Women's Small Business Month: How to Start and Grow Your Business

I would now like to turn the conference over to Erin Andrew, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Women's Business Ownership sba. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much and welcome to everyone joining us. It is October and October is National Women's Small Business Month. So we're excited to host this and to celebrate the over 8 million women owned businesses in the United States and also sort of the success that we've seen with those businesses over the course of the last few years. We know that women owned businesses are growing at a rapid speed and we know that there's so many opportunities for these women owned businesses to start and grow their businesses in the coming decades. So SBA is here to help. And I'm going to talk a little bit today about some of the initiatives that we are launching to support entrepreneurs across the board, but also to really empower women owned businesses as they start and grow businesses across this country. So I wanted to start off and just highlight some of the administrators priorities. SBA's mission is to help us small businesses start, grow and succeed. And I had the Office of Women's Business Ownership and our focus is to help women owned businesses start, grow and succeed, specifically helping them navigate the resources that are available from the SBA and also identifying opportunities for them to grow in the future. So let's go ahead and go to the next slide. All right, so these are some of the administrators priorities. Administrator Contrera's suite is very much focused on making SBA stand for smart, bold and accessible. We want to be smart with our systems, we want to be bold with our ideas and we want to make everything accessible to women entrepreneurs across the board. Below are a few of the initiatives that we have been working on and announced over the course of the last year and I want to just highlight a few and I'll go into these in a little bit more detail as we talk about access to capital, counseling and contracting and resources available through the fva. Once I do that, I also wanted to highlight that we will be bringing on a women business owner, Jules, who is from the Grommet who helped start and launch the Grommet and she'll go into just some lessons learned as being a woman entrepreneur in today's climate. But first SBA1 in our capital side of the aisle. We've got a lot of things going on and SBA wanted to significant Automation upgrade to the 7A loan guarantee platform that we have. The main features for lenders will be loan origination, automated wizard, single lender portal for origination, servicing and Liquidation, electronic signature capability, document management system and some other upgrades that will really make it easier for the lender by reducing the lender's cost by more than $5,000 per loan. And, and this will significantly benefit the small business customers, especially those of community banks which have not been able to gain economies of scale in requesting SBA loan guarantees in the past. So we think this will be very helpful to women owned businesses. I also wanted to highlight Scale Up America. We know and I mentioned There are about 8 million women owned businesses in this country. About 88% of those do not have employees. So there's a huge opportunity to help scale women owned businesses. Really looking at helping them increase their revenues and hiring more employees. So Scaled America is very much focused on that scaling up of small businesses. And we recently announced some grants out of SBA to support entities that are providing intensive entrepreneurship training to help those companies scale, oftentimes with a bit of a focus on women entrepreneurs as well. We also announced Reboot to business working with those businesses that are coming back after they're leaving the military. So it's as they're transitioning out of the military, they're looking at entrepreneurship opportunities and SBA has been there to help them as they transition. The Reboot to Business program is really focusing on veterans that are out there who want to start businesses. There are some other initiatives listed here that we think are really important to women business owners across the board. And if you go to SBA.gov, you can find out more about some of these opportunities. For example, the Affordable Care act for small businesses, a very important thing for a lot of women owned businesses. We have weekly webinars on the Affordable Care Act. You can find out more on our website. We also run the Women's Business center program and my office oversees the over 100 women's business centers across the country that provide free and low cost counseling and training to women entrepreneurs. So these are just a few things we wanted to throw out there. I now wanted to go to the next slide just to talk about the bread and butter of sba. So these are things that sort of fall under that bread and butter. The bread and butter of SBA really focuses on our three Cs, capital, contracting and counseling. And I mentioned a little bit about the changes that we've done to the capital programs. But capital is such an important thing to entrepreneurs who are learning or looking to grow their business. SBA is very much focused on increasing capital to women owned businesses. We have a $90 billion portfolio of loan Guarantees. We work with lenders across, across the country banks, CFIs, other community banks across the country. And we have about 5,000 lenders in our portfolio. And we also work on the equity side, not only on the debt side. When we talk about capital, we work on the equity side. And we have $2.6 billion in growth capital through the small business investment company. So that's another resource that high growth women owned businesses that are looking