I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE AN ENTREPRENEUR

by Susan Gates

I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. And I especially didn’t think I would be an entrepreneur who launched her first business at the age of 53! Isn’t entrepreneurship for people in their 20s and 30s?

People with endless energy, boundless enthusiasm and fewer responsibilities than someone with a mortgage, two teenage kids, looming college tuition payments and aging parents?

But when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, I was laid off from my job of almost seven years along with millions of other women. My friend of almost 20 years, Kate and I watched in despair as decades of progress in women’s employment was undermined in a few short months. And we noticed with increasing discomfort that as our shopping habits shifted online, a few large shopping sites were raking in the cash while women were losing ground.

Kate, a veteran of two startups, asked if I wanted to join her in creating a solution to this inequity, and the WMarketplace was born: an ecommerce shopping site for women-owned businesses.

We opened the site to shoppers in September of 2020, with around 50 brands and around 600 products and services. Today we are so proud to have attracted over 500 brands and have 7500+ products and services for sale. We also have created and launched our trademarked HER-Commerce™ instructor-led ecommerce workshops to help women-owned businesses grow their online sales more efficiently and effectively. Over 125 businesses have successfully completed this training and joined WMarketplace as sellers. It has been a wild ride, to say the least.

As a child in America in the 1970s, I was deeply aware of the inequality that women faced (I was seven years old when women were first allowed to open credit cards in their own name!). Through a variety of jobs over 20 years that spanned the public, private and non-profit sectors, I always knew there was something else I was supposed to do, something that would match my passion with the deep skill sets I was developing. WMarketplace has been the culmination of this passion, plus opportunity plus experience. Maybe starting a business at 53 makes a lot of sense after all?

I’m a big believer that business can be a force for good, and we see this every single day on WMarketplace. We have sellers that range in age from teenagers to women in their 70s. Each of these sellers are passionate about her business, and some of them sold online through WMarketplace for the very first time. They may have had a stand at a farmer’s market or sold their products through their networks of friends, but because of the WMarketplace, they now have customers in every part of the country.

They have a new income source. They have a place where they can connect with other women entrepreneurs in our private Slack channel, and Instagram page, and on our quarterly seller community Zoom calls. They have community and resources that they would not have had by going it alone.

These women also purchase from each other. One of the unique aspects of WMarketplace is that we combine products and services together. When a business owner needs a new bookkeeper, a new graphic designer, a new copywriter or product photographer, they know they can look first at WMarketplace and likely find another woman-owned businesses that they can hire. We have seen these connections happen in real time when women are introducing their businesses to each other on our community calls. It’s like watching magic happen and it’s the most wonderful part of owning this business.

Owning a business is unlike any other kind of work I have done. Like parenting, it’s something you can never not think about. I wake up in the middle of the night with half-composed emails, to-do lists, and moments of inspiration and panic running in circles in my brain. Weekends are not really a “thing” any more, except that there are fewer meetings and more quiet time to do my own work. I feel like I’ve gone back to graduate school at least three separate times to gain degrees in digital marketing, corporate investing and all things ecommerce. I now listen to podcasts focused on entrepreneurship and ecommerce, and research current retail trends. And my friends all know that having a glass of wine with me after work will often result in some “spontaneous” WMarketplace shopping. Entrepreneurship is a full-time, full-body, full-life experience. Especially when you are growing a business with a mission like WMarketplace and with the vision to be a BIG business.

Everything we do is with the faces of the women entrepreneurs who have joined WMarketplace in the forefront.

How can we grow so that they can grow?

How can we put more money directly into their bank accounts by attracting more customers to the site and making the customer experience frictionless so they can hit that “add to bag” button and then click “purchase?” Every time I hear a sale go through our website, I get a little dopamine hit as I picture the order landing with our sellers. That was a sale they wouldn’t have made if we hadn’t built this business.

One of my favorite activities is compiling our weekly Her Story, where we amplify the experiences of the women behind the brands. Because it is their hard work we are promoting; it is their experience and creativity and passion that we are amplifying. And if they sell more, we grow as well, and can offer more products, more services and more training. And we can start to shift some of those trillions of dollars (yes, trillions) that women spend each year toward other women-owned businesses.

Why is this important? Why do we need more women entrepreneurs?

So much of our online shopping habits have been shaped by a few large businesses. But what is so remarkable, and what so few people know, is that every single one of these platforms are owned by men. Isn’t that wild? Women make 83% of purchasing decisions but Amazon, Etsy, Pinterest (yes, Pinterest!), eBay, Poshmark, etc, all are owned by men. These are amazing businesses, with incredible reach and success, but we believe there is room for another marketplace that is owned by women, for women-owned businesses. Many of these large businesses have steep fees and commissions, are incredibly complicated to manage and wildly expensive to be successful on. Some of them require their sellers to always offer the very lowest price so that all sales are driven to them, further impacting margins. While competition can be great, we believe that collaboration and mutual support can take us even further. And that is the kind of business we are buildingone where women entrepreneurs can grow and thrive.

We learned some very real and very hard lessons during the pandemic: women need options and opportunity and flexibility. Let’s face it, the working world does not “work” for many, many women. The old 95 schedule that was championed by Henry Ford in 1926 does not take into account the lived experience of half of our population. Family responsibilities remain unequal, requiring us to leave work more often for child and parent care; women still are paid less than men for equal work; schedules are rigid and many work places remain fraught with overt and covert sexual discrimination and harassment. Owning your own business can remove many of these barriers and obstacles and enable women to grow their net worthwhich currently rests at about ½ of net worth of their male counterparts.

While entrepreneurship is not for everyone, given the increasing rates of women creating businesses over the last three years, it’s clearly a desirable choice for many. And I am so proud to have cofounded a business that can be part of this movement for change and empowerment. I know that women doing business with women can change the world.

Susan Gates is the CoFounder of The WMarketplace Inc. With almost 20 years of public, private and nonprofit business experience, Susan brings depth of experience and creativity to The WMarketplace. As Sales Director with the nonprofit Specialty Coffee Association, Susan grew digital and print advertising sales and delivered high-touch sponsorship for events and programming.

https://www linkedin com/in/susan-gates-twmp/ https://thewmarketplace com/

Prior to her work in the nonprofit sector, Susan managed an international sales team for DaVinci Gourmet and managed national accounts for Kerry’s Foods branded beverage sector. In her earlier work for the US Department of Commerce as a Senior International Trade Specialist, Susan guided companies toward expanded international presence, advised senior government officials on trade policy issues and created private/public partnerships.