In good company: empowered businesswomen

This piece was originally published in the News & Record on March 7, 2007.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It’s not often that the proceedings of a business meeting cause me to fight tears unrelated to boredom but during a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Public Policy Days conference last week, I found myself doing just that.

On the podium stood D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton; she arrived a few minutes late due to the snow that continued to fall upon those who tried to out-shovel it, taking her place at the microphone with an understated confidence and casually-held cup of coffee. Surrounding me sat nearly 200 women business owners representing industries from trucking to cosmetics, accounting to IT - women who had to ask their fathers or husbands to cosign their first business loans in the years before equal opportunity lending, and women like me who have always taken for granted the theme of the conference: Women Mean Business.

Please ignore the trite cuteness that comes part and parcel with such word play; though conference attendees inhabited every point on the scale from tom boy to girly girl, there was neither a trite nor a cute woman in the room. Nor were there sessions on accessorizing for the board room or easy weeknight dinners.

Truly, Congresswoman Holmes Norton’s tone, lacking the pretense and plume-presenting that characterizes much of the business world, proved to be the rule rather than the exception as women respectfully but forcefully questioned Jovita Carranza, deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration; as we discussed the economic – and human – consequences of U.S. immigration policies with Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union; and as we considered the political futures of ourselves and our sisters in business while a panel of speakers addressed the building blocks for campaigning.

The national membership of NAWBO, well-represented by the Winston-Salem/Greensboro chapter, is comprised of women who do, indeed, mean business – on our own terms and with a firm understanding that no amount of financial success can replace integrity. Of course it is about the bottom-line, but it is also about laying the groundwork for the next generation of women business owners and creating a better world for ourselves, our colleagues and our employees in the meantime – the human capital without which entrepreneurship would not be worth risking.

As I sat amid these women, I was reminded that our success is foremost dictated by our willingness to boldly and confidently pursue our goals. The tears that I fought were borne of pride in being surrounded by - and being part of - empowered, world-changing, economy-boosting women, in the capitol of a county with limitless potential.

Tamara McLendon, my local NAWBO sister (a descriptor that doesn’t begin to explain the depth of our camaraderie), and I left the conference the first night after dark, the snow piled into slushy dunes by the sides of the roads, uncertain of how to return to the family home in which we stayed. Turning a corner, we found ourselves driving along Arlington Cemetery, the symmetrical rows of headstones bleached like the snow. One needn’t read a single headstone to be reminded that our capitalistic democracy is less expensive in dollars and cents than in the lives of those who protected it – and that this isn’t a capital that should be spent frivolously.