When Mitzi Smith Moore started in plumbing two decades ago, she never imagined she would one day own her own plumbing company.
Moore, who had a bachelor’s in finance and was months away from a master’s in middle childhood education, joined her father’s plumbing business in 1990 after a divorce made her the sole breadwinner for a newborn and a toddler.
“I needed money for diapers and formula,” she said. “It was supposed to be short-term until I could get back on my feet.”
Today, Moore, owner of Marietta-based Sundial Plumbing, is part of the nation’s growing community of women-owned businesses. She opened the business in 1999 with her father, whom she eventually bought out, after falling in love with the vocation.
Women owned 7.8 million businesses in 2007 and accounted for 28.7 percent of all businesses nationwide that year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Business Owners.
The bureau, which conducts the survey every five years and released on Tuesday the 2007 numbers, the newest figures, said the women-owned firms generated $1.2 trillion in receipts that year, about 3.9 percent of all business receipts.
Those numbers reflect a growth that exploded between 1997 and 2007 when the number of women-owned businesses jumped 44 percent, according to U.S. Commerce Department statistics. That was twice as fast as firms owned by men.
The Commerce Department said much of this growth was because women started businesses in industries that were experiencing employment growth, such as health care and education services. About 46 percent of all businesses operated by women in 2007 were in such fields as repair, maintenance, laundry services, health care and professional and technical services.
In Georgia, about 31 percent of businesses in 2007 were owned by women, the Census Bureau reported. That beat national numbers, where women owned at least a fifth of businesses in most states at that time. In metro Atlanta, that number was about 32 percent.
States with the largest number of women-owned businesses in 2007 were California, Texas and New York. The metro areas with the largest numbers were New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Despite the advancements, women business owners still lagged behind men, who owned a little more than 51 percent of the nation’s businesses.
Atlanta public relations company owner Melissa Libby said the number of women-owned businesses has grown exponentially since she launched her company in 1992 out of a two-bedroom apartment she shared with a roommate. Her mentors at the time were mostly men.
“I didn’t really know that many women business owners back then,” she said. “Now I know tons off the top of my head.”
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