2021 Women in Business

Kittitas County 2021

Women in Business

A special publication of the Daily Record

KITTITAS COUNTY 2021

WOMEN IN BUSINESS PAGE 4

April Rorhbach, Owner at The Botany Shop

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California outlawed the all-white-male boardroom. That move is reshaping corporate America

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Women embark on new businesses.

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COVID-19 was a setback for working women. These first-time entrepreneurs prevailed

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Gender wage gap — saying yes too soon can be costly

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Jennifer Hacket, Owner, Manastash Mapping

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Name: April Rorhbach Profession: Owner at The Botany Shop How did you get started in your business/profession?

I spent many years, about the last decade or so, learning all about botany, houseplants specifically, and growing hundreds of plants of my own indoors. What started out as a hobby quickly became a huge part of my life, and I had dreamed for the last several years of opening a plant store.

What steps led you to your current position?

A LOT of research, listening to advice from family and friends, and meeting with a business adviser.

What have you learned from working in your position?

Countless lessons! In owning a small business you have to learn how to handle so many different roles. Taxes, accounting, inventory management, customer service, social media management. And on top of that, I’ve learned that watering and caring for about 1,500 plants takes...a lot of time!

What challenges did you have to overcome?

Starting a brick-and-mortar store during a pandemic has certainly been challenging, from finding a suitable building to rent to plant shortages and pottery shortages, it definitely hasn’t been easy. I’ve had to get a little creative and be flexible, but it has all worked out in the end.

What advice would you give other women interested in pursuing this career?

Go for it! Do your research, get advice, don’t be afraid to ask for help, make sure it is something you are truly passionate about, and then just go for it! It is better to try and 4

fail than to never try at all and look back later on and regret never giving it a shot. It’s OK to ask “What if I fail?” but remember to ask yourself “What if I succeed?”

How do you balance family/personal demands with work responsibilities?

Honestly, this is something I am still working on, like I imagine most entrepreneurs are as well. I don’t sleep as much as I should, as I’m currently writing this at 3 a.m.…

There are things you have to give up to make time for both. It’s hard to have much of a life outside of the business this early on. It’s been 4 months now since opening the shop.

But I am starting to get into more of a routine now of getting the work done that needs to be done consistently, which has allowed me to have more personal and family time. I am learning that I have to be pretty strict about having days off. And I wouldn’t be able to balance work/life at all without my planner and to do lists.

What was your first job?

My first “real” job was a summer high school gig working the cherry harvest in the lower Yakima Valley where I grew up. I worked in a fruit packing warehouse where I operated the machine at the very beginning of the line that loaded the bins of cherries onto the line.

What did you learn from your first job?

I learned that it was stressful to be in a position where the rest of the warehouse employees down the line would be held up if I made a mistake at my job. It was a quick way to learn that mistakes on the job have consequences that can affect others! But at the same time, it was very rewarding when I did my job well. It also made me learn that I wanted to work in a more creative and fun environment.

2021 WOMEN IN BUSINESS

California outlawed the all-white-male boardroom.

That move is reshaping corporate America Evan Halper Los Angeles Times

corporate boardroom, an institution that for decades refused to evolve — and which guides the direction, culture and financial stewardship of public companies. Even as the courts signal the new rules could collapse legally, the requirements that every public company headquartered in the state have women and members of traditionally underrepresented groups on its board are driving hundreds of companies to make room at the top — and inspiring other states and federal regulators to join California’s push.

“The ripple effect has gone across the nation,” said Betsy Berkhemer-Credaire, chief executive of the Los Angeles-based advocacy group 50/50 Women on Boards.

She predicts that within a decade, “it will be quite an anachronism to remember when corporations had all-white-male boards.”

Recently joining California’s crusade is an even more influential force in the business world. The Nasdaq exchange is requiring nearly all of the more than 3,000 companies listed on it to have on their boards at least one woman and one person of color or person who identifies as LGBTQ — or explain to shareholders why they don’t.

