The Global Summit of Women 2009

Santiago, Chile

May 14-16

Presentation on “Media & How It Defines Women in Business”

By Monica S. Smiley, Publisher & CEO

Enterprising Women Magazine

Good afternoon. It is such a pleasure and an honor for me to be a part of the Global Summit of Women. This is my third Summit and my first trip to Latin America, and I am delighted to be here.

I was asked to share my thoughts with you on the media and how it defines women in business from a U.S. perspective, but I believe that my comments will apply to women around the globe as the under-representation of women in the media is a universal challenge.

Only 6% of the commercial television and radio stations in the United States are owned by women, and women are equally under-represented in the print media as well.

With a move in the past decade by large corporations like Time Warner, CBS, News Corp. and other conglomerates to own media empires that include dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of magazine titles, newspapers, TV, radio and Internet sites—it is becoming less likely that women will hold controlling stakes in the mainstream media.

What about women on the World Wide Web? Women now make up 50.4% of Web users and there are certainly thousands of sites owned and hosted by women. However, it is disheartening to see that many of the major sites geared to women have the same focus as so many mainstream women’s magazines—on celebrity news, recipes, horoscopes, and the like.

Stand in line in any grocery store in the United States and you will find a dozen or so women’s magazines in the check out line—all with the same narrow focus on celebrities, food, weight loss, sex—and little more.

With that information as a backdrop, let me share a little of my own story with you briefly, and offer some lessons learned along the way.

I started a magazine publishing company with my husband in 1984, focused primarily on trade magazines in several industries. My husband is 15 years old than I am and he retired several years ago.

In 1999, my company began researching whether there might be a market for a magazine focused on women business owners. I was looking at launching a magazine that I could be passionate about and I had been a business owner for a number of years.

As I looked around, I saw mainstream business magazines like Business Week, Fortune, and others, but women business owners seemed drastically under-represented among the articles and features.

When I looked for publications geared to women in business, I saw only Working Woman magazine at that time, and its focus was on all working women—not just entrepreneurs. It seemed as though it was trying to serve too wide a market—from women just out of college to executive women and women entrepreneurs. It has since gone out of business.

I saw then and continue to see women entrepreneurs as having unique issues and challenges, and while I have great respect for women executives in corporate America, women entrepreneurs must raise their own capital, meet their own payroll, and take on a level of risk that someone who does not own their own business has to assume. While there are some shared challenges, I felt that women entrepreneurs deserved a publication that spoke directly to them.

In researching the market more than a decade ago, we came across a Web site for Enterprising Women and realized that the magazine had been started in the mid 1990s, but had since gone out of business. Perhaps it was ahead of its time—the dramatic growth in women’s entrepreneurship had not yet occurred. We learned that the previous owners had a limited background in magazine publishing, but we were grateful that they had left behind a Web site with contact information that allowed us to reach them.

A short time later, I flew to Los Angeles from my home in North Carolina and met with the previous owners. Soon after, my company purchased the trademark rights to the name Enterprising Women for $10,000. Along with the trademark to the name, it included several boxes of files, and the opportunity to ask the women who were involved to share their experiences with me.

I learned that their hearts were in the right place, and they had not burned any bridges or made any enemies. They shared some valuable contacts with me that proved to very helpful. My company re-launched Enterprising Women in May of 2000 and I am proud to say that we are celebrating our tenth year this month.

What we saw in 2000 was that the mainstream business media all but ignored women business owners. They did not seem to take them seriously, and their voices clearly were not being heard.

We set out to craft a magazine that would be considered the voice of women entrepreneurs. What we have done with Enterprising Women is to build much more than a magazine. We have built a community of women. We consider our readers to be part of our family. They tell us they read each issue cover to cover, and find inspiration and motivation from the articles. They feel a connection to the other women entrepreneurs that we feature in each issue or who write for us.

One of the reasons we are still here is that we have a lean staff and work hard to publish efficiently with overhead low. Ninety percent of the magazine is written by outstanding women entrepreneurs who are willing to share best practices—lessons they have learned building their businesses—with other women entrepreneurs who are trying to grow their businesses to the next level.

