While we amble through the Great Recession toward the eventual and gradual economic recovery, several new truisms appear to be emerging.
First, as I mentioned last month, value will become the watchword for doing business. If you’re not providing value for your products and services, you’re probably not going to be a survivor.
Second, if you failed to invest in technology or drive greater efficiencies throughout your organization during the downturn, you’ve probably lost any competitive advantages you might have had prior to September 2008.
Third, your work force is going to look very different than it has in the past. The severe blow to multiple business sectors and industries has left organizations with fewer employees tasked with higher productivity expectations. Even well after the recovery, don’t expect a return to pre-recession workloads and larger staffing levels. The days of looser financial controls are gone forever.
Finally, and most significantly, women-owned businesses are poised to become the economic job-creation engine of the future.
According to a study released earlier this year by The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute, women-owned businesses are expected to create between 5 million and 5.5 million new jobs in the U.S. within the next eight years.
That’s a whopping one-third of the 15.3 million new jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to be created by 2018.
This dramatic change in the makeup of the nation’s businesses is due to numerous factors, among them, higher college graduation rates by women than men, a faster growth rate of female-owned versus male-owned businesses and the predicted growth of occupations traditionally dominated by women.
Another factor is at play here, one that previously was a barrier and now may serve as a competitive advantage. Women-owned businesses are more often self-funded than their male-owned business counterparts. That makes them less reliant on bank financing at a time when small business lending seems tighter than ever.
The Guardian Institute isn’t the only group to notice this swiftly rising tide.
At its November 2009 Strategic Growth Forum, Ernst & Young LLP’s global vice chair of public policy, sustainability and stakeholder engagement, Beth Brooke, made the very same observation.
“The untapped potential for this economy and the global recession lies with women entrepreneurs,” Brooke said. “The power of diversity is driving economic growth.”