Federal regulators gave that diversity rule a green light in August, over the objection of a dozen Republican senators. The rule extends even to firms headquartered abroad, though they are given more time to diversify.

The lawmakers — 11 men plus Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming — warned in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission that the regulation would hurt the economy by pushing a social agenda.

Yet the companies those lawmakers say they are seeking to protect are hardly sounding the same alarm. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce threw its support behind the Nasdaq diversity plan and a similar proposal in Congress for a national rule.

“We have seen California make a lot of progress,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, who in his previous job as California secretary of state was charged with ensuring the 647 public companies headquartered there followed the law. “It is what makes sense for the nation, as well.”

Analysts predict the New York Stock Exchange will soon unveil its own blueprint to push board diversity that is modeled after California’s aspirations. Goldman Sachs announced this year that it won’t take a company public in the U.S. unless at least two of its board members are not straight white men. Investment giant BlackRock expects companies it aligns with to have at

least two women on their board.

The rapid shift is creating demand for executives such as Darnell Strom, who heads the culture and leadership division at United Talent Agency. The 40-yearold veteran agent whose job puts him at the intersection of entertainment, media and politics had earlier figured an ossified corporate culture left boardrooms closed to candidates like him.

“The makeup of them were people who do not look like me,” said Strom, a Black millennial. “We all felt it was this exclusive club we did not have access to.”

Now, Strom gets regular calls from board recruiters. He recently became the first person of color to join the board at Wynn Resorts. The Las Vegas company had earlier added three prominent women to its board in an overhaul driven by the fallout from sexual misconduct allegations against former continued on next page

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Dr. Maria Rivas joined the board of a medical tech firm called Medidata a few years ago, she was a novelty: The company had never had a woman in that role.

Medidata was no outlier. Rivas, chief medical officer at Merck, had impressive credentials when she breached the rarefied world of boardrooms in 2018, but much of corporate America wasn’t looking for candidates like her. “It is unfortunately comfortable for humans to go with people who look like they do,” Rivas said.

For hundreds of public companies, that meant filling boards exclusively from their networks of familiar faces — typically white men.

Then California outlawed the all-whitemale boardroom.

The state’s requirements that publicly traded corporations diversify their boardrooms were ridiculed as quixotic by conservative columnists and some corporate chieftains. The courts are still threatening to erase the quotas, the first of which were signed into law in 2018.

But California is having the last laugh.

Even as the mandates on women and people of color have become a flashpoint in the culture wars, companies across the country are embracing California’s boardroom diversity directives. Women now control more than a quarter of corporate board seats nationwide — 50% more than they did before the 2018 California law requiring women on boards was passed. Companies are also scrambling to recruit people of color as other diversity mandates begin to take effect.

The state’s crusade is reshaping the

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continued from previous page Chief Executive Steve Wynn.

The business case for diversifying a board, Strom said, is obvious. Companies are confronting cultural, security and public health shifts that demand they widen their expertise at the top, and the old guard of board directors isn’t equipped to meet the moment.

Wynn, for example, is an operation that needs to tap into fast-changing social trends.

Yet Strom is the rare director on its board with a background in entertainment and media. Other companies are consumed with cybersecurity or pandemic safety concerns, yet have nobody on their boards to take a lead on those issues.

“If you were recruiting for a board 20 years ago, you weren’t thinking about cybersecurity or digital marketing or global supply chain,” said Tracey Doi, the chief financial officer and group vice president for Toyota Motor North America, and also a board member at two public companies — City National Bank and Quest Diagnostics — that have several women in their boardrooms.

“This past 18 months is a critical juncture for companies to step back and ask: Are we operating on a model that is sustainable coming out of this pandemic?” Doi said.

“Are we embracing a different mindset for how we will serve customers within their communities?”

The inspiration for California’s diversity push came from Europe, where several countries had imposed mandates. Norway more than a decade ago required that at least 40% of corporate board positions be filled by women. France, Germany, Italy and other European nations later created their own quota systems. France this year went even further, directing companies to fill at least 30% of all their top executive posts with women by 2027. The European rules tend to be mostly gender-focused, as opposed to American targets that also aim to boost racial and ethnic diversity.

