The Boss of You

We’re div­ing in! More than a year(!) after we fin­ished our first draft, we are lined up with a pub­lisher (WOO! More on that later…) and it’s time to get to work. First stop: inter­views. So, if you, or some­one you know, would like to be a part of our book, please have a look at our call for inter­view sub­jects and see if you’re a fit. If you are, well then, drop us a line and let us know.

Oh, and please dis­trib­ute this far and wide, to all the inno­v­a­tive busi­ness­women in your life.

Read on for detailed info (and please for­give the fact I’ve sim­ply cut and pasted our email copy here — time is get­ting away from me here and I don’t want to delay this post)…

We are co-authoring a book (work­ing title: “Now You’re in Busi­ness: A Hand­book for Female Entre­pre­neurs”), to be pub­lished by Seal Press in early 2008. The book is our attempt at fill­ing an as-yet empty niche in the business-book world — independent-minded young women run­ning their own small businesses.

We are seek­ing women busi­ness own­ers to inter­view for the book. Excerpts from the inter­views will be pep­pered through­out the book to pro­vide smart, cre­ative answers to many of the ques­tions that new entre­pre­neurs have when they’re start­ing out — and to pro­vide exam­ples of busi­nesses that are suc­cess­ful both finan­cially and in terms of sup­port­ing their founders’ dreams, goals, and values.

Who We’re Look­ing For:

Your busi­ness must:

• Be 100% women-owned. Trans women, this includes you! (Male employ­ees are fine.)
• Be suc­cess­ful (by your own def­i­n­i­tion — finan­cial suc­cess is only one mea­sure of success);
• Have been estab­lished for 2–10 years;
• Be located in the U.S.A. or Canada; AND
• Have fewer than 20 employees.

We are par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in rep­re­sent­ing cre­ative, pro­gres­sive, and/or alter­na­tive busi­ness mod­els (e.g. employee-owned, eco-products, non­tra­di­tional indus­tries for women, etc.).

What we AREN’T look­ing for:

• Free­lancers;
• Tra­di­tional busi­ness mod­els (rapid expan­sion, fran­chis­ing, pyra­mid schemes, etc.);
• CEOs, VPs, and/or man­agers of large corporations.

We would really love to include a diverse group of women, so we encour­age inquiries from women of colour and immi­grant women, queer & trans women, and women with dis­abil­i­ties — and of course women run­ning a very broad range of busi­nesses, from prod­uct design­ers, skate shops and con­sul­tan­cies, to eco-tour oper­a­tors, artists, and way, way beyond. We con­fess we have a bias towards younger entre­pre­neurs, due to the voice & tar­get audi­ence for the book, but we are cer­tainly inter­ested in hear­ing from women of all ages.

Sound like you (or some­one you know)? Drop us a line at the­bosses [at] bosslady.ca.

What You’re Com­mit­ting To:

If we decide to inter­view you, we’ll need about 1–2 hours of your time. We will do an ini­tial inter­view by phone, and follow-up ques­tions will be sent by email.

What’s In It For You:

You’ll receive a copy of the book when it comes out, your name — and busi­ness name — in print, and of course, our ador­ing thanks.

About Us:

Lau­ren Bacon and Emira Mears met while work­ing for a web­site design firm on what turned out to be the eve of the Dot-Com bust, in Van­cou­ver. It wasn’t long before we decided we weren’t cut out to ful­fill other people’s dreams, and over reg­u­lar sushi lunches and after-work cof­fee dates, we hatched a plan to become our own bosses. Less than six months later, in Feb­ru­ary 2000, we founded Raised Eye­brow Web Stu­dio Inc. (http://raisedeyebrow.com) — a suc­cess­ful, mission-driven busi­ness that pri­mar­ily serves not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tions, women-run small busi­nesses and arts groups. At the time, nei­ther of us had any expe­ri­ence run­ning a busi­ness, but we had a hunch that wasn’t going to be a prob­lem. Our com­bined expe­ri­ences work­ing in small, start-up, high-tech com­pa­nies in the 1990s, where every­one did a lit­tle bit of every­thing, from com­pany invoic­ing to coor­di­nat­ing large office moves — along with work and vol­un­teer stints in the non-profit sec­tor, where job descrip­tions were equally fluid — embold­ened us enough to take the leap. And we sensed that we’d watched oth­ers make enough mis­takes along the way to trans­late some of those lessons into successes.

As busi­ness part­ners, we set out with goals that would be con­sid­ered mod­est and unre­mark­able within tra­di­tional busi­ness mod­els: build a suc­cess­ful busi­ness that would pay us both com­pet­i­tive salaries and allow us the free­dom to pur­sue our per­sonal lives. In six years, we have not only built a highly suc­cess­ful busi­ness which now employs an addi­tional staff per­son; we have also con­sis­tently turned a profit. And as an added bonus along the way, we went from part­ners in busi­ness to best friends, who were just crazy enough to also co-author a book.

After field­ing count­less inquiries from aspir­ing young busi­ness­women on a wide range of top­ics geared at answer­ing the ques­tion “how do I start my own busi­ness?”, we decided it made sense to roll up our sleeves and write the busi­ness book we had longed for when we started Raised Eye­brow. So here we are today, writ­ing it. It’s our belief that there are plenty of other women out there with sim­i­lar busi­ness goals to ours, and who would ben­e­fit from hear­ing about some of the lessons we’ve learned (some­times the hard way) over the years.

Our pas­sion for the entre­pre­neur­ial life is matched by our love of writ­ing. In the same year we started Raised Eye­brow, we launched Soap­box­girls, an e-zine about women’s pas­sions and pol­i­tics. Soap­box­girls pub­lished monthly issues between 2000 and 2002, at which time we con­verted the site into a blog. Among its many acco­lades, the site was selected as a Blog­ger “Blog of Note” in March 2001, and a Yahoo! Pick in July 2002. Soap­box­girls has now made way for our blog about women and busi­ness at http://bosslady.ca.

Please address inquiries, ques­tions, and ideas to the­bosses [at] bosslady.ca

Lau­ren Bacon & Emira Mears

http://bosslady.ca