Women with Influence — A Collaborative Pathway to a Better World
Women own 42% of ALL businesses yet earn only 8% of the revenues. For minority women business owners the gap is even greater — they own half of these businesses yet earn only 2% of the revenues. Increasing business ownership, particularly among communities of color, could be one of the clearest ways to increase wealth and in turn improve health and wealth outcomes.
Closing this revenue gap is critically important. Without wealth, women have far less security and stability and, as a result, they have far less influence and power. This matters to all of us because the benefits of women with influence are substantial and enduring. When women have greater influence and power, the decisions they shape or make tend to be more inclusive, more oriented toward triple-bottom lines (financial, social, environmental), and more balanced between short-term and long-term objectives. Public policy, business practice, and social well-being all benefit significantly from women’s leadership.
We’ve seen this most recently in ways that women-led countries responded to the pandemic versus countries led by men. One study released earlier this Summer (June 2020) concluded that women leaders communicated more clearly and made lock-down decisions more quickly and more completely than men did — and suggested that it was not a coincidence that male-led countries like the US, Italy, Brazil, and the UK recorded far higher death tolls than female-led countries like Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Finland.
The need is clear and urgent:
We need more women with wealth because wealth strengthens the influence of women.
We’re out to close this wealth gap. We believe that the fastest and most-sustainable path to wealth — and influence — for women is business ownership, from community-based small businesses to scalable startups to medium-sized enterprises and more.
We need energized women growing businesses that support a more diverse workforce. We need inspired women creating innovation with insights that come from a woman’s unique point of view. We need influential women shaping business and government policies that impact every aspect of society.
In short, we need more women owning, leading and growing businesses now! And we need them to pave the path to a sustainable future.
We believe the best way to increase the number of women business owners — and help ensure their success — is to harness the combined power of supply chains, social responsibility, and network momentum. The concept is simple and powerful: we are creating a catalytic marketplace where women-led businesses connect with organizations that want to do business with women. And, we’re creating a collaborative ecosystem focused on women’s wealth by providing a wealth of opportunity, learning and support that is often hard for women entrepreneurs to access and activate.
We’ve brought together two impassioned and synergistic organizations to build this marketplace and ecosystem.
- Cintrifuse is an internationally recognized startup catalyst whose Mission is to help ensure Greater Cincinnati’s economic vitality by accelerating the growth of a tech-based innovation economy. They are focused, in particular, on attracting and supporting women- and minority-led ventures. Their stated vision is to establish Cincinnati as the most female-founder-friendly city in the nation.
- 17 Ways is a market network that helps values-driven businesses find each other and do business together to maximize their impact on the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Their mission is to help like-minded, certified, values-based, SDG-impact businesses to connect. Co-founders Anne Chambers and Kristann Orton are business owners themselves who created the concept for 17 Ways as part of the Cintrifuse startup pipeline.
Together, we’ve developed a highly scalable model for how communities throughout the U.S. can create more women with wealth, power and influence — and, as a result, strengthen their economic and cultural vitality, create more-diverse workforces, and set the course to a stronger, more-vibrant future. Our vision is driven by the needs of now and is inspired by the potential of tomorrow — five years from now, a decade from now, and for generations to come. We’re out to make a difference that matters — and lasts.
The Concept — A Perfect Trifecta
Our model is based on the power of three interdependent forces: supply chains, social responsibility, and network momentum. When leveraged in a highly catalytic way, these forces can be drivers of exponential change.
Supply Chains are the fundamental drivers of our economy. They connect production and consumption, lower costs, accelerate service, and have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. They are often the lifeline for small and startup businesses — and, most important, they are the single greatest, untapped source of wealth for women business owners that exists in our economy.
Social Responsibility is now an essential part of corporate governance. Consumers, investors, government regulators, and others expect companies to operate in socially responsible ways and to directly address issues such as gender and racial equality, environmental sustainability, and human rights.
Network Momentum is the dynamic that is driving today’s tech-based economy. Business models and entire industries are being created based on the scalable power of digitally-enabled networks.
When you bring these three forces together, you create conditions for transformative change. Diverse, resilient supply chains … driven by socially responsible companies … and powered by network dynamics … are unstoppable once they come together.
This unstoppable force — this forward momentum — is what we’re creating for women who own businesses:
- Our marketplace is where women business owners meet companies that want to do business with women.
- Our ecosystem is where the power of networks drives the success of women.
- And our movement is the combined energy of everyone who believes we need women with wealth, influence and power if we’re to be everything our society has the potential to be.
No other initiative we’ve seen brings these catalytic forces together in the way that we are. We’re confident we’re building a capability here in Cincinnati that will create more women with wealth in communities across the nation.
