Geri Stengel's blog

Even in a slow economy, opportunities emerge that, if you use them well, can rocket your business to success.

Women-owned businesses start life with significantly less capital than those owned by men. How can a business grow if it starts life undernourished? Yet, if you’re a woman business owner, your business will start with less and raise less as it grows. If you settle for that situation, you’ll likely end up with less to show for your trouble, a smaller, less successful business than if a man had come up with the same idea and energy, according to a key Department of Commerce survey of women-owned companies across the U.S.

Competition is fierce; to distinguish itself, a small business needs to stand out from the crowd. Customer service is the way to do that.

How do you create more businesses owned by women, especially businesses with revenues in excess of $1 million dollars?

What do investors know that donors don’t? They know that the right team is critical to growing a thriving organization.

No Jewish mother could want more for her daughter than to be fixed up with a doctor. Even better, the meetup led to marriage of sorts. Cheryl Swirnow, a Human Resource and insurance specialist, and Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH, became business partners.

“What was the board thinking?” When a nonprofit runs off course, this is question that most people ask. And so it was with the panelists described instances of fraud and malfeasance. The answer, apparently, is that the boards in question weren’t thinking, a lapse that can leave them open to prosecution.

Sometimes chance encounters happen for a reason. I’ve recently met two women who, for very different reasons, will play a part in rebuilding the Tri-State area after the devastation of Sandy.

Rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy will be tough for small businesses, those workhorses and job-generators of the economy but the Saturday after Thanksgiving is an opportunity for communities, shoppers, and businesses themselves to ratchet up the recovery.