The Boss of You

I’ve come across a cou­ple of sto­ries lately about high-rolling women entre­pre­neurs — that is, women who are break­ing the stereo­types of female busi­ness own­ers play­ing for small stakes. My first stop was Inc.‘s blog, Fresh Inc., where Athena Schin­del­heim posted a cou­ple of weeks back about the Make Mine a Mil­lion pro­gram. From there, I fol­lowed a link in the com­ments to Rick Spence’s blog, Cana­dian Entre­pre­neur, where he had posted about Profit Magazine’s list of the top 100 women-owned busi­nesses in Canada for 2007 (based on annual sales revenue).

I’ve posted here before about my skep­ti­cism re: assess­ing busi­nesses based on gross rev­enues, but I will allow that it’s still an inter­est­ing met­ric to look at in some regards. For instance, it’s very inter­est­ing to me to note that the #50 slot on Profit’s list brought in just over $8.5 mil­lion — hardly chump change, but nei­ther is it an unthink­ably large sum. (The top slot is occu­pied by Energy Sav­ings Income Fund, with over $1.5 bil­lion.) Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t see a com­pa­ra­ble list of com­pa­nies owned by men; I’d love to know what the range is there. I’m guess­ing the top end is sig­nif­i­cantly higher, and I’d be very sur­prised if the low end wasn’t as well.

For me, per­son­ally, these lists serve pri­mar­ily as a reminder to think big — not because I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in helm­ing a billion-dollar com­pany, but rather because if there’s one thing that’s anath­ema to the entre­pre­neur­ial mind, it’s stag­na­tion. And as such, I like to enter­tain notions like how our company’s sys­tems would need to change if we were plan­ning to grow to that level. Often, this kind of lat­eral think­ing will lift me out of my day-to-day real­ity enough that I’m able to pin­point weak spots I might not oth­er­wise have noticed.

There was a time when I felt only alien­ation when I read these kinds of reports, as though my busi­ness were some­how insignif­i­cant by com­par­i­son. But now that I’m clearer on my own busi­ness goals, I don’t feel so emo­tion­ally invested in the ques­tion of rev­enues. I’m com­fort­able with my def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess, so I don’t worry so much about how other peo­ple define it.

I’d love to know from you whether you read these kinds of lists, and if so, how you inter­pret them.