to scale their companies on the contracting side. I want to mention this because I think it's really important. There are a lot of women owned businesses who are interested in contracting with the federal government. And I mention that because it's the federal government contracting space is a $400 billion federal market space. And we have sort of a set aside 23% of all federal contracts need to go to small businesses. That's 23%. But we also have a set aside which 5% of those contracts go to women owned small businesses. So we've made some, you know, we implemented the women owned small business contracting program back in 2011 to help get to that 5% goal and that women owned small business program. You can find out more at www.sba.govwosb. there are certain NAICS codes where women are underrepresented in certain industries. And if you qualify in one of those NAICS codes, you can get set aside contracts if you're a women owned small business through different agencies in the federal government. So that's something that's really, really important for individuals women owned businesses to look at as an option. And then counseling. We provide free and at low cost counseling and training to over a million entrepreneurs a year through our, we call it our resource partners. And our resource partners are made up of three networks, one being the Women's Business center program. We have over 100 women's business centers across the country that are located at Nonprofits. We have 1,000 small business development centers that are located at colleges and community colleges and over 12,000 score volunteers. You can find out more about the resource partners on our website, but also go to SBA field district and regional offices. If you go to SBA.gov, you can find a district office in your area and then talk to them about sort of your needs and resource partners that might be available to help you write your business plan, create a social media strategy for your business, or figure out how to better manage the financials of your business. So that's just one of those are just a couple of resources we have available through our counseling fee. Under kind of our bread and butter at sba. Let's go to the next slide. As you can see, this is sort of the network we're in every state across the country. And oftentimes our resource partners can do counseling and training over the phone and online as well. So it's important, especially if you're in rural areas, to understand what resources exist. In addition to the counseling resources we have through the Small Business Development Centers, the Women's Business centers, and our score chapters, we also have online training available@sba.gov, so if you go to sba.gov training, we have over 30 online courses that help you walk through writing your business plan. Like I mentioned, there is one on social media. There are a bunch out there. There are some on the federal contracting space. So you can use the resources we have@sba.gov to do some initial research. We also have a great tool online called sizeup. So if you go to sba.gov sizeup s I z e U P and this will be on the last slide, you can put in your business industry and your location and look for some you'll get some business analytics essentially on how you size up with other businesses in that same industry in that area. And that information is always so helpful when you're writing a business plan. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. As I mentioned earlier, our office is here for all the women entrepreneurs on the phone. Our office is here to really empower and support women entrepreneurs as they're starting a business and as they're growing a business. We, we not only manage the Women's Business center program, there's 100 centers, but we also work with the different programs throughout sba, our contracting programs and our capital programs exporting to really look at women's participation and how we increase women's participation in the program. So over the course of the last few years, we've been really focused on increasing women's access to capital, helping more women in the federal contracting, supporting women and getting the skills they need through our counseling partners, supporting women veterans as they start and grow their businesses, and helping female encore entrepreneurs. And those are entrepreneurs that are 50 years older to start and grow their businesses. So let's go ahead and go to the next slide. I'm going to talk a little bit very briefly about how we've done this in the past just with regards to capital. The Small Business Administration lending was expanded over the course of the last few years, making 17.2 billion available through almost 60,000 SBA loans to women owned businesses between January 2009 and December, the end of December of last year of 2013 and in calendar year alone. And we're going to get our calendar, we're going to have our FY14 stats come out soon. But in calendar year 2013 alone, SBA made 3.8 billion in capital available to women. And this was a 31% increase since 2009 in all three portfolios, including 7Amicroloans and 504. And SBA has improved policies around underwriting loans for 350,000 and below. We have a new credit score tool that we just released in July and and then also we waived fees on loans that were under $150,000. So our hope is this is really helping to get more capital in lower dollar loan amounts into the hands of entrepreneurs. And this is specifically very much a sweet spot for women owned businesses. We've seen an increase in women accessing especially our 7A tool. As a result of some of these changes, we are really also focused on helping more women get into the federal contracting space. In fiscal year 2013, SBA exceeded the small business goal of 23% which I mentioned earlier, with an achievement of 23.39% and federal small business