Girl Power
There’s nothing like a successful 16-year-old entrepreneur to make you feel bad about yourself.
We need to somehow bottle the chutzpah Cassandra Saba from Chandler, Ariz., has right now.
She started a designer jewelry business at age 11 and now spends six hours a day, after she finishes homework, making custom jewelry. She’s even gotten about 50 orders so far from her
Web site.
“I have a goal -- to be a famous jewelry designer,” she says matter-of-factly.
Hopefully she will go on to become the Bill Gates of the jewelry world. But there are forces working against her. For some reason many of us women seem to lose our ambition mojo as we enter adulthood.
Women make up 51 percent of the population but own fewer than 30 percent of companies in the United States, according to the
Small Business Administration.
There’s a great article called “Do Women Lack Ambition?” written by psychiatrist Anna Fels in the Harvard Business Review that looks at this issue.
In fact, the women Fels interviewed hated the word ambition.
“For them,” she writes, “ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one’s own ends. None of them would admit to being ambitious. Instead, the constant refrain was ‘It’s not me; it’s the work.’ ‘I hate to promote myself.’”
Maybe girls need an extra hand.
I came across Cassandra when I was reading about a young women’s entrepreneurship conference sponsored by
Guardian Life Insurance Co. This is the eighth year the company has held the event, which includes cash prizes for teenagers who “demonstrate exceptional business skills.”
Cassandra was a finalist last year from a group of 4,000 nominees, and won $1,000. She plans to put the cash toward stones for her jewelry or college.
The girls are judged on budding entrepreneurship, taking steps toward financial independence and making a difference in the community, explains Emily Viner with Guardian.
The company started the conference in 1999 to help women with financial literacy and to introduce them to entrepreneurship, Viner adds.
Now, about 100 to 125 girls aged 12 to 16 attend the events, which are held in different locations throughout the country. (The conferences this year are scheduled for Nov. 6 in Athens, Ga., Nov. 8 in Rome, Ga., and Dec. 6 in Union, N.J. Check out
the web site.
About 20 to 25 female business owners also attend and act as facilitators for the day. The highlight for many girls, Viner says, is the question-and-answer period when they get to ask the successful entrepreneurs how they got to where they are today.
I asked Viner if they’ve tracked the young women to find out if they continued with their dreams of entrepreneurship, and she says they are in the process of looking at that right now.
I’m going to guess Cassandra will probably make a name for herself some day. She plans to attend business school and also the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Since selling her first piece -- a three-strand turquoise necklace for $150 -- when she was 11, business has been booming.
One big negative is she doesn’t quite know how much of a profit she’s made because she pours most of the money back into the business.
One big positive: her inspiration. “My mom runs her own charm school. She’s my role model,” she says proudly, even though Mom makes her go to bed if she’s up too late making jewelry.
