We recently held a series of webinars designed “to help black women business owners discover various ways to land capital.” The webinars, titled, “How to Finance a Black Women-owned Business in 2018” were held on July 18th, August 10th and August 24th.
The feedback from the webinars is good. Eighty five percent (85%) of the respondents to our customer satisfaction survey found the webinar useful. Seventy one percent (71%) rated the webinar excellent.
Of the forty or so women on the webinar (and they were all women) forty two percent (42%) have just started looking for business financing. Fourteen percent (14%) have been looking for business financing over the past one to six months, and twenty eight percent (28%) have been looking over the past six to twelve months. Fourteen percent (14%) have not attempted to get financing yet, but are simply exploring options.
This dovetails with the recent efforts we have observed in this sector. The table below lists some of the new funds that have been created to finance Black women owned businesses:
We believe this is a recognition of the higher than average returns that might be available in companies founded by those in overlooked communities.
As we noted in a
recent article in the Journal of Financial Planning :
“Common sense will tell you that in an environment, a culture, and an economy that is getting more diverse all the time, that the diverse company is going to have more customers, and this should lead to higher revenue and higher profits, assuming their costs are under control. They should do better over the long term than the non-diverse company.
We researched that [premise] and found that that is the case, but there is a but; it really depends upon the industry you’re in. If you’re in a consumer-products type of industry, of course, more customers is better than fewer customers, and that’s all it boils down to.
We did some of this initial work for the magazine, DiversityInc. We did the statistical and investment analysis and found that our thesis about the higher alpha for a portfolio comprised of companies that are top performers within the sector diversity/inclusion was correct.”
We will continue to provide information in this space, and will schedule another broadcast of our webinar. If interested, please email us at info@creativeinvest.com.
Journal of Financial Planning. September 2018 - 10 Questions
