Not Oprah’s Book Club: The Women’s Small Business Start-Up Kit

A guest post from Deborah Siegel, author of Sisterhood Interrupted.

Last year, my biz partner Kamy Wicoff and I launched a business on a mission: She Writes. It’s a community, workplace, and emerging marketplace for women who write, and we’re celebrating our 1st birthday next week (join us at meet-ups in 16 cities!) Not long ago, we were two women with wide networks, a passion, a dream. We were book authors. How different, we figured, could starting a business be? As if. Peri Pakroo’s The Women’s Small Business Start-Up Kit: A Step-by-Step Legal Guide is the book we needed yesterday.

Do women business owners–or aspiring ones–really need a start-up kit of our own? If it’s Pakroo’s, then yes. Women have different experiences starting and running businesses than do men (as they do in other employed experiences), and the book retains its focus on women’s business without collapsing into stereotypes. What you won’t find here are go-girl pep talks; Pakroo assumes you can.

The book is peppered with advice and guidance from a range of women entrepreneurs, info on special certification programs for women-owned businesses and government contracting opportunities, and resources like women’s business centers and microlenders. There’s a section on work/life balance and one on child care (which, if feminists ran the world, would be covered in any business book “for” men, duh). And then there’s the standard business book fare: tips on developing a profitable idea, writing a business plan, choosing a legal structure (think sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company, or corporation), marketing your business, managing its finances, staffing up, and so forth. The book comes with a handy CD containing useful forms such as a sample partnership agreement and an interactive calculator to help you do financial projections. If you’re wondering about business start-up costs or how one goes about obtaining a federal employer identification number, this book’s for you.

Digital natives will likely find the chapter on conducting and marketing your business online a little basic. A number of the chapters, like the one on cost-effective marketing, could apply to nonprofit start ups as well. But Pakroo wrote a whole ‘nother book on all that, too.

And while we’re on nonprofits: I used to think feminists worked only as activists, taught in universities, volunteered, and wrote–which is pretty much how I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life. But with corporate institutions in shambles all around–Wall Street, publishing, journalism–I’m newly committed to changing business as usual through an intervention in the for-profit sphere. I’m not alone. There are more than 10 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. More than 400 new businesses are launched by women every day. And my favorite stat: “If women-owned businesses were their own country, they would have the fifth largest GDP in the world” (Center for Women’s Business Research).

Kamy and I recently added a third founding partner to our mix, one who brings deep business knowledge to the team. And lucky for me, I’ve now read Pakroo’s book. Today, we are three women with a dream, and we are dreaming big.

Deborah Siegel is Founding Partner of She Writes, the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, and the creator of the group blog Girl w/Pen.