Many small business owners dream of winning a major contract with a large firm to take their companies to the next level.
Laying the groundwork to make that happen is one of the key missions of the Greater Women’s Business Council. There, Roz Lewis has had a front-row seat to the development of women-owned businesses in the Southeast for more than 25 years.
As president and CEO of the Greater Women’s Business Council since 2000, Lewis helps firms in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina get certified as Women’s Business Enterprises — which can help get them in front of major corporations seeking to do business with them.
One certified WBE is Bennett Family of Companies, a trucking firm based in McDonough that recently expanded into Florida and Texas. Another, Irresistible Pound Cakes, catered cakes for an event for the Super Bowl in Atlanta in 2019. There are more than 800 certified WBEs in Georgia.
And in recent months, GWBC’s nurturing of women-owned businesses has taken physical form.
Last year, the GWBC opened a coworking space in Midtown Atlanta called the WBE Collaborative.
It’s designed for women business leaders but is available to anyone who pays for use of the space or its conference rooms.
The location inside Bank of America Plaza, Atlanta’s tallest tower, offers a professional location for women entrepreneurs to meet with clients. It also hosts networking events such as Wednesday Wine Down gatherings, and Lewis aims to hold more webinars and networking events for women entrepreneurs to connect.
That can help meet the enterprising spirit of women who have a great idea and a dream to grow a business.
“A lot of young people don’t want to work for corporations. They want to be their own boss,” Lewis said.
An organization like GWBC helps them to get training in finance, operations, how to scale a business and understand newer challenges and opportunities like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
But initiatives for women- and minority-owned businesses face challenges amid a backlash to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, for instance, has said the SBA “will not allow discriminatory DEI programs to pick winners and losers at the expense of innovation, growth, and hardworking entrepreneurs.”
Lewis sat down with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to share why she thinks women’s business programs are still important and how WBEs are navigating the challenges they face. Here are some of the insights she shared:
On why it’s important to have women and men in leadership:
“You need both brains. … You want to make sure you have diversity of thought more than anything and that we tap into this intellectual capital and ways of solving problems and issues and challenges that most of the corporations have when they’re trying to bring their product or service to market.”
On the history of women’s business ownership rights:
“People think it’s been 100 years since we got rights. Well, no, it’s 1988 before (women) could actually sign for a business loan on our own.” (Before passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988, women could be required to have a male relative cosign on business loans.)
“It wasn’t that long ago that women gained rights to certain things in this country.”
On qualifying as a Women’s Business Enterprise:
“When you have a CEO that is standing making a speech and … saying they do $100 million with women-owned businesses, they better be who they say they are.”
Women’s business enterprises can have some male ownership, but “with our certification, you must (be) 51% owned, operated and controlled” by a woman.
On the WBE Collaborative:
“This place was created for women businesses who are home-based, to allow them to have a more professional space to be able to network in.
“Some of my women businesses are in male-dominated industries, and they will get certified or join us just so they could be around other women.
“And when they are ready for the exit strategy, they will look to identify other women that could possibly carry on, to take over the business. We’ll encourage that.”
On how WBEs are affected by the backlash against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs:
“Companies are supporting their market. … If that market is women businesses, they’re supporting it … At the end of the day, the stakeholders only care about one thing, the bottom line, and every company is looking at how they increase market share. And when you look at the demographics of the population, you follow the money.
“CEOs are very smart. They are looking at ways strategically to manage through this period of time and without losing, hopefully, their market share.”
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