Book review: Women entrepreneurs can broaden their horizons

Stephanie Breedlove's book All In: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Think Bigger, Build Sustainable Businesses and Change the World is a Lean In for female entrepreneurs.

Courtesy Greenleaf Book Group
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Call this book the Lean In of entrepreneurship for women, right down to the title.

Stephanie Breedlove set up Breedlove Associates as a niche payroll company to help American families pay their nannies and au pairs legally. When she sold the business 20 years later for a reported US$55 million, she decided to write a book about her journey.

It may sound trite to be telling her own success story, but Breedlove truly intends her book, All In: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Think Bigger, Build Sustainable Businesses and Change the World, to be a bugle call for other women to join her.

There are 11.3 million women-owned US businesses, but only 1.8 per cent have revenue exceeding $1m, according to a report last year by mentor network Score.

Breedlove, whose business was generating close to $10m by the time she sold it, says there was “camaraderie” in the start-up and “solopreneur” days, but as she began to rise to the top it felt “like I’d purchased an uninhabited island with no boat back to the mainland”.

The Texas-based entrepreneur started out at Accenture and hired a nanny when she had her first child. She says she and husband Bill “muddled through” the tricky process of sorting out paid holidays, sick days, a health plan and taxes. That became the kernel of the idea for Breedlove & Associates, which was launched in 1992 and built up, slowly but surely, over two decades.

So what does she mean by going all in? Breedlove calls this the “secret ingredient” of a business and advises other women entrepreneurs to take small steps and pace themselves but to think big.

Embrace the entrepreneurial journey, she says, to create the “1 per cent mindset shift that makes the difference between success and failure”.

Breedlove does offer some practical advice for start-ups – setting clear responsibilities for every job, using a top-down approach – but this is more of an inspirational nudge than a how-to manual for entrepreneurs.

As she says, “neither my background nor my story is extraordinary. There should be many more women like me walking this path. My story from ‘the basement to a big deal’ is intended to allow you to see what you can be and to go all in.”

All In is published in hardback by Greenleaf Book and is available from Amazon.com for $21.20.

q&a achievement takes time

Stephanie Breedlove tells Suzanne Locke more about the story behind her book All In:

When you set up the business, did you know it would take 20 years?

Creating sustainable value and large-scale success does not happen overnight: it takes years and a lot of hard work. It was about a dozen years in when we really hit our stride – strong growth, large client volume, industry leadership, strong revenue and strong Ebitda.

Was it difficult to exit the business?

This work is often difficult for founders that have sold their business. It was actually very carefully planned out; upon completion of the plan, our company and our team were ready to move on without the co-founders.

What comes next?

In the next couple of years my work as an advocate for women in entrepreneurship will become part-time, opening up bandwidth to focus on a new business. I am already brainstorming potential ideas with my co-founder and husband Bill – and I am an active angel investor.

Why do you think so few women have profitable businesses?

There is currently a significant gap for many women in the core skills needed to launch a business successfully and build the financial, human and social capital required to scale. We are early in the evolution of women in entrepreneurship and, as more women seek financial and technical degrees and achieve management positions, they will be better prepared for success.

business@thenational.ae

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