GenX Women Founders - A Generation of Leaders that is Changing the World | E137

Well, hello. Hello. So this is gonna be the first episode of a series. I have been working on this now for a while in all sorts of different ways and shapes and forms and sizes. And I'm super excited to have this conversation with you for a lot of reasons about being a woman, being a Gen X woman and being an entrepreneur and why we are our own special cocktail of secret sauce and superpowers with a little bit of poison. No pun intended. Let's get started.

All right, so first of all, I need you to all to know that I wrote an entire email using all 80s songs titles and I can't wait to share it with you. I have been having so much fun and also finding so much validation in doing this research and sort of exploration of what I do. You know, I don't. I don't consider myself any form of scientist or expert in research ideologies and practices. I consider myself more a social intuitive. I notice things. I watch and observe the words and the language and the behaviors of the women that I work with and I draw some conclusions that, listen, may not be true and certainly may not be true for you. And that's okay. But I. I love sharing them and just kind of letting you guys wrap your head around some ideas. So I had a realization not very long ago which seems a little dumb, but just go with me that the majority of my clients are Gen X women. They, you know, so what is the Gen X? I think it's born in 1962. Ish to see you're 42 to 65 right now. So whatever that. Wherever that puts us in our little world of ages. Ish. 63. There's cuspers. We're just going to let. If you, if you feel like you're a Gen Xer, I'm not kicking you out. Like that's. That's how we are. Gen Xers don't care. But I started to really wonder, like, why is it that there's a few things. Why is it that most of my clients are Gen Xers and likely it's because I am. And I. I talk about the things that we all are sort of experiencing, but why are we experiencing them? And what's unique about us and what are our opportunities? What are the unique challenges that we have? What are the unique strengths that we have and what is our collective story that has brought us to where we are today? And so what I thought I would do is break this into several episodes. So this episode I just kind of want to talk to you about the facts Like I just want to look at the groundwork, a little bit of what we know about entrepreneurialism and women and Gen Xing, right. Gen X generation. And let's see where that takes us. So I did try and actually did do some actual research on understanding sort of the trajectory of entrepreneurial growth for women over the past 40 years. It certainly won't surprise you that we have seen an incredible increase in women over the past 40 years who have their own businesses. And in fact the first little tidbit that I got, so this is just for your own edification, in 1972, women owned businesses accounted for 4.6% of all U.S. businesses, translating to about 1.5 million self employed women. In 1979 that had increased to 2.1 million and to 3.5 million in 1984 by 1997. So 13 years later it was 5,4 million of women owned businesses in the U.S. so that's a really significant increase. If we go from 1.5 million to 5.4 million. Just. Just over what, just under 20 years. Just a little over 20 years. But then if we look at, we go all the way up to now 2023, 42% of US businesses are women owned. 12.9 million businesses are women owned. That's a 21% increase just from 2014 to 2019. So it's rapidly increasing now. Why? The lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Gen X. Right. Like social media, one of them, although who created it, created social media, the Gen X population. We've also seen a huge increase in general in minority women self owned businesses, which is also incredibly interesting and encouraging. The average age of a female entrepreneur is 44.5 years old and 62% of all female entrepreneurs are age 45 to 55. So over half of the women who are currently running their own businesses are Gen X. So that illuminated what I thought I knew, which is good news, right? That sort of. I felt like that was true, like just through general observation, but it is true. So the majority of us that are out there right now running our own companies are from the Gen X generation. Okay. And so what? So the thing that's really interesting, you can do a lot of research on Gen Xers, like not as much as I think we should be able to do given who we are and our impact on the world. And there's actually a lot of common phraseology around Gen X that we're the lost generation. We're called the lost generation because we are the smallest of all of the current Generations sort of roaming the planet. The great generation was very large. The Boomers was the biggest. Then us, we were like this little one. And then the millennials were the next, were huge. Right. And I don't know what the numbers are on Z's yet, but Z's and millennials blend in a little bit. Now, if you're not a Gen X woman, I don't want you to feel like this isn't for you. Because I actually think if you're younger, if you're like 32, 34, 29, all of. Listen, I'm not trying to exclude you from this conversation, but I actually think, I hope, anyway, this gives you really good insight into some of the journey of the women who came before you. Because of course we were taught the journey of the women who came before us. But I don't actually think you're taught about us Gen Xers. I think you're taught about the women's movement of the 70s. That was my mother, that wasn't me. And we're the ones Gen Xers who are navigating now a world that was created by that movement. My mom got divorced in 1976 and she couldn't get a credit card in her own name. Women couldn't get mortgages, they couldn't get business loans without a man signing for it. That was not very long ago, right? So the women who cut through that, that was a whole other thing they had to cut through. So here we are, this generation of women, we have, quote, unquote, had it all. We've been able to have the career, we've been able to make the money, we've been able to have the family, we've been able to have the house. We've done it all. Why are we also unhappy? Why are so many middle aged women on medication? Why are so many female entrepreneurs trapped in a company they created? Why, despite our wealth, are we still unable to savor and love our lives? These are the things I wonder and I think, why is that? To use the question from my very astute and brilliant friend, Dr. Camille Wise, right? She's always taught us that's the question we should always be asking, like, why is that? Let's just explore it. Let's not blame, let's not isolate whose fault it is. Let's just ask, why is that? In the next series of episodes, I'm going to illustrate that. I want to look at what are the unique challenges that we may all have? What are the unique skill sets and attributes that we may all share in different ways. And then what's happening right now? Like, what's the current circumstance? 20, 23, if you're a 45, 48, 50, 55 year old woman running a company, what is our current state and what do we do about it? But we know that. I am realizing, of course now as we've all aged, those of us who share this generation, we're all sort of punching through the same hole. Some of us through did it a little sooner than others, but the mass, Right, the mass of us are starting to kind of punch through these same issues. Why do you think if you're a Gen Xer, you see so many things in your social media feed for menopause? Is it just me? I don't. I know it isn't. Why do you see so many wellness centers, day spas, aesthetic businesses, meds spa? Why is this happening? Why do we see so many luxurious trips everywhere? Why are there so many women joining women's groups? Why are there so many younger women not wanting children? Not that it's bad if you don't want children, but why. Listen to. There were no med spas when I was 18. And if it was, it was for a nose job. And you went away in the summer and then you came back as a sophomore and you had a new nose. Like, let's be honest, right? There were no wellness centers. There was fat camp. Listen, I'm overweight, so do not take that as an insult. That's what people called it in the 80s. Do not tell me I'm being discriminatory. Right? But that's what they called it. And people went away and got skinny. It wasn't like you talked about it. I mean, why are there so many weight loss programs and coaches? And why, why is life coaching a profession that did not exist in 1972?

