Women don't need to be 'wantrepreneurs' - Women's Agenda

Women don’t need to be ‘wantrepreneurs’

Just when you thought we had enough buzzwords to describe business owners, women in business, mums who work from home etc, here comes another.

You’ve heard of the ‘techpreneur’, and no doubt the ‘mumpreneur’ (although you may know less about the ‘dadpreneur’ as a man with kids tends to simply be called an ‘entrepreneur’). There are also kidpreneurs (designing kid-based businesses) and even foodpreneurs.

And overnight I heard a new one: the ‘wantrepreneur’. It’s an entrepreneur in waiting — male or female, with or without kids. It’s a wannabe entrepreneur, one who dreams of escaping corporate life, longs to create their big idea, tell the boss where to go. Our sister publication Start Up Smart recently declared ‘wantrepreneur’ one of 2013’s key business buzzwords.

Start-up accelerator Corporate to Freedom believes there are two million wantrepreneurs out there in corporate land (based very much on anecdotal evidence). According to 2009 research by Kauffman Foundation, those of us deemed ‘wantrepreneurs’ are looking to launch our own start-up in the next five years, although 41% of us believe the biggest barrier will be securing a loan or credit, 31% believe it’s too much risk and only 19% cite the skill factor as being the biggest challenge — that is, not actually knowing how to run a business.

So who makes the classic ‘wantrepreneur’? We know that plenty of women leave the corporate world to start their own business and as we’ve often discussed on Women’s Agenda, they do this for a number of reasons. She Business’s Suzy Jacobs recently told me it often comes down to large workplaces not bring structured for work/life balance, as well as not giving women the flexibility and autonomy they crave and allowing old-school values to prevail in the office. Meanwhile, there’s the fact that with the technology readily available women leave the corporate world simply “because they can”, as Yolanda Vega recently noted.

But women don’t need to be ‘wantrepreneurs’ because there are plenty of other women out there willing to support them. We’ve developed a strong networking culture for woman-led start-up businesses with excellent groups like the Australian Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry, She Business, Business Chicks and the League of Extraordinary Women available to help women at all stages of building their own business.

In the entrepreneurial world, the ridiculous notion of “women not supporting women” couldn’t be further from reality. There are always plenty of successful women willing to share how they’ve built their own business – they blog about it, speak about it, tell their stories in the media and mentor others. These women always have an audience, because we love to hear a success story.

The average age of the first time company owner is 38, according to the Kaufman research. You don’t have to be in your twenties, you don’t have to have been raised in an entrepreneurial family, nor do you have to be longing to leave the corporate world in order to go out and do your own thing. You don’t need to be a man, or a woman, or a man or woman with kids.

What you do need first and foremost is a little bit of support — even if it’s just to hear from other women on how they personally overcame their personal business challenges. As we know from the number of business groups and networks available, it’s support that’s widely available – support that starts as early as knowing you don’t need to be a ‘wantrepreneur’, the possibilities for starting something new are endless.

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