Entrepreneur Magazine Plans New Periodical : Businesswomen Pass Milestone

It’s almost 1990, and most of us would agree by now that women and men are, well, different. And that’s just the point that the publishers of Entrepreneur magazine want to make on June 20, when they launch their latest editorial effort: Entrepreneurial Woman.

The 114-page June issue includes articles on the best cars for women’s entrepreneurial life styles, the outlook for the infant-products industry and a woman record executive, as well as a health column.

The new periodical is planned as an every-other-month companion to the successful Entrepreneur, an Irvine-based publication whose audited readership is 300,000 and about 25% female. The June issue of Entrepreneurial Woman is a prototype, with regular issues to follow in February.

Rieva Lesonsky, editor of both magazines, concedes that basic issues are the same for male and female business owners. But she also talks a lot about “women’s special needs” and said her latest creation will do the same.

“Women face some unique problems in starting their own businesses,” Lesonsky says. “Raising money is harder because of the attitude of bankers. And it’s only recently that we’ve given women the approval to work, let alone own their own companies.”

Lesonsky is quick to rattle off a raft of horror stories gleaned mostly from letters written by Midwestern readers of Choices: For Entrepreneurial Women, a short-lived quarterly that Entrepreneur delivered in 1985 then abandoned in 1986.

Choices did “fairly well,” Lesonsky says, but was discontinued after three issues so the staff could concentrate on Entrepreneur. Choices magazine may have died, she says, but it left a legacy of letters that motivated editors to try another publication for businesswomen.

“We got a letter from a woman who went to a bank with a very detailed business plan,” she says. “The banker, in the Midwest, told her they were not in the habit of funding ‘hobbies.’ Another woman wrote that the bank told her they wanted her 17-year-old, under-age son to co-sign for her loan.”

So the need, Lesonsky says, is there for a magazine like Entrepreneurial Woman. But is there a market for the product?

“Absolutely,” says Rick Boden, an economist with the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. Not only is the market there, but it’s growing. In 1977, the SBA counted 1.9 million woman-owned sole proprietorships operating in the United States. By 1986, the latest year for which statistics were available, the number had grown to 4.12 million.

And women business owners are branching out, Boden says. In the early 1970s, such entrepreneurs were huddled mostly in the service and retail industries. Today, Boden says, their numbers are growing in such non-traditional industries as construction and manufacturing.

But Boden has a caveat for the publishers of Entrepreneurial Woman: This working woman’s wave may be cresting soon.

“We see a growth in women-owned business,” Boden says. “But we don’t know how long, however, this fairly rapid growth rate will continue. We think it will probably slow down soon after 1990.”

Regardless of the fact that the number of women business owners may peak, it’s still growing now, says Judy Devin, spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Women Business Owners. And those women who help fuel the economy deserve to read about themselves and their lives.

Devin, too, contends that women do business in a fashion far different from men. But, like Lesonsky, she is a bit hard pressed to point to specific disparities.

“Women do business differently,” she starts. The National Assn. of Women Business Owners is “doing studies on how women set up businesses, and we’re finding that we’re much more egalitarian, there’s no hierarchy. We look for consensus management. We try to be more flexible in our workplace. A lot of women are raising families and running businesses.”

But what this different kind of business owner reads, Devin says, comes pretty much from the same list that her male counterpart uses. According to an association survey, women business owners read Inc., the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Nation’s Business.