Leadership | thesofiamagazine

Top 10 Recommendations for Women Business Owners

by admin | Oct 28, 2021 | Asheville, Business, Leadership, Management, Women

By Susan Clark Muntean

As a consultant, mentor, and advisor to entrepreneurs over the past two decades, I have identified patterns, principles, and paths for entrepreneurs to follow. My passion is to support women as entrepreneurs and my expertise is in how to connect women with the resources they need to succeed. These are my top ten pieces of advice and words of wisdom to support you on your journey. You’ve got this!

Seek Mentorship
Seek out inspirational role models and establish a mentoring relationship with them. Establish yourself with mentors who will be honest with you and who will respect you. Seek well-connected members of your community to advocate on your behalf and who will offer to connect you with important stakeholders. Don’t forget to seek mentors of the opposite sex as well.

Find Your Tribe
Find a supportive community that will nurture your soul, feed your ambitions, sell your expertise and creative genius, and help you to market yourself and your business. Leverage both formal and informal networks to spread the word about you and your business. Connect and support others and pay it forward.

Secure Sensible Funding
Seek low interest loans, SBA loan guarantees, forgivable and/or flexible low interest loans, and government or non-profit sources of funds for launching and growing your business. In addition, consider equity investment, especially among family and friends as well as crowdfunding campaigns. Avoid high interest credit card debt at all costs.

Listen to Your Customers
Design your product or service around the needs and wants of your target market. Solicit frequent and honest feedback. Get a minimally viable product into their hands early on and use the beta version of what you offer to improve what you produce. The customer is queen and should be an integral part of the development of your business model, product lines, service delivery and customer relationship management strategies.

Use Weak Ties
Research shows that women tend to rely on close connections, family members and close friends when networking to generate new business and when seeking financing, partnerships, and support while men tend to use distant connections and engage in transactional networking using so-called “weak ties”. In the business world weak ties—those expansive loose connections of friends of friends who know people—are critical to scaling your business and selling more products and services. Get on LinkedIn and connect with second and third level weak ties.

Find Support Organizations
Entrepreneurship is a significant driver of economic development and local, regional, state, and federal governments allocate taxpayer dollars to supporting inclusive entrepreneurship as a means to economic growth. There are so many free and low-cost resources to take advantage of as an emerging entrepreneur or as an established business owner. Seek out the assistance of small business centers, women’s business centers and networking groups, business incubators, accelerator programs, community colleges that offer instructional programming for entrepreneurs, and shared co-working spaces that support entrepreneurs.

Manage Bias
Gender bias is a well-documented all-to-common experience that women face, especially when seeking equity financing and the support of resources critical for success. Don’t gaslight yourself if you experience very subtle forms of discrimination or exclusion or if the services you are receiving feel in any way disrespectful. Manage systemic bias by preparing responses to it in advance. You are not alone on your journey, and you are inherently powerful, capable, intelligent, and worthy of support and the respect you deserve. Don’t forget it!

Differentiate Yourself
Small business owners need to compete on specialization, uniqueness, customization, and delightful experiences that customers rave about relative to existing offerings. How are you better than the competition? Why are you special? Communicate how you are above and beyond the rest with crystal clarity. Own and exude your unique, amazing brand and be consistently clear in communicating that to your target market.

Expand Your Entrepreneurial Mindset
Work on your capacities to identify opportunities, take calculated risks, empathize with your customers, and execute on your ideas. Successful entrepreneurs have a future focus, are optimistic, persistent, and self-confident. Activate your passion and apply your ambition towards continuous self-improvement. Dedicate time to developing your entrepreneurial mindset daily.

Orient Yourself Towards the Future
Too many small business owners are trapped in the cycle of putting out fires and reacting to the immediate, daily, urgent needs of the business. Take time and space away from the daily grind to put your feelers out to the external environment. What is the competition doing? What are shifts in the regulatory environment? How are customer tastes changing? What are groundbreaking emergent technologies and how will they impact your business model? Today’s marketplace requires constant innovation and that requires understanding changes impacting your business model as well as creating future opportunities. By orienting yourself towards the future, you position yourself to take advantage of emerging opportunities that can secure your success over the long haul.

Susan Clark Muntean is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. In addition to being an author of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Gender Perspective published by Cambridge University Press, she serves as an advisor, mentor, board member and advocate supporting women entrepreneurs in Western North Carolina.

It’s About the Journey, Travel Well…

by Laurie Richardone | Oct 2, 2020 | Asheville, Leadership, Women, Women in Business

An important question to ask yourself is Why? It is what will have sustainability, and keep you moving forward. As an entrepreneur who created three successful businesses in a three decade span, the main ingredients have been passion, intention and a bit of drive. My first business was an intimate hair salon in Santa Fe. I opened it with five clients. I remember someone saying she either has money or she has nerve. Neither was the case. I knew it would be successful. I saw the result in my heart and mind, although it had not yet come into fruition.

“Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action – Just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come on its own accord”. Eckhart Tolle

I admit it takes some courage to do something like that. When I look at my endeavor’s the common thread was a passion for creating beauty of all kinds, and sharing it with others. What is it for you? If there is doubt, know it is a natural emotion in the creation of something unknown.

As an entrepreneur there will be Sundays still in your jammies working on a project. For me it never feels like work. I feel joy and a heartfelt connection. it will take time, wand some sacrifice, but it is a journey worth taking.

What I learned along the way…

• Follow your first instinct

• Stay open, flexible, pay attention to opportunities.

• Know your strengths and limitations, learn how to delegate.

• Follow the 95% rule, especially for all the perfectionists. When a project is 95% move on. The energy spent for that last 5% is exorbitant, and unnecessary.

I wish all you courageous women success and magic…

For Cooking
Classes in Asheville, Visit:
LaurieRichardone.com

Books that Inspire

by Cheri Torres | Feb 28, 2020 | Asheville, Collaborative Learning, Conversation, Leadership, Women

By Cheri Torres

I am inspired by two books I recently read: Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng, and Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Each of these wonderful storytellers pave the way for meaningful conversation about a critical topic. What delights me is the way they frame the conversations. They invite us to see the complexity of reality and ask us to recognize how detrimental it is to see things from narrow, objective, non-relational perspectives. What each of these books have in common is their invitation to see the world through the eyes of the artist and poet. To see reality from a more holistic perspective and to embrace multiple ways of knowing the world.

Celeste Ng’s story brings the reader into the complex world of privilege and discrimination in ways that allow us to see how systems of privilege stifle authenticity and genuine meaningful living at all levels. Exposed to each character’s hopes, perspectives, and pain, we have the opportunity to see how polarity and positioning around important decisions gives way to the system, leaving little room for authentic choice. The artist’s view, however, invites us to see beneath a character’s thoughts and emotions, to see the spiritual crisis the current system generates for everyone in it. She gives us a window into a world where people are seen, where genuine relationships might allow us to connect, deepen understanding, and find a way forward that defined by ‘us’ instead of the system.

How might we foster conversations about racial justice that allow us to make room to hear one another’s stories, to bear witness to one another’s struggle to be human, and to share a commitment to creating a world that works for everyone. The two practices from Conversations Worth Having support such conversations: create a positive frame for the conversation and ask generative questions. For example, positive frames and generative questions for conversations around equity and racial justice might be:

• Frame: Connecting through Our Stories

• Tell me about a time of struggle in your life and how you dealt/deal with it. What do you most value about yourself and others in your story?

• How does our current system of inequity negatively impact you?

• How is our current system impacting you and your ability to thrive?

• How do your strengths and privileges show up in your life? How might they help us move toward an equitable system?

• Frame: Creating Share Images of the Future

• What three wishes do you have for the future?

• What would genuine equity in our schools look like?

• Imagine community decision making was equitable. What would be different? How would we know it was equitable and just?

• Frame: Developing Pathways Toward Equity

• What steps might be taken to ensure equity?

• What three things can we do to get started?

• How can we design our schools and train our teachers to ensure equity?

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Kimmerer invites us out of the polarization around climate change by showing us a more whole way of seeing the world. Emphasizing relationships, she encourages us to embrace multiple ways of knowing in order to inform a broader perspective of the world around us. Instead of either/or, black and white thinking, we are encouraged to recognize the world as both object and subject, both material and metaphysical. Instead of polarity, the invitation is to come into relationship with nature, to see our connection and interdependence so that we can have conversations at a level that just might allow us to find ways forward.

Again, the two practices from Conversations Worth Having are of value. Sharing our stories helps us connect to one another, opening the door for us to discover our commonalities around important topics. Framing further conversation to support possibilities for the future creates a bridge for us to move forward together. For example:

Frame 1: Our Common Connections to Nature

• Tell me about a time in your life when you felt most connected to nature. What did you value about yourself? What did you value about nature?

• How does nature and our environment impact you, your family, and our community?

• What is your relationship with nature and the environment?

Frame 2: A Shared Vision for Our Relationship with the Environment

• Imagine we had a relationship with nature and our environment that was mutually beneficial.
What might that look like?

• If we redesigned our neighborhoods and communities to embrace nature and nurture flourishing, what would they look like?

• Imagine you have an intimate and positive relationship with all of nature. What would that mean for you? How would you benefit? How would nature benefit?

Frame 3: Designing for Wholeness

• What can we do now to create neighborhoods and communities that embrace nature and nurture flourishing?

• What three things can each of us do to feel connected to nature each day?

• What action might the city take to ensure our environment thrives so that we can thrive? What role can we play in making that possible?

Whether you are reading books that inspire conversations about vital topics or not, such conversations are essential to our future. I invite you to join me in shifting those conversations away from the personal—us against them, me vs. you, one right way, mine—and toward dialogue that helps us find common ground, allows us to envision futures that work well for the whole, and creates possibilities for collaborative action. I actually want to do more than invite you to join me, I implore you to do so. The lives of our children and our children’s children quite literally depend upon it.