contracts going to small businesses. And that's compared to about 21.65% in FY2011. And in the year 2013, the women's small business goal achievement was 4.32%, which represents more than 15 billion in contracting dollars. So to also help women's participation in the federal contracting space, as I mentioned, we implemented the women owned Small business federal contract program in 2011. And that allows contracting officers to set aside contracts limited to competition among women and small businesses that are in specific industries or NAICS codes. We also saw in 2013, through the National Defense Authorization Act, a removal of the caps on this program. So as a result it's been positive because we've seen larger dollar contracts going through the contracting program. And we're also doing outreach events with women impacting public policy. And American Express called Challenger events across the country, really bringing in a lot of the agencies and doing events targeting getting more women into contracting pipeline for those specific agencies. Really quickly to move to the counseling the next slide, I wanted to quickly talk about sort of achievements with the counseling women to help start and grow their businesses. SBA's Women's Business Centers, which I mentioned earlier, represent a national network of over 100 educational centers. And we've counseled and trained more than 270,000 women in fiscal year 2012 and 2013. And a lot of these women are in underserved and economically disadvantaged areas. So we've seen sort of an increase in that arena. And across all three of our Resource partners Score, Small Business Development Centers and Women's Business Centers, we've counseled and trained over 850,000 women in fiscal year 12 and 13. And we'll be having our 14 members come out soon. I mentioned briefly veterans being such an important part of sort of our the services we provide and of our target market. And veterans as they're coming back and as they're transitioning back into civilian life, a lot of times entrepreneurship is a great option for them. And a lot of times for women veterans, it's a great opportunity to really use the skills that they gained in the service to apply to starting their own business. So we have made several investments in women veterans and the boots, the business one. And then we've also completed six VYS programs in cities across the country. And VYS stands for Veteran Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship. And those are it's almost like a few day conference that's specifically for women veterans and spouses of veterans to go through the opportunities in terms of preparing and growing their business. And there are classes and trainings available during that time. So that's something we're doing for women veterans. And then finally, I just wanted to quickly mention something we're working on to help female encore entrepreneurs. We have a partnership with aarp. If you go to the next slide, we have a partnership with AARP and we work very closely with them. And our district offices provide counseling and training and mentorship opportunities to encore entrepreneurs. Those are entrepreneurs that are 50 years and older, may be leaving their job or looking to retire, but want to start their own business. So that's something we've been working on very recently. If you want to go ahead and go to the next slide, I wanted to quickly mention the National Women's Business Council. If you are a women entrepreneur or if you're an organization on the phone looking for data or on women entrepreneurs. The National Women's Business Council is a great resource and we work very closely with them to identify gaps that might exist right now in the ecosystem for women entrepreneurs and to also identify opportunities. They have numerous reports that come out every year on women entrepreneurs and we work very closely with them and with women's organizations, a lot of the national women's organizations to identify ways to get information out about SBA's. So with that, I think I want to quickly go ahead and move to the next slide and talk about how we're working with the National Women's Business Council to really focus on how we're helping women entrepreneurs access capital, access markets, you know, create jobs and grow their businesses, especially in some of those high growth industries. And then looking at how we really identify where there are gaps in existing data or in business data where we could identify some trends or some opportunities to really do more. So we're in the process of sort of working on an initiative with them to do some of these things through the We Power America initiative. And then finally, I want to just leave you with some resources on the next slide. SBA.gov I've mentioned over and over, if you go to SBA.gov and type any of these traffic then or even go to sba.gov women there are a lot of resources for women entrepreneurs that are on the phone. I've also given you the nationalwomensbusinesscouncil.gov website in case you are looking for some data specific information. And with that, I just wanted to, you know, it's an important month. We're celebrating women entrepreneurs and we're very lucky today to have Jules with us. Jules Peary is the co founder and CEO of the Grommen and she is a woman entrepreneur and she also works with a lot of women entrepreneurs. So we thought that it was very fitting to have her on today to talk about her experience as a woman entrepreneur with the Grommet and maybe some advice and information she has for other women entrepreneurs on the phone who are either thinking about starting a business, starting another business, or growing their existing business. So, Jules, I want to go ahead and hand it over to you so you can kind of give the stage advice that I know you have to the many women entrepreneurs who are looking for it.

