Winning Strategies for Women Entrepreneurs #1 Get a Mentor

Lately, I’ve been devoting most of my Next Avenue posts to advice for women in their 50s and 60s who are small business owners or want to be. So, in the spirit of New Year’s, how’s this for a resolution for women entrepreneurs? Think Bigger.

That’s the title of a recent book by Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, an accomplished serial entrepreneur and founder and chairman of Tiger 21, a community of more than 500 entrepreneurs and investors who collectively manage $50 billion in personal assets. Actually, the full title is Think Bigger: And 39 Other Winning Strategies from Successful Entrepreneurs.

I found the book extremely helpful for anyone launching a small business or eager to do so. After reading it, I interviewed Sonnenfeldt to hear more, as well as one of the entrepreneurs featured in the book, Linda Abraham, 55, who co-founded two companies after starting her career at Procter & Gamble. She is now an angel investor and board member at a few start-ups, including vice chair of Upskill, an augmented reality software company.

While older female entrepreneurs will gather inspiration and workable ideas from the insights in Think Bigger, the book could be fodder for anyone gearing up to launch a new venture.

But the book could be especially useful for women because, according to Sonnenfeldt, female entrepreneurs have one obstacle that men don’t. “It’s tough for anyone to build a company out of nothing more than an idea, but I have found that all too frequently the female entrepreneurs I know have been underestimated in such a pathological way that the only word that can accurately describe it is sexism,” he wrote.

Sonnenfeldt also thought women entrepreneurs have an advantage over men, though. “There is evidence that, on average, the kind of entrepreneurial activities that really require team building and environments that are particularly well-run and sensitive to the dynamics between the members, are where some women have the competitive advantage — particularly women who are now older and have many years of experience to bring to the table,” he told me. “Many entrepreneurial successes depend on an exquisite form of human understanding and organizational leadership that women have the edge on.”

Here are eight of my favorites “winning strategies” from Think Bigger and my conversations with Sonnenfeldt and Abraham:

1. Seek out mentors. “What saved me, time and time again, wasn’t my education, but the wisdom of other people who had already been through something I was wrestling with for the first time and their perspectives gained over decades of experiences,” Sonnenfeldt wrote.

Read the rest of the article: Winning Strategies for Women Entrepreneurs

Editor Note:  Mentoring improved survival rate was released in 2018 SCORE published a survey demonstrated mentoring increases the likelihood of small business success. Working with a mentor at least five times greatly increases an entrepreneur's likelihood of business success. Specifically 30% of women business owners who had just one mentoring interaction reported business growth, a number that increased with subsequent interactions and peaked at 43% of business owners who had five or more mentoring interactions reporting growth.