If I build it, will they come?

The iconic line, “If you build it, he will come,” is from Field of Dreams, the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner. In this film, he is encouraged by the ghosts of baseball greats past to build a baseball diamond in his corn field. In spite of the fact that this means sacrificing all the income he could make from his corn crop — not to mention everyone thinking he’s lost his mind — he moves forward with construction. A few months later, he sees baseball players brought back to life and play a game while the entire town comes out to watch. The famous line above has been adapted for business: “If you build it, they will come”, is a litmus test, if you will, of the viability of your idea: will customers show up to buy what you have to offer?

I wondered about this a lot as I was building wiseHer, an expert marketplace providing on-demand mentorship and advice for women to accelerate their business or career. I had done all the research, went out and talked to people, did beta tests, and still I wondered… if I build it, will they come?

Starting any business can be challenging. But a marketplace where there are two sides — supply and demand, neither of which you are in direct control of — is probably one of the most challenging ones of all.

Why start?

I started wiseHer because of my own experience. Those who have heard me speak in person and on social media know the story: in 2007, I was working on Wall Street, and was weeks away from giving birth to my first child when the world turned upside down. The mortgage market melted down, and they closed our division; then, three weeks before giving birth to my son, my mom had a brain aneurysm that left her a paraplegic. I had to completely reinvent myself — and had to reassess — what was important in life, what I stood for, and what I would fight for. I called all my old brokers to ask how I could help them. I could do sales training, marketing, the works — and they all said they wanted their websites to rank in Google. I thought, how hard could that be?

As it happens, it’s pretty hard, considering at the time all I knew about Google was how to spell it, and use it to locate restaurants where my clients and I could meet.

I dove in head first, so new to it that one of my first questions was, “is a ‘keyword’ one word or two?”

But all the SEO experts out there wanted me to take their course or read their book. And while I am sure those were all valuable, I wanted to get moving NOW. So I searched and searched, and found someone great at it, and paid him for his time. We talked on the phone every day for two weeks, and then I got my first paying client. The cost was certainly more than a book or an online course, but it was well worth it. Just having that dedicated time to ask questions about what I was doing — and how I was doing it — was key. I went on from there to write nine books, speak all over the world, and launch a successful consultancy. All because I found someone to ASK.

Am I alone?

During that journey, I met so many women who were starting and building businesses. Every single one of them had the same issues: they worked solo, had no other employees, and were all struggling. In fact, back then there were ten million women-owned entities in the U.S. alone — and 90% of them were solopreneurs. 90%!

What’s worse is this: fast-forward 12 years and the stats aren’t any better. Yes, women are making strides; there are now almost 13 million women-owned businesses, but the numbers are still the same. 90% work solo, and 88% are under $100k in revenue. That’s not take home, by the way, that is before expenses. The fact is many women-owned businesses are not profitable.

This runs counter to so many news reports. Finally, the media is reporting good numbers: “Women are starting businesses at 5x the rate of men!” “Women-led teams outperform male teams,” and so on. While all true, women are still struggling and I know the real story because I’ve not only lived it, I have been working in, supporting, and networking with women who own their own businesses for over a decade.

The same is true for career pursuits. Women account for 47% of the U.S. workforce but only occupy 14% of the top posts. I lived this as well. Prior to going into business for myself, I worked in the corporate world — mostly in male-dominated sales industries — and even with top numbers it was very difficult to advance….. particularly after having children. I was on a job interview once and the CEO of the prospective company said to me, “If you’re looking for a job with mother’s hours, this isn’t it.” This is after I established that in my last role I closed more business than his entire company was worth!

What’s the deal?

When presented with those statistics I wanted to know why. Why is it that women are still struggling?

I started conducting surveys and collecting data — and dug deeper into reports by Goldman Sachs, EY, AMEX, SBA, and others — and found that there are four main challenges women face:

1. Access to qualified advisers: Women don’t typically have a deep bench of advisers they can tap into. There are online forums and mentor programs, of course, but if you’ve ever tried to get a real, actionable answer from a Facebook group you know what I mean. Mentor programs can be great but don’t often offer the practical, tactical “show me how” advice people need. After my first time reinventing myself, I decided that I never again wanted to be in a position with no one to ask, so I set about developing a huge network. I now have more than 100,000 people on my email list, and tens of thousands of connections and followers. The vast majority of women, however, do not have a large network to tap into.
2. Confidence Gap: Either a real or perceived lack of knowledge can hold women back. There is a confidence gap that still exists. A woman looks at a job posting and thinks she needs 90% of the criteria. If the job description says 10 years experience and she has nine years 11 months and 29 days, she won’t apply. This is different for men, research suggests they apply if they only meet 40% of the job criteria.
3. Cognitive load: If you haven’t read my post, “A REAL day in the life of a CEO/Founder of a startup tech company who wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to work, hardly has time to eat, and has no free time,” you should check it out. Not only because I wrote it, but because you will see the viral storm it created. Almost 200,000 views, more than 10,000 comments AND the CEO of LinkedIn Jeff Weiner shared it! It certainly touched a nerve. The reason that happened, I believe, is that working/business women still bear the brunt of home and life responsibilities in addition to their workloads. Because of that, time is our most valuable resource — and we need answers now.
4. Funding: I’m sure you’ve heard the stat that women get less than 2% of the available investment capital. However, most of those 13 million women-owned businesses are NOT startups looking to IPO or grow to 100 locations: they are coaches, consultants, and professional service workers. These small businesses keep our economy strong, yet banks avoid investing in them. For career professionals, many companies offer only a select few women career development, and may not pay for courses or education outside their day-to-day duties.

Solving for XX

In the past, how these challenges have mainly been addressed for women is via the creation of women-focused networking communities. A quick Google search yielded over 150,000 listings of women’s networking communities, and I’m sure if I spent more time searching I could find more. Yes, it is true that women love to network (I am a member of several groups), but if you apply the stats above to a meetup, only one of every nine women in that room has employees and earns over $100,000. If you want to grow, you have to seek out those who are where you want to be, not where you are now. The fact is, it is simply not possible to sustain a solo business and have the life you say you want. You need processes and people in place that will help you to scale if you want to have the time you say you want for your life and family. In terms of career, the same issues exist. We need direct help at times with specific challenges if we are going to rise higher.

That is why we built wiseHer: to help women gain access to experts who can give them practical, tactical business advice on THEIR time, when THEY need it. One of my biggest motivations to building wiseHer was that I never wanted any other woman to go through the pain of reinvention like I did — alone. I wanted to make sure everyone had access to the same deep bench of advisers that I built for myself.

Our experts offer a safe place, a sounding board for ideas which can help with confidence. We also set aside a portion of our proceeds to offer grants for women in business and corporate education — because sometimes, you don’t need a million dollars, you just need a few hundred or thousand to get you moving forward faster. That is what wiseHer is all about: acceleration, forward momentum.

We also made a conscious choice not to start a networking group, but to instead partner with groups around the world to complement their services. We realize that each networking group has its own personality and fellowship. wiseHer is the icing on that cake. We have successfully partnered with almost a dozen groups and counting!

Drumroll please… We built it. They came.

In mid-2019, we were voted one of the top 100 Global Startups of the Year, and were invited to Memphis to compete. Our wiseHer platform was still in beta, but as a team we decided to launch it as we wanted the site to be live when we met with the judges. We did not do a high-dollar ad spend launch (not that we could have afforded it anyway), but we were fortunate enough to be covered in many local and online publications and posted those on social media. I was nervous, though, even after building and nurturing my army of social followers and networks. Would anyone come?

We decided to turn it on right before we went to compete. After three days of making the site live, I went off to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration. (the largest women-in-tech conference in the world). About 20 minutes before I went on stage, I received notification saying that someone had scheduled a call using the platform. WOO HOO!!! But wait, was it someone one of us knew? That wouldn’t make it a real first customer… so I texted and emailed and YEAH! It was a complete stranger — someone from across the country. We saw that the call was scheduled for the next day, and held our breath…and then the review was posted.

I can’t even describe the feeling I had when I read that review. Tears filled my eyes, YES! We did it, what we offered helped someone go forward, faster. When we later learned that the customer also hired the expert to do some additional work for her, it was an even bigger win because one of the things we are trying to do with wiseHer is help our experts get visibility and grow their businesses as well. Better still, the same customer scheduled a call with a different expert. Our first repeat customer!

Since that time we have had more new customers, customers returning for help from other experts, and experts acquiring new clients through their presence on wiseHer. We’ve also closed our first enterprise and education clients.

The journey is far from perfect — and it is certainly far from over — but we are raising money and forming partnerships with the State Department and other global organizations to take wiseHer around the world.

Funding opportunities for women are still scarce and we are pushing forward by the grace of friends and strangers who have stepped up to help us build and grow. We won’t let the hard stop us, we won’t give up. For I now know for sure that if you really believe, as I do in my bones, that what we are building is the field for my — and other women’s dreams — you WILL build it and they WILL come.