Researchers are conflicted on whether a more diverse board helps increase profits, but findings that it does from heavyweight firms

such as Morgan Stanley and McKinsey & Co. are solidifying support around the push in the U.S. The Pacific Legal Foundation, the conservative group taking a lead in resisting the California rules, has not been able to entice a single public company to join its court fight.

“There were not any corporations that we could find that were willing to stick their necks out as a plaintiff,” said Anastasia Boden, the lead attorney on the case.

“Nobody wanted to be seen as opposing this law, because they were afraid that they would be perceived as anti-woman.”

The plaintiff the Pacific Legal Foundation has instead is Creighton Meland Jr., a retired Chicago lawyer who owns shares in OSI Systems, a California-based security and medical equipment firm.

The foundation’s argument that the law forces shareholders such as Meland to discriminate in favor of women when they choose board directors is getting traction in court. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, finding that Meland’s claims have merit, reversed a lower federal court’s dismissal of the suit.

“This law gets equality exactly wrong,” Boden said. “It requires the very thing that we’re trying to get rid of in society: doling out benefits and burdens on the basis of the characteristics that we are born into. This is perpetuating a myth that women can’t make it to the corporate board without help.”

The lawsuit argues companies were already moving toward gender balance on their boards without quotas. That point is in dispute.

“People who say this was happening anyway are completely wrong,” said Doug Chia, a fellow at the Center for Corporate Law and Governance at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey. “The needle had not been moving at all before California acted.”

Former California Gov. Jerry Brown described the law as legally shaky when he signed it, but he said the state had no choice but to push ahead. The #MeToo era was well underway, and Brown wrote in his signing

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statement that many companies and leaders “are not getting the message.”

Brown signed the 2018 law over the objections of the California Chamber of Commerce, which led a coalition of 30 organizations, including the state’s major restaurant, grocery and wine grape grower trade groups, in fighting gender quotas for corporate boards. Nationally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still opposes hard quotas like California’s, even as it supports the Nasdaq blueprint and the proposal in Congress, which would force companies that fail to diversify to explain themselves to shareholders but do not impose penalties.

By the time Brown signed the quotas into law, state lawmakers had already tried more gentle means, urging companies to bring more women into their boardrooms with a nonbinding legislative resolution in 2013.

Companies ignored it.

“We weren’t able to get companies there using reason and data,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, the former state senator from Santa Barbara who championed the mandates in the Legislature. “So we required they get there. California has a history of leading the nation in a variety of areas, and this was a first.”

That law, Senate Bill 826, required companies to have at least one woman on their board by 2019, and as many as three women — depending on the size of the company — by the end of this year.

There were at least 115 California public companies that did not have a single woman on their board in 2017. Now there are only five — or just 1% of the state’s firms on the Russell 3000 index. Yet most companies still have work to do.

More than half of California’s public companies need to add women to their boards by the end of this year. Meeting the state’s stepped-up requirements demands that at least 335 more women take seats on company boards in the next few months. And the state is still a long way from achieving gender balance on company boards: Only 8% of the state’s public companies have gotten there.

Another state law, Assembly Bill 979, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last fall, requires California-based public companies to have on their boards by the end of this year at least one person of color or person who identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and as many as three such board members by the end of 2022. While Black representation on boards has grown amid the nation’s reckoning on race, people who are not white or straight still hold only 18.4% of the board seats in the top 1,000 public companies nationwide, according to data released in August by executive data firm Equilar.

Washington state followed California’s lead early this year, passing its own requirement that corporate boards include women. Lawmakers in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan and New Jersey are considering similar measures. Several other states, meanwhile, have recently passed laws that call out companies failing to diversify their boards, by requiring they disclose board demographic data to shareholders.

The shift has touched off a recruiting frenzy among companies, with many creating board seats specifically so they could add positions for women.

