Thursday Thought: Risk and Reward Women

Thursday Thought, Inspiration, Motivation for Women Entrepreneurs, Females, Women in Sports

“I’ve always wanted to try it,” an excited woman wrote to me in an email. She went on, “I’m truly looking forward to joining you.”

These were similar statements I heard almost 3-decades ago when I began planning and hosting networking events for women entrepreneurs in Central New York. The budding career of home-based-business and entrepreneurship was just beginning in the mid-1990s as the economy stretched its reaches inside abodes when personal computers were being introduced. I was one of those career-minded women, with two sons under the age of three, leaving a corporate job to be a working mother of two. I didn’t want to leave a career I loved and I didn’t want someone else raising my sons, so entrepreneurship was my choice.

Leaving the four walls of a corporate office, with an assistant outside the door and a boss to guide my workload, was different than sitting in a converted den turned office space with a glass door between my new office and the living room where my sons would watch television if I received a business call so clients didn’t know I was working from home if they heard them talk.  It was slightly taboo to work from home in 1995, unlike 2022 post-pandemic, when home offices are all the rage.

I also learned I needed to communicate and share business ups and downs with other women working from home, so I searched out the only women’s business group there was at the time, started in 1991, in Syracuse. It was there that I learned from other women and didn’t feel alone in my entrepreneurial journey. It was there that I felt normal being a risk-taking business woman. Taking over leadership of the group one year after meeting them, I learned a new mission in my life was directing, inviting, and partaking in events with other female entrepreneurs  which I continued for nine years until I launched my second company to do exactly that but statewide.

As I look to retire my second company at the end of 2023, my attention has turned to sports and inviting women to try every different sport there is to try once in a lifetime. The statement from the woman above is someone joining me on a skeet shooting teaching session Sunday. Although my focus is changing slightly from women in business, to women in business who want to try sports, my heart mission remains the same, to bring women together to try new things, bond and inspire each other which ultimately leads the way to developing and stretching beyond female expectations in a male-dominated area.

If we can lead our own companies, we can lead our lives into different realms filled with risk and reward too.