No longer for men only - Entrepreneurship

Nation's Business, July, 1994 by Sharon Nelton

The founder of an automobile parts business. The owner of a construction firm. An entrepreneur who runs an ambulance company. The head of a trucking company that transports hazardous waste.

Who comes to mind when you think of these business owners? Some rough-and-tumble guys? Sorry. The owners of these companies are women.

The movement of women into male-dominated fields as employees has long been noted. Less Obvious but increasingly prevalent is the emergence of women business owners in areas that have traditionally been the province of men, from construction to supermarket chains to meat packing and tire manufacturing.

"They are superb at turning around heavy-manufacturing companies and selling them at a profit," says A. David Silver, president of a Santa Fe, N.M., financial services company and author of Enterprising Women: Lessons From the 100 Greatest Entrepreneurs of Our Day (AMACOM, $21.95). "They seem to have a level of courage-- which may be the lack of fear, the lack of experience-so they wade right into these troubled companies and just fix them."

Although women-owned businesses are still concentrated in services and retailing, that's true of all businesses. From 1980 to 1990, however, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, women's share of the sole proprietorships in the category of agriculture, forestry, and fishing rose from 10 percent to more than 17 percent. While women owned 6 percent of the sole proprietorships in mining, construction, and manufacturing in 1980, they owned more than 9 percent 10 years later. In the same period, women's ownership of sole proprietorships in transportation, communications, and public utilities grew to 14.6 percent from 6.3 percent.

Women still own only 2 percent of the nation's 19,000 new-car and truck dealerships, according to Donna Reichle, a spokeswoman for the National Automobile Dealers Association, in McLean, Va. She notes, however, that when NADA launched its Dealer Candidate Academy in 1979, there were no women students, while for the past three years, 20 percent of graduates have been women. Seventyfive percent of all graduates become dealers or dealership managers.

"We are going to see that impact on the number of female dealers eventually," Reichle says. "I don't know when, but the numbers will rise."

While the reception of women-owned companies in male-dominated industries is improving, the women pioneers who have launched such businesses say doing so is tough. Perhaps the hardest part is gaining credibility. "You have to prove yourself maybe five times more [than a man], and after you prove yourself five times more, you're only equal," says Barbara Kavovit, 28, the founder of Stand-Ins Corp., a Mount Vernon, N.Y., commercial construction company.

Women in nontraditional fields find they have to overcome a multitude of stereotypes and misperceptions. When she got into the ambulance business 16 years ago, says Victoria Rosellini of Baltimore, potential clients thought that she couldn't do the heavy lifting required by the field or wouldn't have the mechanical knowledge to keep her vehicles on the road. But she proved them wrong. Today, her Absolute-Care Ambulance Service Inc. and a new company, Absolute Life Support, employ more than 70 full-time and part-time workers and bring in nearly $3 million in annual sales.

Arden Haddox, a former sixth-grade teacher who in 1984 founded a company that rebuilds automobile rack-and-pinion steering assemblies, found that many of the men she dealt with would sigh and roll their eyes, signaling their feelings that she couldn't possibly know what she was talking about. But she uses a method to convince them quickly that she does. "I purposely talk over their heads a lot of the time," says Haddox, whose 50-employee company, AAR (for Automotive After-market Remanufacturers Inc.), is located in North Ridgeville, Ohio, near Cleveland.

Although they say they can't prove it, some women believe they have been prevented from getting business because of their gender. On some occasions, says builder Kayovit, even when all the variables were the same--qualifications, length of time in business, capital, and proximity to a building site--"I was not even given an opportunity to bid a job, let alone be awarded the contract."

Frequent]y, it's the "good old boys network" that circle of long-established business owners in any community--that keeps women, along with minorities, out of the process. The good old boys are more comfortable with one another and award business to one another, the women say. And that's why some say affirmative-action initiatives have been so valuable.

A year after affirmative action was introduced into Chicago's procurement process eight years ago, Robin Wold, founder of Robin's Food Distribution, landed her first city job, a $150,000-a-year contract with Chicago's drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.

Affirmative action does not give a woman or a minority-group member special treatment, Wold emphasizes. On her contracts with the city, she says, "I always won because I was the low bidder. But affirmative action gave me the opportunity to get on the list of vendors and bid." Wold's company had sales of $11.5 million last year.