“These laws make a huge difference,” said Rivas, a Cuban immigrant who grew up in Puerto Rico.

Medidata is a New York firm, but she said California’s move to outlaw all-male boards played into the effort companies like it are making to diversify. New York, for its part, recently started requiring companies to disclose to shareholders whether they are making any progress toward gender balance on their boards.

Rivas has since joined the board of Cooper Cos., a much larger medical device firm based in California, at which she became the first person of color to serve.

“We need more laws like California’s across all the states,” Rivas said. “It will result in companies that are more in touch with our society.”

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For many women in Kitittas County, 2021 presented itself as an ideal time to either start a business on their own or be part of a start-up venture.

The following is a recap of some of the women who took the step to open the doors to a business in 2021

Liz Stone, Pearl Street Books and Gifts, 421 N. Pearl St. Quotable: “My husband and I started looking around for areas that we wanted to live. We looked at Wenatchee, then the book store here came available.

I’ve always wanted to run a book store and we fell in love with the area.”

Gianna Sengsavang, Seng Tong Thai Cuisine, 1713 S. Canyon Road Quotable: “I have a passion for cooking that I learned at a very young age. My grandfather was an excellent teacher. When I put together a dish for our customers, it’s like cooking for family.”

Gianna Sengsavang and her husband, Pino, of Seng Tong Thai Cuisine

Liz Stone of Pearl Street Books

Kirsten Van Swearingen, Laconia Market & Café, Snoqualmie Pass

Dolores Wheeler, Brewster’s Coffee House & Cafe, 407 N. Water St., Suite 101

Quotable: “We have two main groups we plan to serve, locals and people coming over the pass in travel or transit,” co-founder Kirsten Van Swearingen said. “There is a restaurant for dine in and a coffee shop that gets pretty busy.

But there’s really not any options for healthy grab-and-go food.

“We’re really excited that the café side of our business will serve items like breakfast sandwiches, deli sandwiches, salads, soups and really healthy options people can take with them. On the grocery side, we know there is no grocery options up at the pass, so now people have a store if they are up here for the day for recreation or an extended stay.”

Quotable: “I like good wine, so we offer Gard Vintners red,. Everything we have here is locally purchased. We serve all Kittitas County local. We have local craft beers. Our vegetables, breads, muffins are all fresh. It’s all from here in the valley.”

Emmie Nguyen, Young T and Tea, 117 E. Fourth Ave. Quotable: “A lot of people in town didn’t know what bubble tea is.

Students already know, so we’ve been introducing bubble tea to the rest of the community, People seem to like trying something different.”

Emmie Nguyen of Young T and Tea

Jill Johnson. Julep Southern Kitchen and Cocktail Bar, 429 N. Main St. Quotable: “We want people to enjoy the atmosphere and feel like they’re out of Ellensburg for a few hours.

We like to provide a new experience. I have family all over the south. My husband and I have been here 10 years and managed bars all over town. This is my first restaurant and we’re really excited.”

2021 WOMEN IN BUSINESS

Jill Johnson with her husband, Kyle, of Julep Southern Kitchen & Cocktail Bar. 7

COVID-19 was a setback for working women These first-time entrepreneurs prevailed

Samantha Masunaga Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES — Life had stalled La Kesha Wash’s dream of working in interior design.

More than a decade later, she decided to give it a go — amid a global pandemic that was hammering the economy and shutting businesses.

“I was like OK, you’re not getting any younger, so this is the time. If you’re going to do it, just do it,” said Wash, who quit her job as an employee of the city of Alameda a few months ago to focus on getting her business, Meticulous Designs, off the ground.

The pandemic has disproportionately affected women, with significant numbers laid off, leaving their jobs or reducing work hours to care for children being schooled at home or other family members.

It had another effect too: Women, especial l y those who had ne ver 8

before started a business, took up entrepreneurship, spurring a wave of firsttime business ventures that experts say is a pandemic silver lining worth investing in.

