Women Aided on $1 Million March
Program provides capital and advice
By Ann Meyer
March 13, 2006

-- Complete Conference Coordinators in Naperville likely will ring up $1 million in sales this year, an accomplishment founder and President Carol Kuc won't take for granted.

"It's quite a thing for any business to achieve," she said. But the fact that Kuc's company is women-owned makes the milestone more significant, experts say.

While census data suggest the number of women-owned businesses has been growing at twice the national average for all businesses, female entrepreneurs often lag behind their male counterparts in size of business. In fact, more than three out of four women-owned businesses have no employees, according to a January Census Bureau report based on 2002 census data.

Today, about 275,000 women-owned companies, or less than 3 percent of the nation's 10.6 million women-owned businesses, generate $1 million or more in annual revenue, according to Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to increasing women's access to capital. That compares with more than twice as many, or about 7 percent, of businesses owned by men.

"Women are successful at building and retaining businesses, but we tend to start a little slower and we tend not to grow as fast," said Kuc, who is also president-elect of the National Association of Women Business Owners based in McLean, Va.

Lack of knowledge about how to get capital for expansion is one common challenge, Kuc said. Like many women business owners, Kuc started her company 23 years ago using credit cards to pay her bills while she built a clientele.

It's a common scenario but often takes a business only so far, said Nell Merlino, chief executive of Count Me In. While her group provides start-up loans of up to $5,000, Merlino has seen a growing number of larger businesses approach Count Me In because they don't have the necessary collateral or three years of experience that most banks require for a business loan.

So last year her group teamed up with Open from American Express and the Women's Leadership Exchange, an educational and networking company, to launch a pilot program, Make Mine a $Million Business, designed to give women business owners capital and advice.

The success of the 23 companies participating in the pilot led to a launch last week of a national program that will award 40 companies with loans of up to $45,000, plus business advice, said Merlino, who previously created the Take Our Daughters to Work Day for the Ms. Foundation.

To be considered for the award, businesses must be at least 2 years old and be positioned to achieve $1 million in revenue within two years, said Channing Barringer, spokesman for Open from American Express, a small-business arm of the financial giant. Program details are available at www.makemineamillion.org.

The business advice received can be more important than the money, said Cynthia Ivie, owner of White Space Inc., a Chicago-based professional organizer, who received a Make Mine a $Million Business award last year. She also was provided a business coach as well as access to a "dream team" of business experts.

"They forced me to get a lot smarter about my business," she said.

Ivie started her company in 1998, organizing the homes and offices of people she knew. She was good at it, and word of her work spread quickly. The company's sales tripled in each of the first four years, hitting $700,000 by 2003.

But White Space's swift, largely unplanned growth came to a halt in 2004, when sales fell to below $500,000, Ivie said. The company that specialized in organizing other people's lives had been too busy to organize itself.

"We definitely grew too fast," she said. "We were chaotic inside. We had no time to take care of our needs because we were too busy taking care of our clients."

With funds from the award, Ivie in June hired what she calls her "director of balance and order," a staff member dedicated to the company's operations. And for the first time the company has a strategic plan on paper.

"Before, I would talk to the staff about where I saw this going, but I didn't know how I was going to get there," Ivie said. "I never had a solid plan or road map."

Ivie, whose background is in marketing, got a primer in business finance from her advisers. Now she knows exactly what the company needs to do to grow to $1 million in revenue, and she is projecting the company likely will exceed that target by the end of the year.

"We've broken down, how do you get to a million dollars?" she said. "You have to get it into bite-size pieces."

In her business, it means figuring out how many houses, closets or offices the company needs to organize each month and year.

Armed with a lot more business know-how, Ivie's next goal is to open a second Chicago location in 2007 and several more after that before expanding to other markets. To get there, she knows she'll have to codify her business systems so they can be easily duplicated in other locations.

It also will mean hiring someone to help run the company, allowing Ivie more time for business development. The new game plan is a big change from a year ago, Ivie said, when her time was consumed by the day to day.

"As an entrepreneur, you have your head down and your nose to the grindstone, so you don't get a chance to look around and survey the landscape," she said. "But by surrounding myself with experts and wise people with lots of diverse points of view, I've become much more aware of what's out there."