The Women in Business program is especially tailored to address the issues, opportunities, and challenges faced by today’s female entrepreneur. Our goal is to facilitate the startup and growth of women-owned businesses in Louisiana, and to serve as a clearinghouse for education, training, mentoring, and outreach to potential and current female business owners.

Through focus groups, we learned that women often encounter a variety of challenges when they start and own a small business. For example:

• Women found that having no formal business background was a major problem when they decided to start a business of their own. This was universal — whether these women possessed a professional degree, a college or technical degree, or “just wanted to go into business for myself.”
• Women felt they had limited or non-existent access to financial institutions because of their gender.
• A lack of formal marketing and management skills limited women’s ability to market their ideas, business, and themselves to prospective customers, investors, and other business people. Additionally, delegation of responsibility to others within their business or in the family were areas of concern.
• Goal setting — and the knowledge of how to balance home, family, and owning and managing a business — gave some women a feeling of being out of control and “juggling” family and home issues.
• Home-based businesses were of interest to women, but they wanted to know how to implement a professional atmosphere in a home-based business setting.

In response to these issues, we offer the Women in Business program to entrepreneurial-spirited women in the Baton Rouge area. The program, which began in 2002 with tremendous success, continues on today.

For more information regarding this program, please contact Carol Carter.