Nell Merlino never dreams small. The creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day and the Make Mine a Million $ Business program has announced the new Make Mine a Million $ RACE, which kicks off in January.
The goal is twofold:
1. Encourage hundreds of thousands of women entrepreneurs to grow their business to revenue goals of $250,000, $500,000 or $1 million and more.
2. Create 800,000 new jobs to kick-start the nation's faltering economy.
The race will be a year-long marathon conducted via the internet. "We're setting up a way where thousands of women can be in this competition and win prizes and awards throughout the year," Merlino says. Everyone who hits her revenue goal will receive a prize, ranging from house-cleaning services to business coaching. There will also be a prize for the individual who does the best in each state at each of the three revenue goals. The grand prize is $100,000 in cash plus a year's worth of PR and marketing assistance.
Early registration begins December 1, with the contest kicking off in late January.
Each participant will receive a pre-race packet with helpful tips and fill out a questionnaire to help contest organizers zero in on her area of greatest need. Based on that information, the women will receive reading lists, suggestions of websites to explore, courses they can take and services they can use to grow their business.
"It's like a full-body workout for your business," Merlino says. "What we've learned is that if they answer these questions, we can give them enough clues" to fix whatever is stunting their business growth.
"A lot of this is connecting the dots for people," Merlino says. She cites one example of a finalist in the Make Mine a Million $ Business competition in Albuquerque. The woman didn't win and, during a follow-up session the next day, she began to sob. "She's not crying because she lost," Merlino says. "She's crying because she knows what she lost because her financials are so screwed up. And she's been afraid to deal with it because she thought it meant that she had to go out of business." After 15 minutes with a pair of financial experts, Merlino says, "She was totally relieved. She'd been entering some things wrong so that it looked 10 times worse than it was. She was totally fine.
"There are hundreds of thousands of business owners who are out there with those kind of demons thinking, 'I'm two steps away from the end,' when all they need to do is talk to someone who's knowledgeable. But the majority of us still work by ourselves. So you're talking to your 4-year-old about it."
By the same token, Merlino says it's often a mindset that keeps women from growing their business. For example, a button maker who won three months of free coaching came back to the competition six months later having grown her business from $170,000 to $300,000. What she learned from the coaching is that she needed to hire help.
The woman has MS and gets exhausted when she gets stressed. "She kept thinking she had to keep it small. Her husband and her son helped her when she wasn't able to work," Merlino says. "Now she's got a whole crew and is making more money than she ever imagined she would make. [She's] on her way to a million dollars and managing her MS."
And that's how Merlino expects to achieve her second goal of kick-starting the nation's economy. "The only place where there's job growth is in the small-business sector. Women are poised as entrepreneurs to be extremely helpful by being able to create thousands and thousands of jobs," Merlino says. "If 1 million women get to $1 million, it creates a minimum of 4 million jobs. On average, if you're growing your business, you're hiring four to six people." Of the race, Merlino says, "We were planning to do it before the economy went in the tank. Now there's an urgency to it."
Merlino says the credit crunch won't be a significant drawback for women business owners because women know how to build a business without funding from outside sources. "Women only got 2.4 percent of venture capital last year, which is why I'm truly confident about this. We are small enough, nimble enough and flexible enough to deal with these conditions and come out winners."
Merlino is confident that women will flock to the site. "What do they have to lose? It's $100--you're going to know what's right with your business, what's wrong with it and you're going to find out how to fix it."
She adds that it's money well spent. For the price of a birthday dinner out, women can solve problems that have been nagging their business for years.