8. Use technology as a weapon. In today’s Darwinian business environment, if you don’t deploy technology offensively, your competitors will. Guess how that story ends. O’Leary didn’t mention it, but when Walmart became the nation’s dominant mass market retailer in the 1980s, its executives received detailed sales reports every Monday morning about which products moved in each store the previous week and which didn’t. It took competitors weeks to get the same information. Most of the latter are long gone today.
9. Make sure the boss does not always make the most money. O’Leary told attendees that in his successful female-run businesses the highest paid employee is almost always in sales and the CEOs are second. It’s not clear if the compensation consultants for giant public companies who get hired and paid lucrative fees by CEOs would agree, but in small businesses where sales growth is of paramount importance, the point is well-taken.
10. Know that business is war. “There are winners and losers,” O’Leary said. “It took me almost a decade to learn this.” You know all the clichés. Nice guys finish last or, in a line largely attributed to great football coach Vince Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Statisticians probably would argue that O’Leary’s sample of 32 portfolio companies makes for intriguing anecdotal evidence that warrants further investigation but is too small to draw sweeping conclusions. But regardless of how much weight one wants to assign to his gender-lens findings about the common traits of successful female entrepreneurs, they are valuable observations relevant to any advisor or client running a business.
Evan Simonoff is editor-in chief and editorial director at Financial Advisor magazine.