Our Marketplace
The foundation of our program is the 17 Ways Market Network. It’s designed to connect businesses eager to support one or more of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More than 250 businesses have joined since our beta site went live in April 2020 and we are actively recruiting others on a daily basis. Our network members are buyers and sellers who choose which of the SDGs align with their mission. Buyers post a need for products or services across a dozen categories or third-party certifications, find suppliers who are a perfect match, and establish partnerships that can become long-term relationships.
We’re using this platform to power our marketplace for women and women-of-color who own businesses. We bring large corporations that have made specific commitments to buy from women-led companies, either through their support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #5 (Gender Equality) or, for example, through their membership in inclusive organizations such as The Business Roundtable, where 181 CEOs signed their commitment to purpose and The Billion-Dollar Roundtable, which recognizes and celebrates corporations that spend at least $1 billion with minority and woman-owned suppliers every year. We track and report the impact down the supply chain so that a Tier 1 supplier who buys from Tier 2 contributes to each company’s gender equality goals. We are also creating a scorecard to empower purpose-driven purchasing by digital natives.
When we bring our growing network of women-owned businesses to the attention of multi-billion-dollar companies — and make it incredibly easy for them to connect and collaborate — we open new doors for growth and good.
Our Ecosystem
Our marketplace is the enabling platform for our work, but it is just one component of our vision. We are also building a community blueprint for an ecosystem of women business owners that provides access to services, support and learning that will help them thrive.
The centerpiece of our community is the Impact Studio at Union Hall for Women Entrepreneurs. Union Hall is the historic home of Cintrifuse, a 38,000 square-foot co-working space in the heart of Cincinnati’s thriving Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. The Impact Studio is being established as a national learning lab for women-owned businesses to work with large enterprises, solving big issues. With support from Cintrifuse’s startup catalyst team, along with Greater Cincinnati’s very robust startup ecosystem, we’re providing in-person and virtual workshops that connect women business owners with enterprise business leaders, hosting design sprints to discover new-business and innovation ideas, providing access to experienced mentors from both corporate and startup businesses, and facilitating introductions for women entrepreneurs to venture capital and enterprise investors. (The Cintrifuse Syndicate Fund, which currently has $115 million under management, gives us extensive access to many of the world leading VCs.)
We’re excited by these offerings. Our Impact Studio is a space, a service, and a source of community. As we bring women business owners together, whether in person or online, we help them and they help one another. It’s energizing work! It provides a framework that can be replicated in communities across the US.
Our Movement
This combination of supply chains, social responsibility and network momentum has potential to grow into a movement we call #ErgoWeRise — potential that we are actively cultivating. We want to engage women who are beginning their careers, exploring mid-career changes, and approaching the end of one career with passion for beginning another — and then inspire them to build their own businesses and grow their own wealth, influence and power. We want to help them focus on what they own as well as what they earn.
To catalyze this movement, we are working with startup organizations like Cintrifuse throughout the country. We’re encouraging them to create similar initiatives, to leverage our 17 Ways market network to create their own Impact Ecosystems for Women Entrepreneurs, and to become part of a national network. Cintrifuse has strong relationships with startup catalysts across the Midwest and we are sharing our thinking and tools, real-time progress, and key learning — transparently and enthusiastically.
We’re also using our voice — and the voices of our partners — to make the case for why women with influence matter to our economy and our society. We’re demonstrating why women are very often more effective and inclusive leaders than men (even according to men!), and why the barriers they encounter often enable them to build and run more-successful businesses. There has never been a more potent moment to deliver this message with clarity and confidence.
Our Path Forward
We’re leveraging existing programs and bold possibilities turbocharged by collaborative partnerships — and a deeply held conviction that the world needs women.
This is a conviction we share with our friend and colleague Betsy Bluestone, who is a venture and talent scout for P&G Ventures and the kind of corporate leader that we want to connect with women entrepreneurs. She searches for female founders — and says it’s not always easy to find them — because “Women who start, run and grow businesses bring unique insights that come from simply being a woman. They focus on different problems than men tend to focus on. They see different ways to solve those problems. And they generally build and lead teams with different and more-inclusive instincts. As a result, the more women who are starting up new businesses, the more the world benefits.”
We couldn’t agree more — and we have a strong foundation to build on. There are nearly 12 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. today, employing more than nine million people and generating almost $2 trillion in revenues. Nearly half of these firms are owned by women of color. We need to do everything we can to help them succeed even more — and to inspire more of them to succeed.
We look forward to looking back a decade from now and celebrating the unleashed potential of a new generation of women entrepreneurs and business owners of all ages — with greater wealth, influence and power than any generation before them.
#ErgoWeRise is a collaborative pathway to a better world. We invite you to join us on our journey.