Great. Can you hear me?

Yep.

Perfect. Thanks. So I won't spend a ton of time explaining the Grommet because we're super easy to check out online because we launch one product a day that you might think of as something that is likely to have originated, say in a crowdfunding platform or an inventor's workshop. It's an unknown gem that you would want to know about. We launch it with a video every day. And if you are anticipating any kind of holiday gift giving crunch, basically I just am telling you the answer to your prayers because we're launching something very new every day. So no matter what you choose from the combat, it's going to Be a thoughtful gift that nobody had. So. So I'll basically say go to the website and learn more. But I'll tell you a little bit about the strategy behind the business and then move into the core ideas of entrepreneurship. Okay, the next slide, please. So just in terms of my story, this is actually a picture of me in high school at the meeting room at my boarding school. I grew up in Detroit and got a refactory worker and catapulted myself into working boarding school in the suburbs of Detroit, which was probably my first entrepreneurial activity, frankly. Leave home at a very young age and do something that made me nauseous every morning. Show up at boarding school classes. Kids are smarter than me. I became an industrial designer. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. I have it up. Oh, sorry, I'm not seeing it. Okay, I just have a lag here. So anyway, I became an entrepreneur. It was part of my career, basically, not my entire career. My first startup was one that I did right out of business school called Continuum. And I joined an existing startup with the year old solicit product innovation consultancy in Boston. My second startup was Ziggs. I was president of this social network that competed with LinkedIn. And since all of you are probably on LinkedIn and none of you on Ziggs, you know who won that competitive job. But terrific experience for me in learning about social media and that led to my founding, co founding McRomit. Next slide, please. I did a bunch of big company stuff as well. In between, I was lucky enough as a great mentor. I worked for Meg Whitman and all of these companies. She landed in my head, is my boss and I just started following her for a while. Next slide, please. So what we do, we're a product launch platform. Things we've launched that you would know would be Fitbit or perhaps bananagrams or ideapaint or sodastream. Those are things we would have launched say three, four years ago when they were totally unknown. But every day we are launching basically the feature. Next slide, please. And the core of what we do we describe as a term that I actually trademarked, we call it Citizen commerce. Because the weird thing about product and product launch is that the best products do not typically win in the marketplace we have today. The more innovative and unexpected a product is, the less likely it is to succeed. Yet when you have something like social media and video and tools that enable a company like ours to create a platform to connect people, you can actually reverse that trend, reverse that negative cycle of some of the best products. Never seen the light of day, never really fully scaling because you can take people right to the source and the actual human beings and their story behind the product, and you give actual people the tools and the power to really make a difference. And whether these companies do succeed. And so specifically with us, every day when we launch a product at noon, 1 in 200Americans sees it, and it's actually more like 1 in 50 of the more relevant market. So within one hour of launching a product that needs to standardize, we actually know what America thinks. The kind of front edge of mainstream America, what they think, whether they bought the product, shared it, what they said to the maker. And that's incredibly powerful. And that's what I mean by citizen commerce put in the power to decide hands of people. Next slide, please. So I already talked about this. The next slide, please. And keep going. Sorry. Next slide. So the core is what we do, though, is a media platform. You can kind of think of our company as like a daily news organization with all the pressure and operational demand of that, as well as an e commerce company, because the products actually get bought and sold and. And then we've built a massive community. So I feel like sometimes I'm running a combination of like the nightly news and a mini version of Facebook and a new version of Amazon. It's a lot to manage. Next slide, please. So next slide. I talked about this already. So video, though. One of the fun things about interacting with us is you create an original video every single day, and it usually creates. One of the reasons that I know a lot about entrepreneurs is we work with 3,000 of them, and many of them are women. 