Serial entrepreneur, author and women in business expert Margaret Heffernan, who recently featured in Channel Four’s Secret Millionaire, will speak next week at a seminar in Galway on female entrepreneurship being organised by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA ). The seminar will take place at the Clayton Hotel on Thursday May 6 at 6.30pm.
The bestselling author of How She Does It - how female entrepreneurs are changing the rules for business success, will discuss the psychology of women as entrepreneurs, what drives them and how their motivation contributes to their success.
Ms Heffernan will also draw comparisons with other countries such as the US. In the US almost half of private companies are female owned (10 million ), employ more than the Fortune 500 combined, and generate sales of two trillion dollars.
In the EU and OECD twice as many men are early stage entrepreneurs as women. In Ireland, however, by 2007 Irish women entrepreneurs were ahead of their EU counterparts in terms of women setting up their own business.
According to a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM ) report, from 2005 and 2008 there were on average 2,700 new business start ups each month in Ireland of which almost 1,000 were by women, with one in three of those businesses in the retail, hotel or restaurant sector.
By 2008, with the impact of the recession, that gap increased again with almost three men for every woman accounting for early stage entrepreneurs, reflecting the risk adverse nature of female entrepreneurs.
Recessions, however, according to Margaret Heffernan can be a great time to start a business particularly if you are female. “There's more talent around than ever, partners are more open to newcomers and consumers are starved for new and interesting products. Governments always look to entrepreneurs to save the economy and all the evidence shows that women in particular excel at such times.
“I can't think of any better way to revitalize an economy than to back women's businesses. They're profoundly motivated, understand the market and have the enormous stamina every new venture requires. What I will never understand is why everyone appreciates that investing in women makes sense in the developing world -- but they can't seem to see that it makes sense here too,” states Ms Heffernan.
Margaret Heffernan has risen to top positions in large corporations - and she has also built businesses from scratch in both the US and Europe. She is currently Professor of Entrepreneurship at Simmons College, Boston, and Executive-in-Residence at Babson College. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge University.
In her early days, she worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned dozens of documentaries and dramas. As a television producer, she made documentary films for Timewatch, Arena, and Newsnight.
She was one of the producers of Out of the Doll's House, the prize-winning documentary series about the history of women in the 20th century. She designed and executive produced a 13-part series on the French Revolution for the BBC and A&E.
