Small Business Stories – WEDO
Linda Stevenson: Our time to concern is giving very good service to our clients. We know we have great products. That’s not a problem as their products are fantastic and meet the needs of small business and in constantly using innovation. We also are unique about national students. I don’t believe any other bank accounts, financial organization as our women’s business development program. In fact, we were identified as one of the top three financial organizations by department foundation that for giving, providing access to specifically for women business owners.
We have over 330 women business applicants. These are lenders that are specially trained to focus on the need of women’s business owner. That’s our first level that we send out there but also what we do is we develop programs and support programs that will provide women with the information and resources that they need to grow their business and connect level.
Because we know women are going to business at record numbers, the challenge that they face is how to grow to that next level. They flatten out and so a lot of what we do is to help them gain the information resources. So they can gain access to travel, access to market and access to technology and two P programs are the Athena Power Link Program which I personally I’m very passionate about and it’s a mentoring program that provides women business owners with the advisor panel business professionals. Free of charge for one year. And we have literally introduced that to in the 16 cities in the United States of America.
The other one is our Women’s economic development outreach tour, also known as WEDO and what this is basically is a coalition of women and leadership roles that have come together from the public and private sector to put together programs to reach out to women and to provide information and resources.
Now the people providing that information resource are successful women business owners themselves. So it’s a matter of helping this women brought in there focus as well because we introduce them to a larger community so they can be a fun their businesses.
We just take on another step here. It’s an eighth year program that we’ve had at Nashville City and growing across our footprint and this year we’re doing something uniquely different that I’m actually very excited about. And we’re being innovated as well because we had to grow just as much as any women businesses under that. What we’re doing is we’re going to have it in five states, 11 cities on October 21. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to be broadcasting across and I’m not a technological person but broadcasting it out and at the same time at 9:00 Central Time and 10:00 Eastern time, and it will be in all this different cities, 11 cities and we’re going to have a panel of four high level successful professional women.
And they’re going to be talking about the innovative ways they have grown their businesses. So these women are going to help this other women learn their tricks of the trade and they’ll be in interactive Q and A as well. So, our audience of women in these 11 cities will be able to ask questions directly to these women business owners and inflict their brains so to say to get this information.
Following that National Broadcast which will run in hour and a half then each of these 11 communities will have their own individual program. So now they’ll hear from their local successful one business owners. So it’s a national prospective and then a local and across over and what it does it broadens everybody’s network.
And then what we have is we have successful women, an IT, we have Susan Wilson Solovic from sbtv.com which is to be our moderator, which I’m very excited about because I’ve met her and she’s phenomenal. We have a woman who actually had the dream of going within Hollywood and came home and says you know that’s not for me and started a very successful business selling industrial casters of all things and then we have an agency as well, an advertising agency. So we have a broad array of talent and these women are all very successful in their own right and they’re going to share their best practices.
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