Starting and growing a business is tremendously difficult, but for many women founders the journey is saddled with its own unique obstacles and triumphs. A recent roundtable hosted by SmartCompany and Dell Technologies brought together three inspiring women founders to discuss their personal experiences and the strategies that have helped them succeed. Here’s how community, resilience and technology are empowering women-led businesses.
Building supportive communities
For many women founders, balancing family life with business demands can feel isolating. Carrie Kwan created Mums & Co to address this issue by building a supportive community where entrepreneurial mothers can share their experiences and find solidarity.
“The inspiration behind Mums & Co stemmed from my experiences as a mother and as an entrepreneur,” she said. “I started Mums & Co back in 2016 […] because I felt so compelled to make a difference for women, so they didn’t have to feel like they were choosing between their families or their careers.”
Kwan highlighted that, for women founders, community is so critical — especially in terms of ‘co-parents’ and networks, such as other parents or local communities, who can provide plenty of support in juggling responsibilities.
“I have an unspoken arrangement with another parent. If I’m running late for school pick-up, they take the kids home for me, and that really helps with that guilt we can face as working mothers. Find yourself a co-parent and help each other there.”
For more than a decade, the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) has brought women entrepreneurs together from around the world to help them connect, scale their businesses, and succeed. Joining DWEN provides access to a global network of women entrepreneurs, the latest technology, funding resources, and best practices to grow your business.
Resilience in the face of endless challenges
Resilience emerged as a recurring theme, with all three panellists reflecting on the importance of being both determined and adaptable. Katrina McCarter, CEO of Marketing to Mums and Partnership Mastery, spoke on how she’s cultivated resilience throughout her career, quite often through partnerships and collaborations.
“I stumbled on [partnerships] in my first business,” she said. “I had three small kids under five and no money. I spent some of my shareholders’ money on a fairly expensive print campaign and absolutely nothing happened. I reached out to another founder across the other side of Australia, and we exchanged our startup stories. On a whim I said to her, ‘Hey, would you like to do a joint competition together?’ She said, ‘I’m in, but how about we reach out to someone else as well?’”
After wrangling the largest parenting community in Australia at that time, McCarter ran an incredibly successful 10-day partnership for a joint competition, during which time she attracted 7,500 new members.”
McCarter’s advice for women founders revolved around starting with a focus on business objectives and looking for partners who can help you reach those goals.
“Get clear on what it is that you’ve actually got to offer, what might be valuable,” she said. “Always lead with what it is that you can do for a partner, rather than pitching your partnership about you and your business, because that just becomes white noise.”
Leveraging technology for business growth
Technology can play an indispensable role in helping women founders scale up strategically. Katrina Lawrence, Vice President of Enterprise at Dell Technologies, touched on how tech-enabled solutions empower business owners by giving them clearer insights into their operations and customer needs.
“We view technology as an enabler,” she said. “If we look at the pure technologies that we believe are going to be the most pertinent moving forward, absolutely you hear artificial intelligence all the time, and it means something different to everybody. Then there’s data analytics — so how do you grab the data that comes out of your business to understand your market better, to understand your customers, their demographics, their buying cycle?”
For Kwan, technology has been integral to Mums & Co’s success as a digital-first platform. She spoke about how AI is helping her deliver a more personalised experience for her community members.
“We use data to tailor the content and interactions with individual members,” she said. “AI tools will continue to be leveraged to manage communities like ours more efficiently. That might be through moderating content, or it might be through providing personalised recommendations.”
Day to day, technology has enabled Kwan to meet her members’ diverse needs – even in a 24/7 environment — thanks to tools like chatbots that can support users at any hour.
Lawrence added that technology’s role is not just about efficiency, but also about maintaining the integrity of your brand. She advised founders to prioritise data security and work with reliable partners to avoid some of the most common pitfalls that founders can find themselves in.
“Your brand is everything,” she said. “If somebody hacks into your data, if somebody manipulates your data, steals it, changes it, locks you out of your socials — whatever that might be — the brand impact can be enormous.”
The entrepreneurial journey is rarely a straightforward one, especially for women founders who have to manage extra challenges around family, community and structural inequities. But surrounding yourself with a supportive network and making strategic use of technology can put you on the path to long-term success. As Lawrence put it: “Having people to talk to, inspirational people you can listen to — that’s what makes all the difference.”
You can watch the roundtable Navigating the entrepreneurial journey in full here.
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