Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Business

obmar · Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Business

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11...p;en=f2c6b5330e0794e7&ei=5070
By BRENT BOWERS
Published: July 11, 2007

Throughout her entrepreneurial career, Talia Mashiach has pursued another daunting activity besides starting companies: having children, four at last count. And she’s only 30. Enough’s enough, right?

Wrong. She’d like to have a few more. This is good news for people who worry about the dwindling Jewish birth rate, but really. How’s she going to do that and build her hotel-events company into a national powerhouse, as she seems confident she can do?

Because she’s a woman. I have a theory that women, especially mothers, have several advantages over men in the small-business world.

¶They are better listeners.

¶Consequently, they pick up details and nuances men often miss.

¶They are more active networkers.

¶They are better motivators.

¶Having to juggle home and workplace duties, they are better multi-taskers.

¶They are more patient, and thus better able to stick to long-term strategies.

¶They are more tenacious. Men can be pretty dogged, but not a single one, to my knowledge, has had to endure childbirth.

I searched the Internet for evidence for this thesis and found none. The book titles I came across, like “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” by Lois P. Frankel, seemed to contradict it. It’s a familiar tune: women leaders need to drop that nurturing nonsense and kick butt the way men do.

Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps men ought to imitate the opposite sex. The tide is turning in women’s favor, after all. They now account for 57 percent of college students. They are rising up the ranks in corporate America and invading formerly male sanctuaries like engineering and even construction. Most profoundly, they are changing the entrepreneurial landscape, with the number of businesses they own increasing at twice the overall rate for the last two decades, to 10.4 million today, or 40 percent of the total, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research (www.cfwbr.org/).

Sure, women would do well to borrow a few weapons from the male arsenal, like canning poor performers. But if they cultivate their innate strengths, they will gain a competitive edge.

Especially if they are as tenacious as Ms. Mashiach. She showed an entrepreneurial spark as a child, selling yarmulkes her friends knitted. She was captain of her high school basketball team and president of her senior class. At 18, she married a musician and opened a company called Dimensions to promote his band. At 19, she had her first baby and opened a store to sell ethnic Jewish music. At 20, she gave birth to her second child. All this time, she was taking courses at Loyola University’s business school. “I’d come home late at night, exhausted, and want to hang out with my husband and relax with my baby,” she said. “Instead, I studied and wrote term papers.”

The band business made money but the store folded. A failure? No. Ms. Mashiach had learned crucial business skills like accounting and the value of pushing herself to the limit.

At 22, she started techcloseouts to sell refurbished computers for Dell through a barter network. It fizzled into another business lesson: If you aren’t passionate about something, drop it.

At 23, she gave birth to her third child and fourth business brainstorm — to run events, from weddings to corporate-awards dinners, at hotels. In 2004, the couple started Eved Services (www.eved.com) out of their suburban Chicago home and went on the hunt for customers. The director of catering at the Hilton Chicago was interested, but elusive. He couldn’t escape her, however.

“I’d sit outside his office for an hour just in the hope of grabbing him when he walked out,” she said. Realizing he loved talking business, she began calling him on his cellphone every morning at 8:15 sharp, just as he was getting into his car, and had him to herself for his 30-minute drive to work. Most men wouldn’t have thought of that.

Alas, he finally told her, not yet. Maybe next year. “My husband said, ‘Forget it,’ ” she said. Instead, she borrowed $50,000 and persuaded the Hilton executive to help her get her foot in the lobbies of smaller hotels. She signed her first contracts in April 2004.

Weeks later, at 4 p.m. on June 27, 2004, she gave birth to her fourth child. At 8:15 the next morning, lying bone-weary on her hospital bed, she picked up the phone to talk to the hotel executive about a deal.

“I was probably insane,” she said. “But I am not ABLE????? to just sit around and not do anything.”

The breakthrough came four months later, in October, when she got into the 1,544-room Hilton Chicago and the 1,640-room Palmer House Hilton. For a year after that, she would leave the house at 6:45 a.m. and return at 8 p.m. She rarely saw her kids. She pulled all-nighters every other Saturday.

That was then. Now, it is time to relax a bit. Eved Services has 29 employees, contracts with more than 30 hotels and projected revenue this year in the low eight figures. Ms. Mashiach spends more time with her family — and is thinking about having more children. “That’s what really matters in life,” she said.

Will she make it to six kids? Will Eved Services become a household name? Possibly both, if my hunch about female business prowess is correct.

Is it? Sharon Hadary, director for the Center for Women’s Business Research, chooses her words carefully as she says men and women can learn from each other. In focus groups her organization has sponsored, for example, women acknowledged that men were better at delegating authority. Even so, the list of advantages men conceded to women was longer: they were better at multitasking, better at dealing with obnoxious customers and better at resolving workplace conflicts. Other research the center has conducted showed that women entrepreneurs were more likely than men to consult with employees and customers and to seek the advice of outside experts.

“I do believe that as we move deeper into the information age, when skills at interpersonal relations and collaboration become increasingly important, women will be well positioned to be successful as entrepreneurs,” Ms. Hadary said.

I’d love to hear from moms who started businesses in between changing diapers for tips on how they did it and tales of how crazy it got.

Brent Bowers, a longtime small-business editor at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is author of The Eight Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs, now out out in paperback (Doubleday).

The Inquisitor

Excellent story, obmar.

Women are very capable leaders. I have had female bosses in the past, and I've never had any trouble with them. Quite the contrary, they've been more than understanding and would support you 100% if you remained honest and up front with them.