Please welcome the new director of our Women's Business Center, Cindy Butler. The WBC is particularly focused on supporting new businesses and those in the community who are typically underserved, especially women, minorities, immigrants and refugees, and more.
Before joining CBP, Cindy served as Program Director for the Council of Ethical Organizations, Executive Director of Unmarried Equality, and co-founder and Executive Director of the Village Net. The Village Net's mission was to help women business owners in villages in Ghana and Kenya.
She started working with entrepreneurs as Director of the Women's Business Center at Community Capital Development in Seattle, Washington. Partnerships with local business groups, community colleges, and Seattle University resulted in the WBC coaching some 600 entrepreneurs and providing training to over 5,000 participants annually.
Prior to living in Seattle for 15 years, Cindy was a well-known meeting planner and consultant in the Washington, DC area and nationally. She received her pre-law bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a master's in international business from Seattle University.
We interviewed Cindy to get to know her a bit better:
1.What motivates you to work with entrepreneurs?
I am an entrepreneur myself, down to my DNA. Both of my grandfathers and my father owned businesses. I have always been the kid who started clubs, sold things, connected others. I had my own consulting business for 7 1/2 years and through that learned something important -- I really like starting things, but I don't like running them! So the work with my clients was exciting and gratifying and satisfying, but the operations part -- not so much. I now consider myself an "intrapreneur" and love being part of a group where I can help start things, grow markets, find new markets, and still know what my paycheck will be and what day it will come. I want people to have the successful businesses they envision, but to grow them sensibly, without detriment to the rest of their lives.
2. How do the businesses here differ from those In Seattle, Ghana and Kenya?
The businesses are different, but entrepreneurs are the same wherever they are. Seattle is somewhat similar to the DC Metro area in that the population is highly educated, well-read, and has an income level much higher than many other parts of the U.S. So businesses here are usually a result of a pipe dream someone has had for a while, and when the individual retires, or is between jobs, or in the midst of some other life change, it seems like a good time to pull that idea out and see if it's viable.
For the women in Africa, the businesses were all about subsistence. In Kenya, the women make things that they sell to tourists. In Ghana, they would travel to larger markets and purchase items to bring back for resale in the villages. Small amounts of money made an enormous difference. Although microloans are a powerful tool, they do not eliminate poverty. Business loans were often used for medical emergencies, or school costs, or to fix a hole in a roof. We learned to accept and deal with that. The reasons for owning a business were generally not to realize a personal dream or to even amass wealth, so much as they were about developing a sustainable income stream for the family.
3. What are you most proud of in Seattle that you would like to duplicate here?
We did so many wonderful things in Seattle. I would love to work with immigrants and help them create jobs for themselves. We helped artists become business-people who made profits for a change. We opened the eyes of students to the possibilities of business ownership. I worked with adults who were being left out of the job market. I helped single mothers create livable incomes for themselves. And, if I help someone realize that their business idea was not really viable before they sunk a lot of energy and money into it, then I consider that a success too. In Seattle, we created a lot of jobs and income for people who are not typically invited to the small business party, and I'd like to do that here.
