000

One of the business issues that keeps coming up for my women entrepreneur clients is that of focus. As women, we are used to multi-tasking — cooking dinner with a baby on our hip while carrying on a conversation with the two-year-old playing on the kitchen floor, for example. When we open our own business, we also multi-task (how many windows do you have open on your computer right now — fess up!). However, this talent can actually prevent us from having the business success that we long for.

Too Many Business Gurus

There are lots of business coaches, business consultants and trainers who are offering products and services for the small business owner right now. I’m definitely one of them. It’s good to have lots of variety because what makes sense to one person doesn’t necessarily make sense to someone else. Has your significant other ever said to you, “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” at the end of a long discussion. You’ve spent a half hour telling him (or her) how to do something you want done. You try multiple ways until you find the right one where you are sure they understand you!

It’s the same with learning business. You have to find the teacher who will give you what you need right now. As we grow, we grow out of our teachers and need to find new ones. The underlying business truths don’t necessarily change, although technology and the means of getting them done will. You do need to be aware of business trends on a macro level, but that is an ongoing saga.

Find Your Business Mentor

At the risk of being controversial, I’m going to draw an analogy to religion. If you spend some time exploring the world’s religions, you will find common precepts in many of them. How they are expressed becomes a religion with additional rules and tenets. It’s the same with business mentors. If you explore underneath what business gurus are telling you, you will find a lot of similarities. It’s the techniques that differ from one to another. (Although many of the techniques become similar over time as well.)

Your job, as a woman entrepreneur, is to find the business coach or consultant that works best for you. And then, stick with it as long as it takes to absorb what the person has to teach you. If you handle your business learning serially rather than concurrently, it will be easier to get value from what you are paying for! You will save money and save time at the same time. And, you will be a lot less confused.

So the next time you feel like surfing the web for the newest business silver bullet, think about all the programs you have on your shelf right now. Pick one and really get to know what the person has to teach you. Focusing on that will help you and your business get to success much more easily!

Conflict and the Woman Entrepreneur

caseydawes — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:02:14 +0000

I want to get this on the table first. I hate conflict. My stomach clenches and I find it hard to breathe every time I know I have to confront someone about something. I feel like crying every time someone raises their voice to me or, heaven forbid, gets MAD at me!

My name is Casey and I am a recovering people-pleaser.

The topic of conflict has come up a lot recently. A member of the Wise Woman Circle talked about conflict issues she had around business during a recent group coaching call. At last night’s e-woman event, the managing director, Kristy Rogers, talked about conflict during her business tips presentation.

February is the month of romance and flowers. It seems almost sacrilegious to talk about conflict. Yet with the economy in the craziness that it is, the “opportunity” to confront our conflict demons is coming up more and more. You might hit conflict when negotiating with a client to get a contract. Or when you are asking someone for the money that they owe you. Or when you deal with the emotions of a long-term client severing the relationship.

If you scratch the conflict sore, you will usually come into the wound of fear. We are afraid that people won’t like us. More important, our inner bag lady raises her head and tells us that if we don’t please people, we will lose our security. After all, no one likes an aggressive woman, do they? Frequently, women who stand up for their rights and set their boundaries are called all kinds of nasty names.

It’s up to us, the women business leaders of the world, to set that myth of subservience away forever. We need to call on our inner Amazon warrior to stand up for our rights, ask for what is owed us and own our own position in conflict. We don’t need to become shrews, just firm. In fact, the more you exercise the muscle of conflict, the better you will get at stating what you need and want and letting silence do the rest of the work for you.

Are you proud of your actions in a recent conflict? Let us know by clicking comments below.