The challenge to women - successful women entrepreneurs; includes addresses for more information

Nation's Business, July, 1990 by Sharon Nelton

The Challenge To Women

When Lynn Wilson was turned down for a job in a commercial design firm in Miami more than 20 years ago, the hiring executive said he thought that if he hired her, she would just leave in a short time and start a business of her own. He didn't want the competition.

Wilson had never considered being an entrepreneur. But "if a complete stranger has that much respect for me," she reasoned, she should have the same belief in herself. So, at age 27 and as the mother of three preschoolers, Wilson started her own commercial interior-design company at home with $200.

Today, Lynn Wilson Associates, based in Coral Gables, Fla., reaps annual revenues of over $250 million by designing interiors--from woodwork to glassware--for the hospitality industry. The firm has offices in Tokyo, London, and Paris as well as New York and Los Angeles. Its projects have included restaurants, country clubs, and hotels for clients with names such as Trump, Sheraton, and Hyatt in locations from Aruba to Zaire. Lynn Wilson Associates also renovated the historic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. Among its current projects is the 1,000-room Disney Mediterranean Resort at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Fla.

Lynn Wilson's career gives an early signal of things to come. As the 1980s drew to a close, experts on entrepreneurship recognized that the millions of women who had started businesses in the 1970s and 1980s would face a new challenge in the 1990s: growing those businesses.

But would they? And if so, how much?

Some doubters argued that the best-known women who had grown large businesses from small ones were not typical. "Sandra Kurtzig is a wild exception," Karl Vesper, professor of business administration at the University of Washington, in Seattle, told Nation's Business. Kurtzig, the founder of ASK computer Systems, had nurtured her company to nearly $200 million in annual sales.

"Someone like Debbi Fields is the wildly unusual exception," Cambridge, Mass., economic researcher David Birch echoed later to Savvy Woman magazine, referring to the creator of Mrs. Fields Cookies.

Maybe so. But more and more women are becoming "the exception." Liz Claiborne Inc. had passed the billion-dollar mark in annual sales when Elisabeth Claiborne Ortenberg retired last year. Wells, Rich, Greene Inc., the advertising agency whose co-founders included Mary Wells Lawrence, had topped $850 million in annual billings when she gave up management control this past spring. And since she led a leveraged buyout of the apparel conglomerate Warnaco Inc. in 1986, Linda Wachner, president and CEO, has grown the company from $432 million to $816 million in annual sales. Profit growth has been even better--from $45 million in 1986 to $77 million last year.

Lane Nemeth's company, Discovery Toys, founded in 1977, reached $70 million in revenues last year, and the Krok sisters--Sharon Krok Feuer, Arlene Krok, and Loren Krok--drove EPI Products Inc., founded in 1987 to import and distribute the Epilady hair-removal device, to a staggering $200 million in annual sales in two years.

The trouble with trying to predict the future is that studies of women business owners are rare; the only government statistics available apply to sole proprietors, the smallest of businesses. Women now own more than one-third of those firms and are expected to own 40 to 50 percent of them by the year 2000. But figures about sole proprietors tell us nothing about the numbers of women owners of other types of companies. A study conducted earlier this year for Business Women Leadership Media Inc., a New York advertising and marketing firm, indicates that 48 percent of women-owned businesses are not sole proprietorships but are partnerships, corporations, or S corporations. The study surveyed women business owners in 11 professional women's associations.

Talia Carner, president of Business Women Leadership Media, cautioned against applying the figures nationwide to all business women. She also said, "I prefer to stress what the study shows most clearly--that women are a much greater portion of American entrepreneurs than ever before known."

Optimistic that women will grow businesses to substantial size--with annual revenues of $50 million to $100 million a year--is Edward M. Moldt, manging director of the Snider Entrepreneurial Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, in Philadelphia. He expresses certainty that the U.S. will be seeing more women creating billion-dollar businesses as well.

"This thing is really a stair-step kind of a process," Moldt explains. "You get comfortable with running a business at a certain level and say, 'Gee, I can do more than that.' Then you step up to another size. That's the way men have done it for a long time, and I don't see any reason to believe that ability to learn the process is at all sex-related. I think it just takes a period of time to get comfortable running a business."

The majority of women-owned businesses have been started since 1980, and, as Karen S. Kennedy points out, "when businesses start, they start small." In 1983, Kennedy started KSK Communications Ltd., a high-technology, business-to-business public-relations and advertising agency in Tysons Corner, Va. Now she has more than 40 employees and does $25 million in billings a year.