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The New Woman Entrepreneur

Northwestern Mutual

By Tom Stein and Tim Devaney

Lisa Griswold has discovered the magic kingdom, a place in life where she has money and time. She operates Pixie Vacations, an Atlanta-based travel agency that specializes in Disney destinations and employs over 60 agents around the country. She works from home and spends many hours each day with her two young daughters.

She does well and lives well. And millions like her are doing the same. They’re part of a new movement of women entrepreneurs.

Women now make up 40 percent of entrepreneurs in the U.S., but often their approach to business is different from the traditional male approach. They want their business lives to blend better with their personal lives.

This leads many to start lifestyle businesses that don’t require outside funding—businesses that enable them to pursue a career and a personal life. They are bootstrapping their businesses with their own money. They are not getting money from venture capitalists and angel investors.

To many, the term “lifestyle business” might have a cloying connotation. A lifestyle business sets out to achieve a particular level of income for the founder and no more. To Erin Albert, it suggests that women value balance.

Albert is the author of Single. Women. Entrepreneurs and director of the Ribordy Center for Community Practice Pharmacy at the Butler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Albert has started two companies herself and she’s spent years studying other women entrepreneurs.

“Women want to redesign their entire lives, they want their whole lives to be amenable to whatever balance or flow fits,” she says. “Maybe they have to be home at 2:30 because that’s when their kid gets off the bus. It’s like haute couture for their entire lives. They’re designing individually the best life they can have for themselves—not just the best job.”

And they’re succeeding. Take Katherine Forrester from Eden Prairie, MN. She’s been a wealth management advisor with Northwestern Mutual for 17 years. Over the past four years, she cut her work schedule, had a baby, trained for an Ironman competition, and still managed to grow her business exponentially.

“As an entrepreneur, I really appreciate the flexibility to turn the faucet on or off at whatever level I like when it comes to work-life balance,” she says. Recently, she decided to train for an Ironman and was able to cut her work week down from 40 hours to 26 hours, while training 20 hours a week.

“This is a very important bucket list goal I want to accomplish, and I couldn’t do that if I was working in a corporate structure,” she says.

Forrester also discovered that working crazy hours doesn’t necessarily translate into a more successful business. “When I had my son four years ago, I moved to a strict 32 hours work week and actually had 100 percent growth that year. And I’ve grown every year since then even though I’m working less than ever.”

So what’s her secret? Balance and contentment. “I’m more effective in front of my clients because when I’m at work I’m more focused than ever,” she says.

Women on Top

The 2013 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report by American Express shows that the rate of growth in the number of women-owned firms over the past 16 years is 1.5 times higher than the national average. In the period since the recession, 2007-2013, the businesses that have fueled a net increase in employment are large, publicly traded corporations and in privately held, majority women-owned companies. In all other privately held firms, employment has dropped.

So don’t call it a lifestyle business, Albert says. Call it what it is: successful. “Some women get bashed in the press for having a ‘lifestyle business’ but, at the end of day, business is business. There’s this double standard around what kind of business you have. But if you’re passionate about it and brave enough to take the risk, who cares what kind of business it is?”

In fact, Albert says many women entrepreneurs now take bigger risks than their male counterparts, because they tend to be self-funded. Maybe that’s due to the fact that VCs and angel investors are mainly men, and women have a hard time getting invited into that club. Or maybe, Albert says, it’s because women don’t want to relinquish control, they want to own it and own all of it.

“Women entrepreneurs I studied are not really empire builders," she says. "They’re not building their businesses to rule the universe, they’re building them because of the flexibility around them and the fact they can control their entire lives. They want to be comfortable but don’t necessarily need to be the next Amazon or Apple.”

Searching for Balance

Nina Hale is CEO and founder of Nina Hale Inc., a social media and search engine marketing agency in Minneapolis that opened in 2005. She says she’s observed “the rise of women who can build businesses that are a reflection of who and what they are.”

For her, that means balance. In her business, she focuses on working with local companies to minimize travel and spend time every day with her husband and their 12-year-old son. She has 30 employees and is committed to a 40-hour work week for all of them. When her billable hours were forcing people to exceed that, she eased back.

“This is very different from many of the other social media and SEO agencies in town, who are focused on really pushing up the billable hours and having a 60-hour workweek all the time,” Hale says. “I think that makes us a very attractive company. We don’t work people these crazy long hours.”

She grew her company slowly because, she says, she’s “very risk averse.” Where others in her field take on large loans to pursue rapid expansion, she has not. But her company is fiscally sound. It has no debt and is profitable every month.

Hale now works slightly more than 40 hours a week and plans to scale back this year to pursue personal, art-related projects.

“Can women entrepreneurs have it all? It really comes down to what is your definition of success,” she says. “Is it making as much money as possible or is it having a good life and making a good living at the same time? I think it’s OK to have the latter. I think that’s the better definition of success.”

Tom Stein writes about technology and business for a number of publications. He has contributed to leading publications including Wired, Business 2.0, Venture Capital Journal, AllBusiness, and Tennis Magazine. He has also held staff-writer positions at the San Francisco Chronicle, Red Herring, and InformationWeek.  Tim Devaney has held senior editorial positions at magazines including Red Herring, Industry Standard, San Francisco, and the Berkley Monthly.