Interview with Dean Patricia Greene, co-author of Clearing the Hurdles: Women Building High-Growth Businesses

In Clearing the Hurdles you identify seven specific, major hurdles faced by women entrepreneurs and offer solutions and strategies for overcoming them. Can you share one hurdle with us and one strategy you recommend?
One of the hurdles I find most useful to think about is that of having access to the networks of contacts that helps lead to the resources needed for business success (with success defined in all types of ways). In our book we describe these networks and relationships as key to gaining information, finding employees, and accessing financial capital. And this is just a short list of the types of resources possible. The hurdle to overcome is that sometimes our networks do not include the right contacts – those that match the woman entrepreneur’s resource needs. One of the strategies we recommend is to plan out your network and explicitly cultivate a wide range of contacts in multiple social networks. The idea is to reach beyond your usual personal connections and create bridges that link to your needs.

You state that there are stereotypical beliefs that many in the venture capital industry hold about women entrepreneurs. As women entrepreneurs network are there tactics they can use to counter these beliefs in order to gain access to investors?
Absolutely. One way is to increase your financial sophistication and be able to converse about multiple types of capital in a manner that sounds informed and knowledgeable. The tactic is to use one level of your network to learn about debt and equity means of funding businesses in order to apply your new expertise in a different network level – the providers of those types of capital. In addition, resource providers look for track records and the ability to lead and stay focused. Finding ways in which to showcase these types of assets greatly increases an entrepreneur’s attractiveness to those with the capital to invest.

In your book you have a chapter focused on building high-potential teams. Is there one step that is most important in forming these types of teams?
I’m not sure I’d say there is just one step – but one of the early steps to take is to do a careful consideration of what you need to get done in order to accomplish your entrepreneurial objectives. What are the skills needed from the people on your team. The next question would be to ask what you want the culture of your company to be – how do you want people to work together. You can have all the skills in the world but if the team can’t get along – you have another type of challenge.