Women business owners have reason to feel good. According to a survey, in the most recent 10-year period, the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. grew by 44 percent (twice as fast as men-owned firms) and, women-owned firms added 500,000 new jobs.
Women are growing business twice as fast as men, they are employing thousands of people. It is crazy for men to neglect this market when they are hitting the networking circuit. It is not that men do not network with women, they just don’t do it well. Not that they really don’t want to and not that they don’t try, there are just little things that cause the connections to go south.
Here are 3 things that men can do to make their chances of connecting with women better.
When opening a conversation with a woman, don’t go straight to business. Ask them to tell you something about themselves. Women are looking for ways to connect, some common ground that will allow for a relational conversation.
Listen to the women that you meet at networking event. Yes women talk more than men, they have deeper conversations that men do, often sharing a great deal of information in a very storytelling way. Men can learn a great deal by asking questions and just listening.
Never underestimate how serious a woman takes her business. Just because she may be selling a product or a service that seems soft and fluff, like cosmetics, clothing, child care or any other personal service, does not mean she does not take her business as serious as any man may take his.
Women are creating business, they have a need for services, they know other women who need products and services but they are not going to share that information with someone whom they do not have a trusting relationship with. Building those relationships will take time and work, but if you are willing to invest both, men and women can connect and refer to one another very successfully.
Hazel Walker
Referral Institute, llc
BNI
hazel@bni.com
On to A New Year
Friday, January 20th, 2012January is one of my favorite months. The feeling of renewal and rebirth that this season brings can be life-changing for so many. For others, especially as we get older, we get stuck back in our grooves.
Why do people as they seem to get older find it tougher to reinvent themselves? To get out-of –the-groove so to speak? Why are the people that are able to reinvent themselves seem to be geniuses that change the world? Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, and even Tony Robbins seem to keep themselves relevant through the times when the “norm” is to have “your time, your glory days” and move on.
Steve Jobs had a theory that as people get older, they become more and more engrained in patterns, and these patterns cause them to start to limit their ability to think creatively. The range of their thinking would become smaller and smaller.
These patterns become our groove, they are comfortable and safe, at least we feel their safe. But are they? Is it safe to get grooved in a career, your role in a business, a business model, a certain kind of product or even an economy?
I love working in technology because the very nature of it forces you to turnover old grooves and think in different paradigms almost every day. You can’t get in a groove in this industry. If you do, the world just passes you by…which is pretty much the way it works anyway, right?
What I mean is, are you stuck in an old job groove? an old economy groove? an old business groove? an old relationship groove? or a even an attitude groove?
A new year is not just a new way to date your checks (if you are still stuck in the groove of writing checks, that is). It is the chance to commit to throw yourself into something new. You are not a train, you are built to create, to solve problems, to produce.
You are designed for greatness by your creator. If you are not making the impact of Mother Teresa or M and M, it’s because you are playing a smaller-than image of which you were created. A groove to deep could be your grave or worse yet, the death of your dreams.
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Tags: Business goals, indianapolis small business, New Year's Resolutions
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