For women who are the primary income earner in their household and whose jobs were affected by the pandemic, taking that leap was a financial necessity. For those who are part of dual-income households, with a greater financial cushion or less spending obligations, the pandemic gave them time to think about what they really wanted to do with their lives.

“The pandemic just created a little more space for people to pursue the things they’ve been thinking about or wanting to do but didn’t have the time or capacity to do when they had to commute to work or sit at a desk or just be in the office,” said Hayya Lee-McDonald, chief executive of Next Chapter Property Solutions and founder of the Women Small Business Owners Network group on LinkedIn.

Human resources platform firm Gusto found that 49% of people who started businesses during 2020 were women, up from 27% in recent years, according to a May survey of about 1,500 business owners who used Gusto’s software.

The most recent census data on female business owners nationally dates to 2018 so it’s difficult to quantify the trend, but many women who run entrepreneurship groups on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook have reported scores of new members, many of whom are first-time business owners.

The Women Business O wners Supporting Women Business Owners group on Facebook had about 1,000 members in November 2019; by August 2020, there were 15,000 and today, there are about 21,000, said Amber Powers, the group’s founder and president of Powers Digital Marketing.

“A lot of people through this time

2021 WOMEN IN BUSINESS

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have had some hard and harsh realities to deal with and sit with, and I think that entrepreneurship makes an incredible amount of sense for a lot of people,” she said.

New female entrepreneurs have gravitated toward coaching, virtual assistant and e-commerce businesses, particularly as remote work and virtual conferencing software became the norm, according to founders of women’s business groups on social media.

The pandemic’s emphasis on virtual connections helped Jessica Bruny and her mindfulness coaching business, JessBeU, reach people when and where they were.

The Upland resident had the idea for her business for several years but chose to finally start it in June 2020.

“This virtual presence has also opened a plethora of doors for people to connect with people around the world but also see how they can be able to share ideas, start

businesses, meet new friends, begin new relationships,” she said. “It’s like no other.”

Alexa Stanfill graduated from law school in December, into a job market with few opportunities for entry-level lawyers.

She needed a job, and she had long thought about starting her own business, particularly in the horse industry. As an equestrian herself, she knew horseriding pants could be expensive and uncomfortable.

In January, Stanfill, her mother, Shelby, and friend Kara started Esprit Equestrian Wear, a Murrieta-based e-commerce company that started off selling lowcost horse-riding pants ($60 per pair, as opposed to the traditional cost of $150 to $200 on the low end).

Stanfill set up a website and negotiated with manufacturers, and within six months, the company had sold almost 4,000 pairs of pants. Her merchandise has since expanded to include belts, sun shirts and jewelry.

Though it was scary to start a business during the pandemic, Stanfill said the flexibility of running her own company quickly paid dividends. She can choose when she works and does not envy the long hours and rigid work schedules of lawyers. She looks forward to planning longer-term travel.

“Starting this e-commerce business will give me more freedom to do that than be

attached to a desk,” Stanfill said.

A Facebook group called The Female Entrepreneur Community also exploded in membership during the pandemic, from 880 members at the beginning of the year to nearly 45,000 by August, said Whitney McQuade, the group’s founder and a business coach.

McQuade said she started the group to provide an inclusive community online because she and other Black and biracial women she spoke with felt “we were not represented in the online space.”

Women of color were hit harder by job losses during the pandemic than white women, and many struggle to rebound professionally, with families disproportionately hit by COVID-19 and juggling child- or family-care obligations.

Other online groups shied away from discussing racial justice and its effect on businesses, and McQuade wanted to create a space where a diverse community felt it was seen and heard.

“It was creating a really safe space for women to come together during these trying times,” McQuade said. “There were a lot of people who had no idea how to run a business but needed to receive feedback, support and guidance to make it work so they could provide for themselves, provide for their families.”

A March survey conducted by Gusto and the National Assn. of Women

Business Owners found that of the women who started new businesses during the pandemic, nearly half were women of color. They were more than twice as likely as white women to say that they started their new businesses because they were laid off or worried about their financial situation.