40% of the products that we launch are from women. And you can even shop on our site by that category. We call that underrepresented entrepreneurs. If you want to shop by a particular value, like green products or social enterprise or underrepresented entrepreneurs, you can find the product made by women there as well. Next slide, please. So I already talked about this. This is our office, actually, where I'm sitting. Next slide, please. We've lost now almost 3,000 cars. We started in the depths of the economic crisis in 2008 and have one of those heroic valves behind us. I guess part of it at least that many people, any of you who started a company at that time, know that that is probably the toughest class of entrepreneurs the United States has ever seen, at least certainly in our lifetime. And I count myself part of that group. That tough. Next slide, please. So talking about entrepreneurship, I think you really have to. I've Learned that I have to embrace three really prominent sort of, I guess, emotions or aspects of entrepreneurship. The first one is if you work in a really big company, I think a prominent emotion you might experience in a big company is actually very different. Probably frustration, because there's so much that's outside of your control and you see things that don't make sense and you have to learn to succeed in the face of that frustration. It's very different in a startup because you do have the control if you're the founder. And so what you need to embrace and not get overwhelmed by is actually to get the emotion of anxiety because it's going to be your constant friend just about every single day. And it's actually a positive emotion if it inspires you to the next key quality, which is action. You have to have a bias for action. I don't know a single successful entrepreneur who spends a lot of time, more time thinking than asking the idea. The actual idea of a business takes one second, right? I mean it doesn't take any time at all to come up with the idea normally, but making it happen. I just heard a quote about Steve Jobs. That vision without execution is just hallucination. And that's true here. And then the final one that actually probably was in some ways the hardest for me to, especially my last startup when I kind of got back into startup team, was the ambiguity of it all. Because it's a blob. When you start a company, nobody's calling, there's no routine, you're not repeating anything you did last year, you have no measures of success and that blob starts to take shape. But at first it's pretty hard to embrace that. Next slide, please. So one of the ways you get there, I think, or I have, is by practicing. At first I know that I don't really want to say fake it till you make it because you're not faking it. You're really doing the business and you're not a fraud and you're not pretending. But internally you can feel like you're faking it until you make it. That's really what I mean. Where the very first time I had to make a tough team decision and let somebody go, it probably lost tons of deep and over considered a very obvious decision. And that's the hardest thing, frankly. People think they're the hardest thing. And then the second or third time when you're really trying to conquer someone into success or out of the company or whatever they need, you realize, I'm not taking this anymore. I'm doing this to protect my company and the larger team. And that's true of any aspect, whether it's fundraising or other aspects that seem really, really hard. Next slide. Funding is a place where I got more practice than I would have liked fundraising. I got way more practice. Now, remember, this is a high visibility, sort of high growth company that I've been working on, one that's in perhaps very narrow category that requires serious capital, venture capital, nature capital, where this is not something that could be bootstrapped. And unfortunately, for the first four years, we were closer to bootstrapping than actually funding it properly. And so why am I showing you a picture of shoes? That's because these are my real shoes that fell apart. One day I'm in Boston and I was walking in the streets of Cambridge from one venture capital office to another, and literally my shoes did this. They just started disintegrating on my feet because I had walked them that much in the course of funding my business. Long story short, I did not succeed in raising venture capital at that time, but I did succeed in raising 4.4 million in angel investment and ultimately a much larger investment from a company in Tokyo around 10. I literally traveled to Tokyo to ensure my company would prosper. It's an extreme story, extent over an extreme amount of time. And so partly why I'm talking to you is to help prevent anyone else from going through what I went through. But mainly it's different economic time. So I'm much more optimistic about, even for myself, if I were doing this over, but certainly for all of you. Next slide, please. So a few things about pitching. These rules are more about sort of public vendor pitching. I love resources that are available to the sba. They're rich and varied. And this is a bit more narrow when you're thinking about pitching to more classic kind of venture capital, angel investors and some of the resources out there. So it's not so much