NAWBO

I write this from Panera where I wait for a half dozen members of the Winston-Salem/Greensboro chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. As my new role as Vice President of Administrative Services (I just love a good title!) a big part of my job is just making sure that the right people are telling each other the right things at the right time, e.g. my member services liaison giving the member services committee the current roster. We're going to try to make sure that's happening today.

This will be the first meeting I've ever conducted - I've attended plenty but never actually been the lead. That's a big part of why I took this role, though: to learn, move forward, challenge myself with new experiences. It's a terrifying way to grow but oh so effective.

Last night was the NAWBO general meeting. Tamara McLendon of Lede PR gave an excellent talk on do-it-yourself PR and, as usual, the mood was the most pleasant version of business gathering imaginable.

I was asked last night to give a short testimonial on why I think NAWBO membership is advantageous and while I'm not much on selling people on anything (my downfall as a businesswoman) the task itself did make me think.

I started with NAWBO right around the end of the first year of my personal chef business, Dining with Ease. I had been making the rounds of networking groups (having found that groups often pay more attention to guests than members) and ran into then-president Jan Hinton.

My first meeting was a breath of fresh air. While the atmosphere of other business groups seemed to insists that I pretend to be more knowledgeable that I was, and to pretend that my business was more developed and more impressively staffed than just little ole me, NAWBO was a safe haven to admit that I was a small up-start business and that as a businesswoman, I barely knew what I was doing but was eager to learn.

The icing on the cake was that though NAWBO is not technically a networking group, I was able to grow my business through their referrals.

To me, The truly exciting part about NAWBO is that the mission, to support and bolster women businesses, stretches far beyond the membership and into the community. This October, NAWBO WS/GSO will become one of only six chapters to host the Guardian Life Girls Going Places program where 100 young women from area high schools will learn the building blocks to business: how to develop an idea, how to write a business plan and, perhaps most importantly, how to manage their finances wisely.

This piece of graffiti I recently posted says it all: to bolster women businesses in no way hampers traditional male-owned businesses. Quite the contrary: we are working to build a stronger overall business community.