What is happening? It's such a good question, right? And so that's what I want to unfold for you in the next few episodes. So I'm going to give you little teasers just a little bit more so that you'll tune into the others, but you don't have a choice because it's going to be on the podcast. So here's what's fascinating, right? There's this sort of stereotypical Gen X experience. I have two favorites that I follow on Instagram. There's one that's the Real Sherry. Real, real slim Sherry. Sherry. I'm terrible. I'll make sure that we get this right. And then there's another woman who now I can't even Think of but they really embody sort of the stereotypical Gen Xer who got kicked out of the house on Saturdays. Like this was legitimately happened to me. My dad and stepmom kicked us out every Saturday. We had to sit on the stoop, figure out what we were going to do. We would come back at lunch and they would put sandwiches out and I remember my dad would try and make like a cheeseburger and tell me it was like McDonald's and he made special sauce and it was disgusting and it was not like a McDonald's cheeseburger and or Big Mac. And we were gone all day. Weekends we were gone all day. We were up in trees. We were out far away. We were in the woods. We were everywhere. Nobody knew where we were. We had no cell phone, we have no beepers. We did not have trackers. There was no life ID or whatever that thing is called or find my iPhone. Nobody knew where we were and cared. Let's be honest. Our parents didn't sit around all day worrying, I wonder where they are. They didn't. Busy running their own lives. I don't know. I honestly don't know what they did because I couldn't get in the house, right? My parents got divorced when I was 7. I had a grow grain Kelly green ribbon around my neck with my key. I was a latchkey kid. I walked to and from school by myself until my mom got a nanny. I was one of the only kids in my school whose parents were divorced. I was alone for hours at a time. And I know so many of you were too. I fed myself. I got myself ready. I did my own homework. I know for sure. My mother never ever, ever asked me, like about applying to colleges. She never offered to help. Not because she didn't care. That wasn't what they did. That's not what we do now as parents. Holy smokes, right? Stop writing your kids essays. I'm kidding. Only for some of you, right? This is who we were. We had the best music on the planet and we still do. That's why every generation after us still loves 80s music. Why it was happy. 80s music is the most delightful music ever. Except for maybe like Depeche Mode and a few others, but, you know, happy. So we share this story, which means that as Gen X women, we could argue that we're relatively independent. We didn't have a lot of feeling. Coddling. Too bad, get over it, suck it up, move along. We made a lot of decisions without a lot of influence. So we had to develop some Critical thinking and problem solving skills made a lot of mistakes. We're also the generation that sort of was the ski bums, right? We were the first generation that would graduate college, partially because there was a recession and we didn't know what we wanted to do, so we just went and worked at Club Med or went and worked at the beach somewhere for a couple years. We're the first generation to get married a little later and have kids a little later and math. So what does all this have to do with being an entrepreneur? Because here's the teaser. I think a lot of us were parented to be independent, problem solving, feeling tolerant, meaning really indulge a lot of these feeling things. We just had to get it done. We were parented that way, but we don't lead that way. We didn't parent that way. And that is fascinating. And the second thing is we quote, unquote, had it all. But we're the first generation to really be able to say that. And we are the ones who are learning what that really means. And I also think that the next generation is challenging us just like we were challenging them right as we were growing up. And I don't see people, Gen Xers, handling the challenge in a way that I think is necessarily going to serve us. And I'm going to talk to you about that in a future episode. So thanks for tuning in. The next one will be up soon and I'll talk to you then.

Hey, if you are a female founder, business owner running a company, and you are, you know you've achieved some success, right? You're running over seven figures, you grow a little bit every year, your team is growing. I know a lot about you. And one of the things I know about you for sure is that you don't have a lot of time. And you also might be a little tired of everybody who wants to talk at you and not listen to you. So I want to encourage you to join the visionary diversity.

We're going to be putting together a pretty powerful opportunity for you to work with me exclusively in some private coaching, while also getting all of the tools and resources that you need to be better at leading your team so your business can continue to grow, but you don't have to continue to literally accept expand how much you're doing all the time. So I hope you'll check it out, add your name, more information will be available soon.