Melanie Sabelhaus, deputy administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, called on the members of the Riga Women Business Leaders Summit to help foster the next generation of women entrepreneurs during her keynote address in Riggs Library last Thursday.
“Together, we can have peace and prosperity in the world,” Sabelhaus said.
This was the second meeting of the Riga Women Business Leaders Summit. At the first meeting in September in Riga, Latvia, women from the 26 represented American states were partnered with one woman each from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Russia, Ukraine or Belarus in the same business field to share management techniques.
The foreign partners were invited to spend three days staying with their American counterparts to experience how businesses are run in the United States.
In her speech, Sabelhaus recounted her struggle to become a woman entrepreneur. Even after completing her college career in her native state of Ohio, the only job the local Sears had to offer her was selling wigs, she said.
“I learned I could sell,” Sabelhaus said. She said her experience at Sears led her to later walk through IBM’s doors and say, “I’m here. I want to sell computers.”
Sabelhaus’ career brought her to New York where she realized that there was a lack of interim housing for the executive on the move, she said. After leaving IBM, she said she transformed her hardship into a business opportunity, offering fully furnished and serviced housing for businessmen without a home.
“I was the maid,” Sabelhaus said about the first house she put on the market. “You must learn your business from the bottom up.”
The coordinator of this event, former U.S. Ambassador to Finland Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, asserted that the American women in the program learned just as much from their counterparts as the Europeans did from them.
“This is a sisterhood to help promote economic development with jobs and prosperity,” McElveen-Hunter said.
Sabelhaus also recounted what she claimed was a unique struggle that women face when becoming an entrepreneur. Recalling an experience one day on the way to work, when her daughter Alexa said, “Mom, me need you . me need you forever,” Sabelhaus asserted there was a delicate balance between home and business that a woman had to maintain.
“We are jugglers,” she said.
Sabelhaus said that women entrepreneurs have become such an important component to the world economy that the Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) dedicated a whole conference to the importance of fostering women entrepreneurs in the world because of their economic impact and job creation. The OECD asserted that women are founding two times as many businesses than men and that women make 80 percent of worldwide purchases.
“It all can’t be shoes,” Sabelhaus said.
Sabelhaus was present at the OECD conference where she said she met both praise and criticism.
“We live seven years more than the men do,” Sabelhaus said. “That is a quite a challenge.”
To demonstrate the power of the woman entrepreneur, Sabelhaus recounted an anecdote about a meeting with Anette Loo, Taiwan’s future vice-president, at a conference in Taiwan. Loo stood up at one of her speeches and said, “I want to be a woman entrepreneur. I need some advice. What should I look for in a husband?”
Sabelhaus said she looked for Loo after the conference and discussed how Sabelhaus’ American education had little bearing in Taiwan. Loo had also given a speech at a business conference to inspire women entrepreneurs. However, for speaking her views, she was sent to prison for seven years. In prison, she said she promised herself that one day she would change the world for women.
At the conclusion of her address Sabelhaus called on the audience to “work hard, take risks and achieve the American dream.”
Sabelhaus said she has high hopes for the impact of women entrepreneurs in the future.
“Tomorrow belongs to us,” she said.
The next Riga Women Business Leaders Summit is tentatively planned for 2006 and will be held in Jordan to reach out to the businesswomen of the Middle East.