Women's group seeks federal master plan

Nation's Business, Jan, 1998 by Sharon Nelton

A report published by the National Women's Business Council (NWBC), a Washington-based group established by Congress in 1994 as an independent source of counsel to the president, Congress, and the Interagency Committee on Women's Business Enterprise, recommends that the U.S. Small Business Administration develop a "Small Business Master Plan" for the federal government.

"The plan should reflect the public-private partnership needed to provide support to small businesses and link federal, state, and private resources,"says Growing Women's Businesses a report based on workshops held in 10 cities last summer to develop policy recommendations for enhancing women business owners' access to capital and credit.

Workshop participants included women entrepreneurs, investors, lenders, and government officials. The sessions were sponsored by the NWBC, the Federal Reserve System, and the SBA.

According to the report, the master plan should "include programs designed to meet the particular needs of the fastest-growing small-business sector: women-owned businesses." (Studies by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, a research organization based in Silver Spring, Md., indicate that there are 8 million women-owned companies in the United States.)

In other recommendations, the workshop participants called for innovative incentives, such as targeted tax credits to spur investment that will help women's businesses grow; improved recognition of service-based businesses; and initiatives to reduce the risk and expense of making smaller loans so that such loans would become more available to entrepreneurs.

The report states: "Current financial-institution regulations place essentially equal regulatory burdens on commercial loans of $5,000, $50,000, $500,000, and $5 million. This serves as a disincentive to make smaller loans."

Also needed, according to the report, is support for financing the exports of service businesses, "because often there is no tangible asset for a borrower to offer as collateral. ... Participants suggested new lending criteria using intangible assets, such as intellectual property, be developed to finance these ventures."

The NWBC is chaired by Lillian Vernon, chairman and CEO of Lillian Vernon Corp., a catalog company based in New Rochelle, N.Y