The face of entrepreneurship is changing — and, especially, in the world of small business.
According to a 2015 report by the Institute of Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), there has been a steady rise in the number of women-owned businesses than ever before. About 29 percent of America’s business owners are women, up from 26 percent in 1997. The number of women-owned firms has grown 68 percent since 2007, compared with 47 percent for all businesses.
For minority women, such progress has been particularly swift, with business ownership soaring by 265 percent since 1997. Research shows minorities now make up one in three female-owned businesses, up from only one in six less than two decades ago.
As founder, president and CEO of the Ecolibrium Group (EG), a strategic environmental consulting firm in Philadelphia, and regional administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration, Natalia Olson-Urtecho is one example of such success. Recognized by the Maryland Hispanic Business Conference as a “Latina Powerhouse,” she was one of the Delaware Valley’s “Most Influential Latinos” in 2014 and winner of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 2010 Minority Business Leader Award.
“It turns out Latina women-owned businesses are actually the fastest-growing percentages within minority-owned companies,” she says, “and I think it’s because they’ve been able to think in an entrepreneurial way, but not until lately have they had better resources to do so.”
As keynote speaker for the ninth annual Women in Leadership Development (WILD) Conference on April 20 at the Ambassador Banquet & Conference Center in Erie, Olson-Urtecho will share her professional journey as a woman business leader and the success stories of others. She also will address what the SBA is doing to help America’s small businesses — particularly women-owned businesses — thrive through its capital, counseling and contracting programs.
Read more in the April 2016 edition of the Business Magazine.
