Women-Owned Million-Dollar Firms by the Center for Women’s Business Research (CWBR), research underwritten by AT&T and KeyBank (January 2004)

In 2002, the CWBR under Dr. Myra Hart, director, surveyed women owned businesses selected from the Dun & Bradstreet database of publicly-held firms. A total of 278,924 women-owned businesses were identified as earning one or more million dollars a year (5.7% of the CWBR estimated total of 4,893,400 compared to 1.8% of all women owned firms as estimated by the Small Business Administration). Firms solely-owned by women numbered 112,712 (40.4%) and firms equally-owned by men and women numbered 166,212 (60.6%).

The SBA 2002 data indicates that less than 2 out of every 100 women who opt to go into business for themselves earn 67% of all the revenues. The other women earn far less than $50,000 a year, on average.

Of the 278,924 women-owned million dollar firms in the CWBR study, 84.4% earned between $1 M - 4.9 M (235,411), another 9.2% earned $5 M - $9.9 M (25,661) and 6.4% earned $10 M or more (17,851).

Thus, women-owned million dollar firms represented 6.6% of all million dollar firms, and 94.3% of the women-owned businesses earned less than $1 M (or 4,614,480).

According to the SBA data, million dollar women-owned businesses achieved $5.4 M in average annual revenues per firm by being different from their female peers and more like their male counterparts. Successful women-owned businesses were likely to be in the wholesale trade, construction, manufacturing, and transportation, communications and utilities industry sectors. Successful women-owned businesses were less likely to be in the services and retail trade sectors. That is exactly where smaller women owned businesses concentrate.

Fifty percent of million-dollar women-owned businesses have a board of directors (about the same as male-owned million dollar firms). The women-owned million dollar firms are more likely than smaller women-owned firms to seek the advice of an external accountant or financial advisor (40.7%), an internal accountant or financial advisor (25.7%), followed by a female mentor (18.3%) or a male mentor (9.3%). Only 13.3% seek the advice of a board of directors.

Based on these estimates, about 117,100 million dollar women-owned firms have a board or directors. Yet, only about 15,600 actively seek the advice of their board resource.

Million dollar women-owned businesses are more likely to have a partner (46%) compared to smaller women-owned businesses (22.4%). Of those with partners, 70.3% have 1 partner, 14.5% have 2 partners, 4.3% have 3 partners, and 7.2% have 4 or more partners.

Of those who partner, 64.7% have a male partner, 21.8% have a female partner and 13.5% have a mixed partnership.

Of those who partner, 68.4% do so with family members, 17.3% partner with business colleagues, 7.5% partner with friends, and 6.8% have a mixture of partners.

We have a choice. Looking at the data, do we sit back and “blame” discrimination, male-dominance or other too easy old fashioned targets? Or, for a change, might we say to ourselves -– some women have learned how to build successful businesses? We have the opportunity to learn from them.