The universe of women entrepreneurs in the United States is large. There are 10.1 million women-owned businesses. Together they employ more workers than all of the Fortune 500 combined.

In 2008, these women-owned businesses generated $1.9 trillion in sales and women-owned firms that are 50% or more controlled by women account for 40% of all privately held firms in the U.S., according to the Washington DC-based Center for Women’s Business Research. Women in the U.S. are starting businesses at twice the rate of men and are growing their businesses at a faster rate than those owned by men.

In light of these impressive numbers, you would think that women entrepreneurs would not have to shout to be heard, but that is not the case.

We have found a unique way for women business owners in the U.S. and increasingly from other parts of the world to support our mission of providing a magazine and a voice for them.

Eight years ago, we formed a National Advisory Board for Enterprising Women. I know that Advisory Boards are not unusual, but the model for this Board is a bit different. On it are nearly 130 women who believe in our mission to support the growth of women’s entrepreneurship and provide a magazine devoted just to them.

How did this start? We began by asking the president or executive director of every major U.S. organization that supports women’s entrepreneurship to be on our Advisory Board. It was the first time all of them came together in such a way and it helped to facilitate more communication and understanding between organizations with similar missions. I see many of these organizations working together more closely today than ten years ago.

We also asked the president of a major U.S.-based organization, The Women Presidents’ Organization—a group that requires its members to have a minimum of $1 million in annual revenues—to nominate 15-20 women for our Advisory Board each fall. The WPO President, Marsha Firestone, helped me craft a Board membership with dues of $5,000 annually at the gold level and $10,000 annually at the platinum level.

We created a win-win for all. Our Board members receive three ads in the magazine as part of their membership or they may donate their ads to their favorite nonprofit organization. The ads have a value far greater than the annual dues, plus the Board member receives wonderful exposure for her company in the magazine and on our Web site. This model has been successful and is the backbone of the magazine—helping to guarantee that many of our ads are from women-owned companies who might not otherwise be able to advertise with us.

Our Board members agree to write for the magazine—sharing best practices with our readers, and they act as ambassadors for Enterprising Women as they travel around the country doing business for their companies.

We also invited the major U.S. corporations that have strong women’s business initiatives to be a part of our Advisory Board, and many have done so, including American Airlines, Walt Disney, UPS, Bank of America, American Express, FedEx, and others.

In addition, we began our Enterprising Women of the Year Awards program in which the magazine’s Web site, www.enterprisingwomen.com, opens up nominations each November and hundreds of women entrepreneurs apply for the award. Our editorial team narrows the field to a group of finalists, and this year, 18 of our Advisory Board members conducted telephone interviews to help us select the winners.

The past six years we’ve hosted the Enterprising Women of the Year Awards Celebration at a luxury hotel at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, with Disney as our premier event sponsor.

This year we recognized 50 outstanding women entrepreneurs and the event shines the spotlight on their accomplishment and generates national publicity for their businesses. We also produce a special issue of Enterprising Women that features our winners on the front cover and profiles each woman inside the magazine.

After the event, our winners are invited to join the Advisory Board if they are interested. Many do so and this is an excellent way to keep the caliber of our Board very high. We want our Advisory Board members to be the top women entrepreneurs and this nomination process helps assure that is the case. We are proud that our Board is becoming more international, with new members from Canada, South Korea, and Peru who have joined in the past year, and we look forward to more international involvement from outstanding women entrepreneurs from around the world.

I’ve been asked to speak about why it is so important for women’s voices to be heard. Let me just say that if we are to be taken seriously and have a seat at every table—in business, government,

large corporations, and academia—the accomplishments, ideas, and lessons we’ve learned must be shared.

Studies have shown that women generally are more collaborative than men. They are more willing to share information, mentor other women, and lend a helping hand, and that is what Enterprising Women is all about so we certainly find this to be true.

The world is faced with daunting challenges like never before and we need the collective brainpower of all of our citizens—women and men—in order to solve these problems in the United States and around the globe.

When we use the tools that the media can provide to tell our stories and share our experience—when we embrace and support women-owned media—and when we push hard for every media outlet to hear our messages, our voices can be heard.

Thank you.