| |  | A Woman In Business I spent almost five hours this past Wednesday trying to figure out how to pay my
marketing intern -- legally, that is. But let me start at the beginning. By all accounts (or is it all counts?) women-owned businesses are booming -- especially
in Boston where the only all-women MBA program in the United States thrives and there are
two programs directed at women who want to start or currently own their own businesses and
want to benefit from the advice and knowledge of those who have had the inevitable ups and
downs or rights and wrongs or wishes and regrets that one has when one owns a business. Oh
yes, and the New England Women Business Owners recently announced completion of Phase I of
a landmark research study about the very topic they are existence to support. So it would
appear that now is a very good time to be in business and be a woman who owns that
business.
I would have to agree. For a large portion of my adult life -- mostly when I was in the
middle of scrapes with my current unreasonable boss or feeling overwhelmed by the culture
(which was not mine) of wherever I was working -- my family, business owners to the almost
the last one-- my sister is a doctor who refuses to pay for her own malpractice insurance
so she works in an emergency room -- told me that I really needed to become my own boss if
I wanted to be happy. And, so, eventually I did. It is true -- the happiness part. The
parts of my demeanor that grated on bosses trying to keep me within the confines of their
local culture hoping that I would just do the work and keep quiet about how I felt about
it are the parts that make me an effective consultant. Consultants are supposed to have
opinions, supposed to tell you when there is a better way to do something, supposed to
come up with solutions that make you feel just a bit anxious because they have never been
tried before, supposed, in fact, not to keep their mouths shut. Here, at last, I found my
perfect job -- a job in which I am quite sure I use every single bit of information and
put to practice every single skill I ever learned and, it turns out, need to keep learning
because business, the environment, technology, and the people keep changing too. In a
fleeting moment which occurs probably once a week or so, I feel daunted by my constant
search for what is and what works now and what will work in the future. Knowing that my
work has now become my business and that it is what I want for the right now, I
temporarily give in to the feeling because I know that it will quickly pass, and I will
once again wonder if something I see will work for one of my clients.
Being a woman and owning a business is, indeed, a good place for me to be |
