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.
