SUCCESS CHARACTERISTICS OF FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS IN TODAY'S RAPIDLY CHANGING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

摘要

In 1984, the HomeHealth Care business, We Care Health Services was founded, and today employsrnover ten thousand people, has 60 offices across Canada, and is the largest home health care company.rnThe majority of owners are female nurses who had no prior knowledge of running a business nor inrnmanaging people prior to starting their businesses in an established marketplace. The systems for therncompany were all developed from the ground up [1], which meant that we knew the management andrnmotivational requirements of our business very well. Our survival rate was above 95% after 5 years,rnwhich is above the 15% of individual businesses and 82% of franchised businesses, statistics that arernoften quoted today. Some of the success of these business entrepreneurs was attributed to the successrnprinciples taught to them as part of the franchise system, and which were largely contained in Hill's epicrnworks [2] [3], as well as in additional systems that the authors developed such as "End PointrnVisualization". However, the work of Hill was based on interviews with 500 of the most successfulrnmales in America at the time of his research and perhaps this research does not totally describe thernreason for the success that today's entrepreneurial women are experiencing. The authors observed thatrnthese 60 women entrepreneurs, not only applied the seventeen Hill principles to varying degrees, butrnalso applied additional principles that allowed them to flourish in the business world of HomeHealthrnCare in Canada, which is rapidly changing, arduous and an environment of continual cost cutting. Basedrnon interviews with 30 of the most successful women operators in the We Care franchise system, and 10rninterviews with successful women outside of the Health Care industry, the authors distilled additionalrnprinciples, which were instrumental in contributing to their flourishing in a tremendously competitivernand volatile industry, and in the rapidly changing environment that we all find ourselves in. Thesernperspectives will be described in this paper.