SHAKERS & MOVERS n ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The New Female Entrepreneur
By Dr. Rollan Roberts II
S
teve Jobs. Mark Cuban. Jeff
Bezos. Bill Gates. Mark
Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. Notice
what’s missing from the highest
entrepreneurial profiles of our age?
Women! This truly is the dawning of the Age of
the Female Entrepreneur. More and
more women are understanding the
incredible independence and identity
that is found through entrepreneurship
and embracing it like never before.
It is not because there’s a glass ceiling.
Twenty years ago, calling yourself an
entrepreneur or consultant was code
for unemployed. Being an entrepreneur
wasn’t cool back then. Systematically
starting multiple businesses and new
ventures, some of which succeed
and some of which never take off, has
always been around, but it bucked
the prevailing wisdom of the day —
go to school, get a good job with
good benefits, and settle for stability.
Entrepreneurship is anything but
financially stable, but in today’s global
economy, being an entrepreneur is
one of the most stable lives you can
build for yourself when accounting for
your entire life (emotional, relational,
physical, spiritual), and not just money. After working with countless female
entrepreneurs, here are 3 thoughts for
the female entrepreneur to keep in mind:
There are notable female entrepreneurs
— Sarah Blakely (Spanx), Anne Beiler
(Auntie Anne’s Pretzels), Tory Burch,
Debbi Fields, Martha Stewart, and you.
And this is just the beginning. Female
entrepreneurs have a huge advantage
in the marketplace and in leadership
roles, given the cultural change in the
United States. The dispositions, values,
empathy, and heart that ladies bring
to business ownership, combined with
their business acumen, is the formula
for successful leadership that very few
men have ever achieved in business.
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1. Overcome the innate desire for
stability. Most people are wired
with the desire for emotional,
financial, and relational security
and stability, and entrepreneurship
is counter-productive to those ob-
jectives in the beginning, then
morph into the best way of attaining
the pureness and fullness of
them. If you are going to make it in
entrepreneurship, embrace the
stability of instability. Embrace that
the norm is fluctuation of income
and do not derive your sense of life
stability from money; rather, attain
your stability from your faith, solid,
deep relationships, and consistent
focus on a single mission and
purpose.
Do it whether you have a strong
support team or not. Do it whether
your close friends and family believe
you can do it or not. The thing about
successful entrepreneurs is that they
do not need to require validation of
an idea and/or purpose. They must
do it regardless. It’s who they are,
and who they’re meant to be. It’s how
destiny is fulfilled.
2. Reposition what other people
think about you. I suggest that you
not care what others think about you.
But that doesn’t always work. We are
human, and we do care. It is how you
process what others think and
say about you that either stops you
dead in your tracks with doubt and
discouragement or provides rocket
fuel and a determination like they
have never seen before. The most
successful people in history were
bold, and that boldness turned
some people off. People either loved
or hated them — not much in between
unless they’d never heard of them.
The same can be described for every
single notable entrepreneur. View
your haters as fans that just can’t get
enough. They will harass, slander,
lie, and gossip about you and
what you are doing, and you can’t
let them be a distraction. Responding
to them doesn’t stop them, it just
gives their false claims credibility
with your acknowledgement of
them. The best advice I ever heard
was, “This train doesn’t stop for every
barking dog.”
What people are saying becomes
your “reason why” or “reason why
not.” I was recently asked if growing
up poor was instrumental in my
eventual success. I said, “No. A
hundred other people grew up in
the same backwoods that I did,
and they didn’t achieve some
magical level of success because
they
were poor. They used their
upbringing as a reason to keep