A lot of what women need to know to run a business can be found on the Internet.
The World Wide Web is fast becoming a source of technical assistance and education for women business owners.
In January 1998, the Office of Women's Business Ownership at the U.S. Small Business Administration launched what its developers hope will become the premier World Wide Web site for women entrepreneurs: the Online Women's Business Center, at www.onlinewbc.org. By early July, the site had received about 1 million visits.
"Even though we expected a large demand, we didn't have any idea how large it was," says Sherrye Henry, who heads the Office of Women's Business Ownership.
Even more surprising, says Henry, was the discovery that women in more than 100 countries had visited the site. "So without knowing it, we [had] launched an international women s site," she says.
The site contains more than 1,000 articles on starting, growing, and expanding a business. Topics range from an introduction to bookkeeping and accounting to electronic commerce, team-building, and understanding capital sources. If you want to sell to the government, for example, you can find out how in a section of the site called "Procurement Place."
There are links to dozens of other useful sites, opportunities to exchange information with other entrepreneurs and ask them questions, and stories about successful women business owners.
Hundreds Of Questions
The site was developed and is run by the North Texas Women's Business Development Center, an SBA-sponsored educational center in Dallas.
In addition to an initial grant of $150,000 from the SBA, which it won through a competitive process, the Texas center raised matching funds from five national private sponsors: IBM Corp.; J.C. Penney Co., Inc.; NationsBank (now Bank of America); GTE Corp.; and Avon Products, Inc.
Much of the information on the site is provided by the nearly 70 SBA women's business development centers across the country, all of which are linked to the online center.
The online center receives about 300 emails daily from women business owners; their questions are forwarded to the most appropriate women's business development center for response.
The site has been available in Spanish since October. Says Henry: "When you look at the fact that we have 18 million Americans for whom Spanish is the first language and [that] Hispanic women [entrepreneurs] are the fastest-growing segment in the business community, we realized that we had to reach them in a more specialized way."
Henry says the online center should eventually be a place that educates women about electronic commerce, allows them to trade internationally, and enables them to take long-distance classes from women's business development centers.
Scrolling The Sites
The fact that an Internet site is aimed at women does not necessarily mean it will be more valuable to women entrepreneurs than other sites. There is an abundance of information helpful to women through a variety of sites.
Following are descriptions of some of the particularly useful Web sites.
* www.toolkit.cch.com connects you to the Business Owner's Toolkit, operated by CCH Inc., a Riverwoods, Ill., company that provides business, legal, and tax information and software. There's a virtual warehouse of small-business knowledge here, ranging from model business plans to sample company policies (on sexual harassment, for example, or on smoking) that can be adapted to your enterprise. An online advice column addresses topics such as exporting, bar codes, and dealing with bomb threats. For a fee, an information-retrieval section provides business reports, market research, and other services.
* www.score.org is the site of the SCORE Association (Service Corps of Retired Executives). SCORE, a Washington, D.C.-based volunteer organization affiliated with the SBA, offers free business-counseling services via e-mail on its site. (See "SCORE's Impact On Small Firms," January.)
* www.womenconnect.com is a commercial site run by women and based in McLean, Va. Click on "Business" for articles on entrepreneurial topics and for links to information on a conference called the Women's Economic Summit '98 and on certification of women-owned businesses.
* www.nfwbo.org is the site of the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, based in Silver Spring, Md. It contains summaries of research on topics such as access to credit for women business owners and selling to the government.
* www.slu.edu/eweb/index.html, known as eWeb, is a St. Louis University site aimed at providing support for entrepreneurs. It offers a guide on how to use the Internet for tasks such as finding financing or searching for company information, and it lists university-based entrepreneurship centers across the country.
* www.fambix.com is designed for executives and owners of family-controlled companies. Sponsored by NetMarquee Inc., an Internet-marketing-services firm in Needham, Mass., the site offers more than 300 articles on a wide range of family-business subjects.
* www.entreworld.org, or EntreWorld, bills itself as "A World of Resources for Entrepreneurs." The site is sponsored by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, a division of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., and its editors provide links to what they consider the most useful information on starting or growing a business.
Some sites, among them eWeb and EntreWorld, lead readers to other sources. Other sites, such as the Online Women's Business Center and the Business Owner's Toolkit, are destinations in themselves, offering instant access to articles and other information.
Ultimately, business information on the Internet knows no gender. Men are using the Online Women's Business Center, notes the SBA's Henry, "and we're so happy to have them. There's no reason why they shouldn't."
Nonetheless, it's foremost a site for women, Henry adds. "We wanted a place where women felt comfortable and where they talked to each other in language that they found familiar. And I think if you read the site, you will see that it is the language of women talking to women."
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