Misty Reich is a business advisor, coach and former Fortune 500 Global HR executive. Four years ago she left her corporate career to begin the journey of building her own luxury skincare line (due to launch late summer 2021) and lifestyle website for women on-the-go 35Thousand.com. Formulated with female multitaskers in mind, the brand is born out of Misty’s own experiences of managing her sensitive skin whilst juggling family life and a global travel schedule.
Passionate about supporting women in business, Misty talks about why we should be putting female entrepreneurs front of stage.
On finding talent….
I started 35 Thousand 4 years ago (in 2017) and until then my career was focused on talent, people and HR. So for all of the things I am learning (and don’t yet know) about running a beauty and lifestyle brand, what I do know a lot about is what makes people tick and how you motivate them to step up into roles that will inspire others.
One thing I learned over my 23 years of focusing on people resourcing is that ‘Talent Begets Talent’. If you want a particularly skilled type of person on board, you need to find that type of person at the top to attract them, because that is fundamentally how the human brain and heart works – we believe what we can see.
If you want to build a team of strong engineers for example, go find an awesome, inspiring engineer, give her a big meaningful role and then ask her to bring more talent like her. This dynamic of like attracting like is one of the biggest reasons why I am passionate about promoting and supporting female entrepreneurship. Seeing a female entrepreneur is the best way to of understanding that you too can be the same.
On why we need female entrepreneurs…
If you believe that female entrepreneurs are important to society as a whole – and I do – then we need more women starting and running businesses in order for others to follow suit. We need women in positions of authority to inspire others and to educate women on how and what it’s like to succeed, as well as how to manage a team through the inevitable failures.
Why women? Because pre COVID, success rates for women-run businesses were booming as shown in this article from the World Bank, “Female entrepreneurs make significant contributions to economic growth and to poverty reduction around the world. In the United States, for example, women-owned firms are growing at more than double the rate of all other firms, contribute nearly $3 trillion to the economy and are directly responsible for 23 million jobs. In developing countries, female entrepreneurship is also increasing—there are about 8 million to 10 million formal small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with at least one female owner.”
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COVID-issues aside, there are still major barriers to success to be broken down – women still face great obstacles that can stunt the progress of their businesses, such as social constraints, lack of affordable childcare support and lack of capital . According to research done by Kauffman.org women-owned start-ups even pay higher interest rates and take on more collateral than male-owned businesses.
Why we must elevate female-led business now…
Depending on what source you refer to, anywhere between a quarter and a third of women-run businesses will not have survived the COVID experience. For many, juggling home schooling whilst managing a team, and making big decisions has been nearly impossible. With women more likely to work in service industries and face-to-face businesses such as tourism, retail and hospitality these were hit hardest by social distancing measures.
This ‘She-cession’ as it is now becoming known is a tremendous loss here and now to our economies but the ripple effect will extend for years as young women who might have been employed and inspired by female business owners are left without work and without that important role model to inspire further entrepreneurship. It is a huge concern of mine that the COVID crisis may undo many years of gender equality in the workplace.
However, there is potentially one silver lining. It is true that, based on historical trends and following the 2008-2009 recession, minority and women-owned businesses were huge job creators and stabilizers of the economy . In short, we may well see a boom in female entrepreneurship.
On personal role models…
Personally, I was lucky enough to grow up with a mom who owned a beauty salon. I would watch and listen as she dealt with staffing issues, customer challenges, building and plumbing headaches, set-backs and successes large and small. Her leadership is probably a key reason I had the confidence to come out of a safe corporate career and bet on myself to build something meaningful.
It is my deepest hope that what we are creating at 35 Thousand – a skincare line but also a lifestyle website packed with content aimed at supporting women on-the-go and their increasingly busy lives – that will help and encourage not only our team but a broader segment of women, younger and older, to bet on themselves and build the thing that they are called to build for themselves, but also for all of the women who need to see what can be.
35 Thousand will launch their skincare line towards the end of summer 2021. Head to their website atwww.35thousand.com for beauty, wellbeing and career tips and tricks as well as their series How She Carries On which interviews inspiring women and entrepreneurs about how they manage life’s juggle.