about the pitch itself, which I could talk about in the question, but about thinking about where to spend your energy, because your time is truly your most precious resource when it comes to this kind of activity. So, next slide, please. First of all, there are events where you can pitch. There are lots of angel forums, there are lots of startup competitions, there are accelerators. But when I see an event, I really do now, I've become quite savvy about figuring out whether this event is going to really give me access to the people I want to get to. And if it's big enough to matter, will it expand the network and the big name people, is it so big that I can't even get to them if they're people that I'd like to know about my company. So let's say you're going to be speaking at a very large event. One thing I watch for is that if there are multiple breakout sessions, does the audience start to get broken down to like 20 people in the room? And it's probably not worth my getting out of plane to that or traveling across town sometimes. So get really savvy about how to use your time because when you're early days for the day you can speed can be visible. But very quickly you have to learn which things are worth it and which are not. Next slide please. So in this case I'm also always looking at the public relations tab and you can tell whether an event has serious budget for this and whether it has good media sponsors and a good media plan. So I'll ask for those things and you can see it best if they've had this event before. And in our case at the grommet, we've been holding something called the product pitch event. This is really directed at makers, people of physical product. It's a national competition, but we conceptualized it not just to help us find the next greatest grommets, but to give those companies a meaningful list in terms of their PR awareness and to be able to repeat that for them. So we make it worth it for them to show up. Next slide please. This is just hard and fast. I did this once and I regretted it. Never pay to speak. I once really wanted to be on stage at an event with a really prominent marketing guru. And here's a lesson I learned. If you have to pay to speak, that audience is not that interested in what you have to say. And I didn't pay much. It was kind of a last minute thing, but I would never do it again. Next slide please. Similarly, there are venture forms where people ask you to pay to speak to investors or the investors have to pay to be there. Avoid those as well. These are just money making opportunities for the event organizers. They're not designed to your best interest. Next slide please. And finally, the thing that's changed Even dramatically since 2008 are the opportunities to raise money and to get disability with angels and individuals through technology. I actually have three things in mind here. I'm going to say something kind of obvious, but if you're new to this, may not be. We've seen 15% of our companies that we launch on the ground that get funding through crowdfunding, Indiegogo and Kickstarter in particular. And these are particularly great platforms for women because on those crowdfunding platforms, if you have a project that ultimately could be a business, if you can engage a community there, first of all, we have folks who have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a physical product for net. But for women, it's really good because women get different. That's 47% of the funding on crowdfunding platforms and they're 60% more likely to succeed than men. So the message there is that this is a very welcoming audience for women because it's an audience of people who choose to participate in these campaigns who look like us, who look like America, which is not true in most of the investor community. So that's one way to use this technology. The other resource I would consider if angel funding is a new path is angel risk. Because that again came out a little bit more recently since I was raising money for my company. But it's a very, very credible source for raising disabilities of company and getting yourself in front of angel investors who frankly used to be like unicorns until Angel List came along, it was really hard to find them. They don't necessarily publicize their activities, but the ones who are there are much more accessible. The first thing I'm going to say is kind of obvious, but it's really difficult to get an investor to take you seriously unless you come in with an introduction outside of these type of forums. But if you want a one on one with an investor in LinkedIn. I've heard many investors say that with LinkedIn today, if you can't figure out a way to get an introduction to me or a way to connect to me through that platform, I've got to wonder about your savvy around how to network and how to establish our essential skills for any startup founder. Next slide please. I'm just going to mention, I'll tell you about a study that just came out. It's on the panel of people that released a couple weeks ago called the Diana Project study and it's about the massive gender gap in venture capital, women's access to venture