Cheri Torres is an author and speaker cheritorres.com. You can download a free Conversation Toolkit and learn more sparking great conversations at ConversationsWorthHaving.today.

Jennifer Bullman Jones–Bullman Heating & Air, Inc.–One Big Family!

by Sandi Tomlin-Sutker | Dec 3, 2019 | Asheville, Leadership, Women

Since growing up in her parents’ business and living her youth in Asheville, Jennifer didn’t want or expect to move back here after college. But life, as it often does, arranged things in a different way.

Her parents started Bullman Heating & Air in 1993; Dad worked at it full time, and Mom worked a regular job during the day and helped him at night. They started out in a tiny trailer with one truck. When Jennifer was only 12 years old, she began working in the business every day after school; her main job was typing—on an actual typewriter—job proposals her dad created. She also answered phones and made appointments. A focus on work and success was something she saw in her parents and something she emulated herself from that early age.

In 1999 she graduated from North Buncombe High School and went off to college at UNC-Charlotte. “Back then Asheville wasn’t like it is now (I love it now) and it was not where I thought I’d get married and raise my family.” But in her first year in Charlotte, she met her future husband, Chris Jones, a first-round draft pick right out of high school who played for the Giants in the minor leagues. “I was one of those who said I wasn’t getting married till I was 30 . . . I think my dad even had me sign a contract about that! Two months after we met, Chris proposed, and we married a year later.”

They traveled together for a couple of years after college, living in several places—like Louisiana, Maryland—every few months until in 2003 he was traded to the Rockies which brought him to Asheville to play for the Tourists. Back home, Jennifer thought it was great to be near her family again. It had been hard for her to get a job since they moved about every six months, so she went back to work for her family business, which included her brother, Branson. At the end of that baseball season, she was pregnant and decided not to go back to Charlotte where they usually spent the off season. Her husband left for spring training, but she stayed behind in Asheville, not wanting to travel while pregnant. Then he decided to retire right before their first daughter, Mckenzie, was born; he got a job locally while she continued to work for Bullman, where she’s been ever since.

During that time a lot of changes happened: her parents got divorced and her mom left the business. Jennifer moved into the role of office manager with a lot more on her plate, including a second daughter, Madelyn. Dad was still in the role of owner/president and her brother was in sales. But in 2012 their dad decided to retire and hand the business over to his daughter and son. From then until about two months ago, Jennifer was Vice President and Branson was President. “Then he decided to go a different route and pursue his music career. I am now owner/president and it’s been great. My biggest worry was that the employees might not like a woman boss. I was a woman running a heating and air business within the construction industry. I had been in a management role but not a full owner.”

Partly because she has an “open door” policy with her 50 employees and partly because many of them had seen her grow up and grow with the business: “Everyone has been very receptive of me running things. They feel they can come in and talk with me about their lives. A lot of people who are managers now have been with the business for 20-25 years. We also have customers who have been with us for years and also watched me grow up. We are one big family!”

And speaking of family, Jennifer and her husband have raised two daughters, now 15 and 12 who have also grown up seeing a successful mom and dad. “I want them to be proud of me. I tell them: You make your own money, make your own way. Don’t marry a doctor, BE a doctor!”

When each of them was born Jennifer didn’t take them to daycare right away. “They came to work with me every day, and my 15-year-old now comes in after school when she is available to help out. When our 12-year-old needs money, I tell her to come to work and earn some.”

Bringing babies to work, especially in a male-dominated business, might seem difficult to carry off. But, “Employees were happy to see the girls. We had a huge office with a playpen. My service manager at the time actually helped me change diapers! I would sometimes put the babies in file cabinets while I was filing. I have videos and photos of them running around the office; everyone loved it.” And
that contributed even more to the “One Big Family” feeling.

And surely that has contributed to Jennifer’s full life: she’s been married 18 years this coming January; her girls are active in sports: travel volleyball and they play for Biltmore Volleyball Academy. Her oldest also plays softball and they both are straight A students. “We normally go to a game or practice after work. We’re very proud of them. Our oldest, now a sophomore, is preparing to go to Chapel Hill for college when the time comes. She’s always thinking about building her college credits.”

Meanwhile Bullman Heating & Air continues to build and maintain its strong reputation for quality and service. “We’re very picky in our installation. Look at our duct work and it looks like art. I’ll only hire people who do it our way: right the first time. There are lots of ways to pass code, but that’s not our way, the Bullman way. It’s got to be perfect. My dad taught us that.”

Meanwhile, they have been voted best in WNC for the last six years. They have three departments: new construction, change outs, and service. They cover all of WNC and are also licensed in TN and SC. Jennifer says that while they could grow more, add more employees, she wants to keep the business about the size it is now to maintain that family feeling.

“My dad was hard on me growing up; he pushed me and told me, one day you’re going to take over the business and I want you to be able to do it well. I had no plans to be here, but now I can’t imagine life anywhere else.”

Jennifer Bullman Jones
[email protected]
Bullman Heating & Air, Inc.
bullmanheating.com
828-658-2468