I consider myself a successful business owner. I consider myself a successful woman business owner. Yesterday it was suggested to me that to be considered a successful woman owned business I need to have 18+ employees and make millions of dollars. I replied to that by saying that there was something wrong with the world.

I don’t measure my success by the bottom line. I believe in a social and work conscience and that my employees are my bottom line, not the client and not the client’s dollar. Does this make me a bad business woman? Does this make me a less successful business owner?

In a world of women fighting for their rights from voting to abortion, I find it kind of strange that women would define success in business so stringently and, pardon me for being blunt, so masculine. It seems to me if we look back at the road and history of business and the American Dream, we saw men working hard and women staying home and running the family and house. I get that as recent as the late 90’s, women business owners were less likely to be approved for a business loan or less likely to be considered serious, but that seems far from the case in 2005 and far from anything I have personally experienced. What shocks me is that here now in the mid 00’s you want me to define successful woman business ownership as something for which I never intend to reach. Not because I don’t think I can get it or am not supposed to have it, but because the idea of having 18 employees and the sheer accounting madness of making millions of dollars just does not interest me.

What interests me is my employees, what they are reading, what movie they just saw, how we feel when we launch a new website that brings attention or interest in the cause we are standing behind. What interests me is defining success based on individual businesses. My company profit has increased by 150% each year for the last 3 years; I have an increase in number of employees of 25% annually. Im sorry maybe I am missing it but this… is success.

Success is the way feel, the way I think. It’s not green (unless it involves employee lunch in a park), it’s not money (unless it is the currency used to buy tickets for employee movie day); success is getting up every day and going to work and producing a product that I stand behind 100%.

-- Jordan Dossett

Posted by Jordan Dossett on November 03, 2004 at 07:48 pm EST

Tags: Success
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