capital. And it was first done this study in 1999 and this is the first update on that study. And what it did is take a Look at from 2011 to 2013, what was happening on the side of the venture capital firm in terms of women's participation, what did the funded teens look like and how much venture capital did they obtain and then what were the actual outcomes from Those investments. And I have to tell you that I wasn't really happy with what happened, what the findings were. There was one positive finding, which is that back in 99, only 5% of the teams that were funded by venture capitalists have women on the team, and now it's up to 15%. So that is one positive direction. But the other number didn't go anywhere good. The number of women who are venture capital investors with decision making, investment decision making authority, basically partners dropped from 10% to 6%. And even worse, only 2% of venture capital funded companies had a woman CEO. And so to me, those numbers are hair on fire, scream their head up problem numbers. Because venture capital, it isn't for every company. It's only headed to 1% of companies. But these tend to be the very high visibility, high growth companies. They get media attention and define entrepreneurship for the current and next generations. And if you can't see it, you can't be it. And if you can't get the access to the Capitol, it's hard for you to be able to be seen and to be it. And the parallel I would make for why I find this 2.7% number just outrageous is that if you think of entrepreneurship as access to opportunity and creation of opportunity for other people and defining the world, because business really does that more than any other entity, then you have to care about who gets to be an entrepreneur. And it's almost to me like who has access to university education. If we all heard that women were only being admitted 2.7% of the teeth at universities, we would go crazy. Or if it were only accept for men. And I see this as equally important. And so I am screaming my head up with this. A lot of people are, if you're reading any press at all, there are plenty of people about it, screaming ahead about it. Next slide, please. I'm working on kind of a specific focus or project in this area, which is I call Title IX for business. The sports image on this slide is deliberate because Title IX was a resounding success for trading assets and sports, which are another place of opening up opportunity. And I really want to shine a very, very strong spotlight on these numbers that I just mentioned down to the individual venture capital firms, because I do believe that when there's something festering in the dark, that basically something that's negative and you can shine a spotlight on it, you might actually start. So I'm working on a project, hopefully in collaboration with the Batson study. People have massive, wonderful data around what each individual firm is doing as well as the Kauffman foundation and other interested parties. And there are plenty of interested parties here. And it's something obviously any entrepreneur would care about. But I think anybody who cares about business, period, would care about because having diverse nonsense start of a company determines the outcome of a company in terms of opportunity for all. And that includes men. I have three sons and I want them to work in companies that are founded by a diverse team because I know that that leads to better economic as well as social outcomes. So last slide, please. Is in the capital raising game or the entrepreneurship game. This is so basic, but honestly, this is the main thing I've built in my entire career prior to being an entrepreneur. And certainly while I am an entrepreneur, the only two things I can really count on in this venture or anything I do before or after are the network that I build of people that hopefully reflect well on me and the reputation that I have built with them. And so everything I do sort of centers back on that. How I spend my time, how I help people, how I ask for help. And when you're an entrepreneur, you're asking for more help than you ever, ever imagined you would be doing. And I've always been really glad and invested in this from the very beginning of my career. Anyway, I'm going to stop now. I went a little long for the questions, but I think we have a few minutes, don't we?

Great. Thank you, Jules. This is really helpful and I think for national and NC Small Business Month, this is some great information for women business owners out there. I just want to remind everyone to continue to visit SBA.gov and then also look at, you know, and talk to women entrepreneurs like Jules who have started their own businesses. Because I think sometimes the best advice and the best, you know, challenges, understanding challenges out there really come for the folks who've been in the trenches. So thank you for all of you've done and for taking the time to do this webinar today and for providing sort of guidance to the women out there who are looking to start and grow their business. I think with that we'll conclude. And then, Emily, can you take us offline?