“This is a very inspiring trend of women of color turning obstacles into opportunities and creating new businesses, but the conversation can’t end with, ‘This is an inspiring trend,’” said Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto who wrote the survey report. “We have to find ways to support these new business owners and make sure their businesses don’t fail.”

Economic and entrepreneurship experts say that would require more investment in small-business development centers, low-cost consulting and other programs that give women the education and tools to learn and grow their businesses. “ Women are very, very strong in terms of gaining social support, family support, informal social networks,” said Lois Shelton, a professor at Cal State Northridge who specializes in entrepreneurship and strategy. “Where women have somewhat of a disadvantage ... are accessing these business networks.

That’s where men are very strong.”

Spurred by the setback women have faced in the workplace during the

pandemic, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brit Morin started Selfmade, a 10-week online entrepreneurship seminar for women.

Since June 2020, nearly 2,000 women ages about 20 to 70 have gone through the program. Of those who attended, about half had recently become unemployed or furloughed, and the other half had a side job that they hoped to make into a fulltime gig. Many women wanted to join the program to work on what they’re most passionate about, Morin said.

“With the pandemic, a lot of people have reevaluated their life,” Morin said.

“They want to have a job that’s meaningful to them.”

Esmeralda Jimenez recently went parttime at her property administrator job to focus on growing her Mexican pastries and bread business, Clementina’s Sweets.

She founded it in San Diego in late 2019 as a passion project for weekends and offhours. After the recent deaths of family members and friends, Jimenez decided to take the leap and focus more on what she loves.

Although it was difficult to leave the security of her job, Jimenez knew she had to give up something to keep growing the success of Clementina’s Sweets, which is named for her grandmother.

“Life is not easy,” she said. “Doing what you love, that’s what makes life.”

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• Integrity • Commitment • Experience 9

Gender wage gap — saying yes too soon can be costly Carla Fried Rate.com By one estimate, over a 40-year career the persistent lower pay for women translates to a lifetime earnings penalty of $500,000 less than what men earn (for white women) to more than $940,000 less (for Black women) and $1.1 million less (for Hispanic and Latino women).

Among the causes: gender wage bias by employers; the unequal division of household work that causes many women to take time off to care for family; and a disinclination at times among women to forcefully negotiate pay, especially since such assertiveness at times leads to a backlash.

Now, another cause has surfaced. New research finds female undergrads rush to nail down their first job faster than men, and in doing so may miss better offers.

Job search anxiety Academics studied job-hunting habits and initial salary offers for more than 1,300 undergrads at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University between 2013 and 2019.

There was no gender difference in the number of job offers, nor the tendency to turn down a job offer. But female students were more inclined to accept a job earlier than male classmates, by an average of one month.

Among those accepting offers during the summer (August) heading into their last year of school, women earned 17% less than men, on average. By graduation, the wage gap had narrowed to 10%. (The data takes into account different majors — marketing vs. finance — and GPAs.) Granted, that 10% gap is still problematic — it worked out to an average gap of around $6,000 — but the research suggests that being a bit more patient can pay off.

The overconfidence game Why the difference between genders in timing?

The well-established behavioral fact that men tend to be more confident — overly confident — than women is at play in the job search. The researchers estimate that 10

about 25% of the wage gap can be attributed to men’s greater confidence.

Waiting, of course, raises the risk one might not land a job. Men were more OK with that, and more comfortable with risk-taking than women.

What women graduates can do —Negotiate if you get a summer job offer. If you interned at a great place, and they offer you a job before you head back to school for senior year, that’s a great achievement.

But slow down. Are you absolutely sure you want this job?

If the answer is yes, don’t retreat into a “I can’t believe how lucky I am” stance. C’mon, they’re lucky too, right?

Do not tell yourself all you care about is getting your foot in the door. A lower starting salary tends to stick with you for years, and it means raises and next jobs are built from a lower base.

—Research what’s competitive. There are plenty of websites, such as PayScale and Glassdoor, that provide salary range info. And asking people you know in that job, or who had that job a few years ago, is going to be even more helpful. This is where your social network and alumni relations can help. Or see if you’re just a LinkedIn connection or two away from someone who had your job a few years ago.

