In Business to Give Women Clout : Assistance: New organization seeks to aid entrepreneurs with capital, credit or insurance woes.
A year ago, Lindsey Johnson and Judith Luther Wilder met over lunch in Washington, D.C., and mulled the problems facing female business owners. Lack of access to capital, credit, health insurance and corporate discounts put female business owners at a disadvantage, they agreed.
Now, with $1 million in grants, a $150-million loan pool and a list of Southern California advisers that reads like a Who’s Who among female entrepreneurs, the two have set out to solve some of those problems.
They have formed Women Inc., a California-based national membership organization modeled after the American Assn. of Retired Persons. The two hope to pull in female business owners from across the nation and from a variety of industries who will collectively have the clout they now lack as individual entrepreneurs or as home-based business owners.
“There are no chapters, no networking; we’re really about credit,” said Wilder, who traveled recently to Los Angeles from the group’s Sacramento office to promote the group. So far, 6,000 women have paid the $29 yearly dues to join. The goal is 100,000 members by the end of the year.
Their high-powered board of advisers includes Southlanders Jill Barad, president of Mattel Toys; television producer Marcy Carsey, Paramount Pictures Chairwoman Sherry Lansing, clothing designer and manufacturer Carole Little, and Adrienne Hall, president of The Hall Group, a marketing firm.
Johnson is former director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership, and Wilder formerly headed the California American Woman’s Economic Development Corp.
A 1992 study by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners found that 52% of female business owners use personal credit cards to finance their businesses--at interest rates far higher than those available elsewhere--whereas only 18% of all small businesses do.
Women get left out, Wilder said, because they often enter service industries such as day care, advertising and consulting, which lack buildings and equipment that could serve as collateral. Many women also lack a credit histories separate from those of their husbands.
Women Inc. will offer access to business credit cards, group health insurance and SBA-backed loans from a $150-million loan fund set aside for women by The Money Store, a Sacramento-based lender which disburses $4 billion annually in loans of various types.
In addition, corporate discounts will be available from airlines and from mailing, duplication and other services. A newsmagazine will be published quarterly, and there are plans for a series of conferences for women in business. A conference is scheduled for Friday and Saturday at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center.
