Business panels promote success of women entrepreneurs

With the help of the School of Business, a program is working to make women entrepreneurs more successful by providing them with customized business advice and mentoring.

“It’s invaluable for young businesses that have very little business experience to have an advisory board to help make key decisions. That’s gold,” says Larry Cox, director of the school’s Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. “It’s the Wisconsin Idea – bringing what’s going on at the university to the people.”

Called LEAP, for Launching Entrepreneurial Advisory Panels, the program sets up and supports volunteer advisory panels of experts who can advise women business owners in specific areas. LEAP advisers come from accounting, marketing, consulting, finance and other backgrounds, and are often entrepreneurs themselves.

Cheryl Vickroy, principal consultant at the Bachner Vickroy Group and a member of a LEAP advisory panel, says the advice can help take the businesses to the next level.

“It’s like having a board of directors that doesn’t cost you anything,” says Vickroy, whose Madison firm does small-business consulting. “As an adviser, it’s great to get out in the community and use your business skills to help women-owned businesses grow.”

Program participant Linda Remeschatis, president of Wisconsinmade.com, says the experience has helped her business become more profitable and focused.

“They helped me tighten my financials and gave me lots of marketing ideas,” says Remeschatis, whose four-year-old Madison-based business is an Internet food and gift store featuring state-made products. “We did a detailed business plan that helped them understand my business better and helped crystallize in my mind where I was going.”

Started four years ago at the business school, LEAP has created advisory panels for 23 women-owned businesses in the Madison area. More than 100 business people have served as LEAP advisers.

To participate, a business must be owned or co-owned by a woman, be an existing business and not a start-up, have employees or plans to add employees, have under $2 million in gross revenues, and a potential for growth, improved profits and positive changes. Some of the businesses in the program are owned by man-woman teams, with the woman playing a principal role.

Marian Walluks, who coordinates LEAP, says the program helps growing businesses make contacts in marketing, banking and finance that they normally wouldn’t have. And, she says, the volunteer advisers gain new perspectives, too.

“When a question about banking comes up, they don’t just turn to the banker to answer it. They all learn about how to solve problems as a team,” Walluks says. “Participants get different things out of it. Some do major, in-depth business plans, while others use the panels to get over the hump with a specific marketing or finance problem.”

Cox says studies have shown that a small percentage of people who start small businesses seek help from outside professionals.

“It’s a way of getting the perspectives of people who have been there and are experts in their field to fill in the knowledge gaps,” he says.

LEAP is a collaborative effort supported by the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship and the Women in Business Council. The program’s chief corporate sponsor is the law firm of Cullen, Weston, Pines and Bach, with additional support from the QTI Group and CUNA Credit Union.

Walluks says LEAP is always seeking volunteer advisers and entrepreneurs to participate in the program.

For more information about LEAP, visit www.bus.wisc.edu/leap or call (608) 262-3828.