—Ask for more time to make a decision. Undergrads recruited at BU’s business school typically have a maximum of two weeks to accept an offer, and 40% are given just a 2021 WOMEN IN BUSINESS

one-week decision window.

The researchers estimate that if employers extended the offer time by a month it would reduce the first-job gender wage gap by 40%. That’s not likely going to become standard practice any time soon. In the meantime, when you get an offer, politely and professionally express your enthusiasm, and then pivot to requesting that you have a few more weeks to sort through the decision.

—Get negotiating help. If your school offers any free seminars on salary negotiating or how to approach the job hunt, you are nuts to not take advantage of that. In junior year, ideally. There are going to be some useful nuggets in there.

You might also want to hire a salary/negotiating coach for some online tutoring. Ellevest, an investment and financial planning service run by women, for women, offers 1:1 salary negotiating sessions at an affordable price, as does the Muse website.

If you get help before you even start the job search, you can practice how to answer the “What sort of salary are you looking for?” question that is going to come from HR pretty early in the job-hunt process. (Hint: Give a range, and make the low end 5% to 10% higher than what you will be happy to accept. Giving your negotiating counterpart room to negotiate is key to a successful negotiation.)

Name: Jennifer Hacket Profession: owner, Manastash Mapping How did you get started in your business/profession?

After a 16 year career with the Defense Department, mostly stationed overseas, my family moved to Ellensburg in 2002. I worked as a consultant for a few years and then, when my son started kindergarten, I decided it was time to find a new focus.

I did Resource Management MS at CWU, and discovered GIS (computer mapping). After I finished my program, I decided that I wanted to focus on mapping and that I wanted to try to work for myself.

What steps led you to your current position?

I started Manastash Mapping, a GIS consulting company, as I was finishing up my resource management program.

I initially focused on projects for local non-profits but eventually decided to expand the scope. I named the new project Washington Hometown and developed a dataset of all recreation opportunities in the state that I use for web maps, apps and analysis.

What have you learned from working in your position?

Recreation is complicated, working for yourself is more satisfying but a lot more stressful than having a conventional job, and flexilibity and a willinngess to adapt is critical for success.

What challenges did you have to overcome?

I am much more interested in the technical side of the business rather than the business side and spend too much time working “in the business” instead of “on the business.” I have had to work to learn the business end of things and still have a lot of work to do in that direction. I have been very fortunate that there is lots of support for people starting small businesses, and have taken a number of free or low-cost courses that have helped me learn how to run a business.

What advice would you give other women interesting in pursuing this career?

Be realistic about how much of a risk you can take - if you need your income to pay the rent, then start slow and don’t give up your primary job until you have the income actually coming in. Ask questions and find resources that can help. No one has all the answers. Don’t be afraid to dream.

How do you balance family/personal demands with work responsibilities?

It is always a challenge to balance personal/family and work.

Working from home and in my business gives me the flexibility to adjust my hours around the needs of the family, whether that was picking the kids up when they were young, or driving out 2021 WOMEN IN BUSINESS

for my daughter’s college graduation in Minnesota this June and then getting my son settled in college in Colorado in August. Now that the kids are older and out of the house, I no longer have the in-person tasks, but still try to be there for them if they want to talk or need help during the day. I often take a few hours off during the day to deal with personal/family obligations, but then work some more in the evening after dinner. Sometimes the hardest thing is to find time for myself -z but the consequence of not taking care of myself is that I become cranky, tired and do not do my best work.

What was your first job?

I worked at the Boulder Public Library when I was 14. My first adult job was an analyst with the Defense Deparment.

What did you learn from your first job?

I enjoyed the work but also found that I disliked being overscheduled, trying to juggle school and the job. From my DOD job, I learned the importance of asking the right questions, finding creative ways to answer the questions with available data, and always keeping in mind the limitations of your information so you don’t make assumptions that cannot be supported.

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