She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Jessica Johnson

When the members of the She Owns It business group gathered toward the end of 2012, they looked back over the year’s accomplishments and ahead to their goals for 2013.

Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay, said she was most pleased that her company had gone from being reactive to proactive. “Every year, we seem to learn from our mistakes and try to plan and do things better,” she said. For example, December is typically when Bari Jay starts shipping its dresses for the spring season (there are spring and fall seasons).

Normally, when Christmas rolls around, she said, she worries that shipping may spill over into January and that stores may no longer accept Bari Jay’s dresses. This year, however, Bari Jay shipped most of its dress samples in November. This meant that stores had more time to re-order dresses and also that stores that budget poorly were less likely to run out of money before ordering.

Another group member, Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, asked how Ms. Parker managed to ship the samples early.

Normally, she responded, she does a schedule for just one season. But this time she made one for the entire year. “We’re just doing things so early, and then when we have problems, which we always do, it’s just giving us …”

“… a cushion,” said Ms. Lord.

Ms. Parker said there were other examples as well. She feels she and her sister, also a co-owner, have improved at planning in general. “I’m not going to say things don’t come up and we don’t have to react to them, but it doesn’t seem as horrible when you’re not reacting to everything on your plate,” she said.

Looking ahead to 2013, Ms. Parker knows she must address problems at her biggest factory, which is in China and continues to have quality issues. At a previous meeting, she told the group that she and her production consultant traveled to the factory in October to attempt to rectify the situation. Still, she continues to lack confidence that the factory has the will to improve. When dresses fail to live up to Bari Jay’s standards, she said, the reaction is, “Your dresses are too complicated, and it’s hard to get skilled workers, so too bad.”

“For a while, we tried to dumb down our designs,” she’d said at the earlier meeting. But sales fell. “I don’t want to make dresses that are cheaper and easier to make if no one wants to buy them.”

For now, she has retained a quality control firm to inspect the dresses in China. But she knows that’s not a long-term fix. “I don’t want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars having people inspect my dresses because the factory can’t make them right,” she said. “I need to get the factory to make them right.”

The factory is a holdover from when her father ran the company, and its performance has steadily declined over the last few years as the effects of the Chinese labor shortage have intensified. While Ms. Parker continues to explore other production options, extracting herself from this factory, which also stocks Bari Jay’s fabric and makes its patterns, will be complicated.

Jessica Johnson, who owns Johnson Security Bureau, said that as “hokey” as it might sound, she viewed surviving another year in business as her biggest accomplishment. Ms. Lord said she felt the same way.

Ms. Johnson explained that she considered it “major” to get up every morning and still want to do her job. “The big victories are really the little victories,” she said, adding that the challenges small-business owners face “would make most people crawl in a corner and just die.”

“Amen, sister,” said Ms. Lord.

“There are many days when nothing seems to go your way,” Ms. Johnson said. As a business owner, she said, you have to come to grips with the fact that, “If this person doesn’t have the right attitude, or this client doesn’t pay me on time, or this project that I’ve been bidding on for six months doesn’t come through, it will be O.K.” And just when you do, she continued, “There’s something else that comes and knocks you upside the head.”

“That’s what it’s like to run a business,” said Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit.

The big accomplishment, Ms. Johnson said, is “keeping it in perspective and finding the wherewithal to wipe off your knees, put on your smile and do it again the next day.”

Thinking about the coming year, Ms. Johnson said her goal was to continue to grow, but not necessarily at the same pace. She wouldn’t say she wanted to “slow” the pace for fear of jinxing herself, but said she planned to grow the company in a more managed and thoughtful way.

“Security services are really a commodity to most people,” she said. “Nobody’s like, ‘I’m going to have lunch with the security company to figure this out,’” she added. Still, Johnson Security is finding there are exceptions among some of its clients who view their relationship with her company as more of a partnership.

In my next posts, we’ll talk about the goals and accomplishments of the other group members.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/business-group-members-talk-about-surviving-another-year/?partner=rss&emc=rss