By Dr. Stacie N. C. Grant, Chair, WIBO Board of Directors
October is Women’s Small Business Month, and this year it lands in a special season for WIBO. In 1966, our founders opened a classroom in Harlem with a simple belief: ownership should not depend on who you know or what you inherited. Sixty years later, that classroom has trained more than 18,000 entrepreneurs, and many of its strongest businesses were started by women.
Women rarely lack the idea, the work ethic, or the community. What holds many women founders back is something quieter: being told, in a hundred small ways, that someone else handles the financial side of business. The banker, the accountant, the partner. That message costs us more than any market downturn.
Here is what six decades of WIBO graduates have taught me.
1. Your price is a business decision, not a personal one
Too many women price their work by asking what feels polite. In WIBO Grow, we teach owners to price by asking what the business needs to survive and grow: costs, margin, and the cash cushion to get through a slow month. When the number comes from the math, you stop apologizing for it.
2. Cash flow is confidence
The owner who can read her cash flow projection walks into a lender’s office differently. She knows what she needs, when she needs it, and how she will pay it back. That knowledge changes the conversation, and often the answer.
3. Leadership starts with the books
Leadership is not only vision. It is knowing your numbers well enough to make hard calls early, before a small problem becomes a closed door. The women I admire most in business are not the loudest in the room. They never have to guess.
4. You do not have to build alone
WIBO’s model has always been peer learning. Owners sit beside other owners, solve problems out loud, and hold one another accountable. For women who have been made to feel like the only one in the room, that circle is often the turning point.
As WIBO marks its 60th year, we will celebrate at our Anniversary Gala on Thursday, Nov. 19, at Metropolitan College of New York’s Bronx Campus, alongside the alumni whose businesses prove what this classroom can do. Every one of them started with a decision to learn.
If you are a woman thinking about starting your own business, start there too. Join our free session, Decide: A Business of Your Own, on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7 PM online, and find out whether ownership is right for you. Then let us help you build it.
Dr. Stacie N. C. Grant is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Workshop in Business Opportunities (WIBO).