Entrepreneurs with new product brands need Ann’s retail expertise, resources, and strategies that accelerate growth. She has a proven record of succeeding across many categories, including launches of kid’s snacks, home essentials, pet products, coffee, ethnic products, and beverages.

Here are some of the questions Ann answers:

• What is needed to get your finished product ready for Big-Box Retailers?
• Why not approach Big-Box Retailers yourself?
• When is a good time to hire a retail specialist?

• Do you have your channel strategy worked out?
• What is the priority of your brand from a channel perspective?
• What is the timeline to get new products on retail shelves?

• What elements do you need to organize?
• Online operates differently; in what ways and what do you need to consider?
• What is involved before and after getting our products on store shelves?

I ask Ann about closing the door on corporate employment and planting her feet solidly in business ownership. It is an essential step in succeeding with a new venture after leaving a fulfilling legacy in corporate America. Owning each part of how you redesign your future is exercising bravery. Listen to her answer. DOWNLOAD

A Note About The First-Year Pandemic Toll on Small Business

Ann Anderson is not alone in starting a new business during these unpredictable times. In 2020, the Census Bureau cited “an explosion in new business applications, reaching nearly 4.5 million by year’s end—a 24.3 percent increase from 2019 and 51.0 percent higher than the 2010-19 average.” Before 2019 new business applications hovered around 2.5 million.

In July of this year, the Federal Reserve released a report on the number of small business closures during the first year of the Pandemic to be below 200,000. Historically normal levels of annual closures are around 130,000. The 200,000 closure number is about one-quarter to one-third above routine establishment exits. If you compare the historical percentages of new businesses formed and closed in 2020, you can see we gained more new businesses than those closed. That’s the good news. If we further analyzed the numbers to look at the industries hardest hit in 2020, it would definitely be restaurants and storefront retailers, and they are still recovering if they haven’t closed.

Entrepreneurial activity fuels our economy promoting innovation and evolution, critical in helping us quickly adapt to local and global changes. I am hopeful about our economic future, even with the Delta variant moving through our communities. From the above statistics and talking with experienced and new business owners, we know how to keep people safe while doing business: taking the vaccine, wearing masks in public inside spaces, physical distancing, and hand washing.

The Work Ahead: What we need to do now is focus on women and minorities. Women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic globally, as tracked by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). GEM has over 22 years of data tracking entrepreneurial activities across geographies.

Wendy Teleki of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi)  believes in women as change agents, job creators, and drivers of economic growth. Her team is sponsoring, along with others, GEM’s 2020/21 special report on women’s entrepreneurial activity. They will find out the effect of the pandemic and learn more of what entrepreneurial women need going forward.

What Wendy knows right now is “COVID-19 has exacerbated existing barriers that have long impeded women entrepreneurs, such as limited access to finance markets, networks, and policy and legal constraints.” There is a wide global gender gap in starting and growing businesses that We-Fi, founded in 2017, is working to bridge.

Here are three overarching themes in the gender gap and what we can do about them:

1. Strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems by reviewing government regulatory constraints and gender biases impeding women’s ability to run their businesses is number one. This also means releasing unsupportive cultural and policy environments. Women need mentors and networks, digital skill-building and online marketing strategies, leadership training in resiliency, and entrepreneurship education on the nonregulatory side.

2. Market access by linking buyers and suppliers and pivoting their businesses through online marketing, distribution skills, and digital finance. Helping women in the consumer-facing sectors where they are concentrated and have been hardest hit; 90% reported a loss in revenue. Providing financial capital opportunities to grow differently would help.

3. Getting more support at home during the pandemic. We-Fi completed a survey of small business owners revealing that 23 percent of women entrepreneurs spent six hours or more per day on domestic responsibilities.

What can you do right now to bridge the gender gap?

If you are running a women-led or minority-owned business, yeah! Keep going. Your dreams and aspirations are as important as your counterparts. Identify your business needs and determine where you need help. Use the list above to start. Assert self-leadership, ask for the help you need. Connect with me for resources and educational opportunities.

If you are not a woman or minority-owned business and financially doing well, you can review the themes above and see where you could help. Every effort counts.

• Buy from a woman-owned business.
• Financially invest in women entrepreneurs. Using WeMentor as an example.  I know women who would like one-on-one strategy sessions with me but can only afford three sessions and need three to five sessions ($895 or $1,295) to really make a difference. Or, invest in one or more participants to join a WeMentor LAB (annual tuition is $3,300). This would provide the network, resiliency training, business owner competency skill-building, and accountability.
• Review household tasks. Revisit family goals. Redistribute the work if there is an imbalance.
• Volunteer to be a mentor at WeMentor, Women Venture, MN Cup elevator pitch competition, or SCORE – service corp of retired executives through the small business development center (there is one in every state in the U.S.).
• Online Leadership Training
• Pick an idea or two from the above list and get started. Or come up with other ideas. See if you can do something during August to bridge the gender gap and be part of the solution.