women entrepreneurs
November 2018
Get Inspired from Buckets of Good Advice
Receiving advice from accomplished people, whether for personal or business gain, is a way to accelerate your own trajectory toward favorable outcomes. There are many ways to seek out guidance from experts, such as reading success stories, listening to helpful podcasts, crafting a thoughtful request to start a dialogue with a mentor, advisor or sponsor, and attending big and small networking events. I find that a consistent resource for a concentration of experts and networking...
Two things immediately stood out, to me at least, while attending my favorite cybersecurity conference last week in New Orleans. Both were tied to toilets. One had to do with a personal observation: There were lines between sessions to use women’s restrooms. At any other event, women typically stand in longer restroom lines than men. Cybersecurity conferences, though, are the reverse because there are far more men than women in the information security profession. Having...
One of my and Anne Saita’s goals as business owners was to be mentors to other business owners—a way to impart our knowledge culled over our careers working for others and the five years working on our own content creation company, Twirling Tiger Media. Early on in our business, our company benefited greatly as recipients of a year-long mentorship under the tutelage of professionals at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and we wanted to...
It’s May Day, where nations celebrate both spring and International Workers Day. The latter is often associated with socialist nations, but its birthplace is the United States in the 1880s, with Chicago at its epicenter. It is easy to forget the conditions our ancestors were forced to endure in order to earn a living. Minimum 12-hour workdays. No meal or bio breaks. No weekends off or shortened, if any, vacations. Wait! We’re talking about times...
January 2018
Making Lemonade … and Content Worth Reading
Fueled with a good idea, commitment and fortitude, it is possible to create new and successful opportunities for yourself and others at any stage of your life or career, even in the face of those crippling curve balls life inevitably throws at you. The ability to move quickly when confronted with challenges is more manageable when you’re an experienced problem-solver—a skill that’s honed over toil and time. In the last days of 2017, I had...
October 2017
Women: Power in the House
It’s time to celebrate! October is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA)’s National Women’s Small Business Month—a way to acknowledge the tremendous trajectory of women owning businesses, taking control of their financial futures and packing economic power. A recent SBA article stated, “Thirty years ago, some state laws prevented women from getting a business loan without having a male relative co-sign for it. That changed in 1988 with the passage of a federal bill known...
August 2017
Pushing Past Your Comfort Zone
Every year I do something that pulls me so far beyond my comfort zone that I eventually ponder my own mortality. This year, it’s hiking in highly remote sections of the Southwest where the terrain can be tough and the weather deadly. That is, after all, why I sign on to do these things. If you don’t have days that scare the hell out of you—that push you past your comfort zone—you are not taking...
June 2017
4 Ways to Become More Resilient
When we are young adults, we’re drawn to the most successful classmates and companies. As we age, though, the more interesting people and places tend to be those that bounced back from serious setbacks. Their resilience attracts us because we can learn from their mistakes, even if the only miscalculation was poor timing. We all are brought down to zero by bad news or a bad breakup at some point. It’s how we respond to...
January 2017
Find a Mentor, Be a Mentor
“Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.” —John C. Crosby (1859-1943), American politician When armed with eagerness, and an open mind and heart, there’s likely something new to learn each day in our personal lives and professional careers. On big and small issues that arise where you have little or no experience navigating, one of the best ways to accelerate learning is to reach out...
December 2016
A Year Later: Our Resolutions Roundup
This time last year, Maureen Joyce and I created corporate resolutions for our company in an effort to both improve and remain accountable as the year progressed. Part of that accountability is publishing results to date. Resolution #1: More time reflecting, less time reacting (work-life balance) Taking the entire year into account, we did achieve our goal of more downtime to recharge and reflect on our work. Some weeks and months were easier than others,...