How Women Are Acing The Entrepreneurship Vertical Like Never Before

While getting shaped up as a seasoned homemaker (with a full time management job always) oftentimes I would wonder and celebrate the power women wield and the acumen women show in running a household. The raw material ordering at the start of the month, the inventorying of the right amount of items needed for smooth functioning, taking care of the staff welfare, setting up values and ethics for the unit called home, defining the culture of the family, selling ideas or deselling them at times, ensuring discipline prevails across all rungs, hiring/recruiting for various positions and of course retention! Aren’t these common across management lessons and living a Marie Kondo life in parallel?

Well, if you can resonate with the aforesaid, please applaud yourself for being the woman who is born with the germ of entrepreneurship along with the natural gift of high risk taking abilities.

In my case I always felt the latent desire to “create value”, “to do more”, to set standards or redefine some but for the longest the articulation of the same remained elusive. And I feel most of us women experience this phase. Some drop the pursuit thereafter and some adhere to it doggedly.

So like most of us (who are plagued with a burning fire pit in the belly but…) who keep nurturing a dream but don’t act upon it promptly, the first part of the management experience is usually spent towards learning, acquiring skill sets which seem necessary to reach the CXO levels in our professional careers. But as progress begins, satisfaction starts diminishing and the latent fire starts turning into an inferno of ambition manifesting itself into a reality. The orientation gets shifted from becoming skillful to attributes laden, the delivery changes from check list methods to higher involvement processes for value creation and this shift spells all things entrepreneurship.

Women Acing Entrepreneurship: So fellow Ladies, women are great leaders! That is when they decide to take the fore. Because summarizing what is already said

1.     We have the natural ability to be analytical, logical, disciplined and result oriented
2.     The respect for time is naturally imbued
3.     Multi task is a myth and yet women managed to make it sound real and even aced the myth.

In the recent years we have seen a huge surge in the growth of the “woman entrepreneur”; Rephrasing – “the successful woman entrepreneur” and more commendable is the fact that for the ones who have emerged out with flying colours, the ones with failure stories have also existed and fortified and supported this dare. The entry barriers to entrepreneurship for women were higher. Running and sustaining a business while doing everything else in life too seemed like a formidable thought- decoding the world of VCs & PEs, Working on product R&D, Being on factory floor managing manufacturing, Coding back end with tech team, Balancing the balance sheets and P&Ls, getting listed and going IPO - these were classically scary and continue to be so but something has changed which has altered the mindset of many and created acceptance that women can also champion these functions and run a business efficiently and profitably. It has been those success stories and magazine covers with women leaders beaming at us and sharing their multi layered success while being great daughters, wives and mothers- victories at multiple levels and not just one. It is those few women who could articulate their dreams and vision early on in their lives and careers (and some at a very young age) and bore the courage to convince an army to follow through and partner with them in their journeys, the ones who stuck by themselves and didn’t fear failure, the ones who worked relentlessly like clockwork to make their dreams come true, who have set up the examples for the entire race and every time you look at these examples, the courage just seeps through every pore- so follow them the women leaders for they are our torch bearers!

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Women led businesses are today providing some meaningful solves for human kind, and these have stemmed from personal needs in most cases - Fin tech solution for women, high quality and safe products for babies and children, good quality, cruelty free skin care, menstrual hygiene, sustainable education aids for children, clean, chemicals free food- are some of the wide arenas where women have ventured into and created great businesses rapidly garnering a community because many such solutions were waited for by many. It was a shift in approach- the approach from waiting for someone to change things for women changed to women taking charge and bringing about changes for the community and this set the domino effect in motion. From one successful example set out many (not discounting the learning from failure) and it became a blueprint to follow.

 Without taking a feminist stance (because I am not one) I just wish to highlight that it takes a lot of hard work and self- belief for a woman to ace this game. We are natural begetters, the ones who are looked upon for taking things forward- taking the family forward, taking the future of children forward, taking generations forward so there is no reason why we shouldn’t and couldn’t become the ones who could take business legacy forward. Why leave this territory uncharted then?

Pallavi Barman is the Business Head and Fitness Ambassador, HRX. The views expressed are the author's own.