Polishing women entrepreneurs - training women in business

Nation's Business, July, 1987 by Sharon Nelton

Polishing Women Entrepreneurs

Mrs. Fields Cookies founder Debra J. Fields had just concluded a rousing speech at last year's national conference of the American Woman's Economic Development Corporation (AWED) in New York. The glamorous, ultra-slim blond business celebrity displayed the unbridled exuberance of a high school cheerleader, smiling and shouting as she exhorted an audience of 3,500 women to take on the challenges of entrepreneurship.

Another founder, Beatrice A. Fitzpatrick of AWED, a large, dark-haired woman who moves and speaks with deliberation and who is Fields' senior by more than 25 years, rose to the microphone and stated the obvious: "I'm not anything like Debbi Fields.'

After the laughter died down, she added, "But we think alike.'

With the same zeal for quality that marks the way Fields turns out chocolate chip cookies, Bea Fitzpatrick develops and polishes women entrepreneurs. She has been doing so since 1977, when AWED conducted its first management training and technical assistance program with a group of 18 women.

Since then, Fitzpatrick and AWED-- a nonprofit corporation--have touched the lives of 35,000 women from all 50 states and Canada with business training, counseling, conferences and seminars.

The pilot program was funded with a grant of $124,000 from the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Now AWED operates on a $1.26 million budget of mostly private funds--including a $100,000 gift from Revlon, $55,000 from Citibank and contributions from more than 60 other companies, as well as from individuals.

Since 1983, the General Electric Foundation in Fairfield, Conn., has provided a total of $105,000 to AWED because, says the foundation's president, Paul M. Ostergard, "we have looked upon AWED as one of the groups that has taken a leadership role in pioneering start-ups by women.' And startups, he points out, mean new jobs for other people.

The biggest enemy of women's success in business, Fitzpatrick, AWED's president and chief executive officer, has found, are the attitudes that have been instilled in them from childhood. They have been brought up believing they should serve others, not run things. Even though today's more liberated young women may aspire to be lawyers or doctors, they still don't expect to be entrepreneurs.

Women pushed into business by a need to support themselves and their families or by sheer drive are often "terified' of the financial side of their enterprises and uncomfortable about being in charge, Fitzpatrick observes. They experience confusion about their relationships with their employees. "They think they're supposed to be mothers; the employees think they're supposed to be mothers.'

She recalls one businesswoman who felt that her responsibility was to make her employees happy. Sometimes she didn't even go to work because she was so tired of trying to please everyone.

"It's your responsibility to have a successful business,' Fitzpatrick told her firmly. "If you want to make your employees happy, be sure that you can pay them on payday and that you can grow your company so they have careers they can look forward to.'

The chief cause of small business failures is poor management, according to Fitzpatrick. To help society capitalize on the benefits that women-owned businesses can offer, she says, "you have to start providing some really good management training to make it possible for people to succeed where they might otherwise fail.'

Training women to successfully manage the businesses they start is the heart of AWED's approach. Just helping a woman learn how to price her goods and services can make all the difference in what happens to her business, she adds.

Passionate about the cause she has chosen for herself--helping women up the economic ladder--Fitzpatrick is an outspoken foe of loan programs and special treatment offered by some government agencies.

Government-backed loans often are not repaid because the recipients don't know how to run a business, and their businesses fail, she observes. The government, she says, "is giving the wrong kind of help and giving it in the wrong way.'

If Fitzpatrick feels comfortable criticizing government, it may be because she has a government background. In the late 1960s, she was director of parent involvement for New York City's Head Start program and director of special projects in the Mayor's Office of Education Affairs.

She was also the first executive director of the Administration and Management Research Association of New York City, Inc., a quasi-governmental nonprofit corporation established by the mayor's office in 1970. While at AMRA, she supervised studies ranging from energy conservation to economic development and began laying the groundwork for AWED.

What motivated her was seeing so many women going into business with good ideas but without business knowledge. She was influenced by the women's movement, too. "But,' she says, "you can't be very liberated if you don't have any money in your pocket.'