When she was growing up in East Providence, Lori. J. Bedrosian had a hard time convincing her mother to let her play ball. Girls like her just didn’t do organized sports, said Bedrosian, 35, who today as New England manager and Vice President for Fleet’s Women Entrepreneurs’ Connection spends her days linking women business owners to the financial and technical resources they need to hit home runs in the business world.
“For a long time I thought I wasn’t coordinated,” Bedrosian said, shaking her head at the oddity of such a notion now. “It’s because I wasn’t allowed to play.”
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Knowledge is Bedrosian’s business at the Women Entrepreneurs’ Connection, which was originated in 1997 by Teresa L. Cavanagh and officially launched two years ago as a service of BankBoston.
A special unit of the Small Business Services group at Fleet, the Connection is designed to serve the unique needs of women business owners and entrepreneurs by connecting them to sources of debt and equity capital, technical assistance and agencies, organizations and programs that focus on issues that matter to women.
Women, you see, do business differently than men, Bedrosian said, a fact that BankBoston and now Fleet have been astute enough to see. They make decisions differently, are more oriented toward information, service and support and typically ask more questions before they buy.
And now, because women have become such a dominant financial force, with women-owned businesses increasing at twice the national average and comprising nearly half of the small business marketplace, how a bank interacts with females can mean the difference between capitalizing or not on a major market share.
At the Women Entrepreneurs’ Connection they pride themselves on knowing the needs of women business owners as they evolve from startups to growing businesses to firmly established companies, providing appropriately geared capital, technical assistance and help with business plans and connections to peer mentoring groups and private client services. Fleet also publishes a glossy, richly informative guide for women business owners that not only walks readers through the basics of small business management but provides candid wisdom from five female entrepreneurs who have already been through the process.
“Women-owned businesses have their own approach to achieving success and very specific needs for support in attaining it,” Cavanagh said, and whatever the stage, it’s the Connection’s mission to be the critical link.
Despite the sharing and identification that are so important to women, who weren’t raised like men to be as aware, subconsciously or not, of basic business strategies such as networking for getting ahead in the world, there’s nothing touchy or feely about it. “I keep it to business,” said Bedrosian, who three years ago, well before the Connection got started in Rhode Island, was organizing monthly breakfast meetings in Providence where women could gather over coffee and eggs and connect.
“It’s been three years now, and people are doing business,” Bedrosian said, remembering how she’d plan her seating so that folks could mingle with more direct contact than what might happen at a typical sort of Business After Hours. “There’s not that direct contact.”
Speaking of direct contact, when BankBoston merged last year with Fleet Financial Group some folks assumed the Connection might be disbanded, when in truth it “only got stronger,” Bedrosian said.
They increased their number of dedicated consultants, expanded their market to include New York, New Jersey and Maine, and although it’s already been in full operation in New England already, they are preparing for a “re-launch” celebration in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in early October, “to explain to folks it’s the same, only better.”
The local re-launch comes on the heels of June’s announcement of a new $2 billion financing and investment initiative at the Connection that’s available in part through Fleet’s Business Credit Express, a loan program that guarantees a same-day response to a simple, one-page application, with term loans and lines of credit for amounts up to $100,000. Larger loans and commercial mortgages will be made through the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The expansion is part of Fleet’s resolve to be a catalyst, partner and “bank of choice for women-owned businesses throughout the Northeast,” said Robert J. Higgins, president of commercial and retail banking at Fleet.
No other bank in New England plays such an intimate, face-to-face role in the community, said Bedrosian, who spends her days “pounding the pavement” and serving as a personal voice and information source at local sites like the Center for Women & Enterprise on Claverick Street and the Minority Investment Development Corporation on Weybosset Street. Bedrosian was active in establishing the Center along with its executive director, Carol Malysz, and she maintains a continuous partnership with the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and works closely with many others, including Business and Professional Women’s (BPW) local chapters.
In expanding the Connection Fleet and BankBoston have spent no money on advertising, it’s been all sponsorship and word-of-mouth, Bedrosian explained as her phone rang for the 10th time in as many minutes in her temporary quarters high in the old BankBoston building on Westminster Street.
They also cut no special deals and offer no special products and rates to women entrepreneurs, just because they’re women. Bedrosian and her counterparts are also not independent consultants, nor are they salespeople, although if FleetBoston has a product they know would be useful to a business owner they’ll say so.
But Bedrosian, a wife, mother of three and Bryant College graduate with 14 years of banking experience at BankBoston and now Fleet, is strong about the Connection being more about education than pushing products or signing loans or even tracking phone calls and trying to drum up statistics. “The main thing is that we want them to be satisfied.”
And again, keeping women satisfied makes perfect business sense – after years of cultural ill-preparedness and being delegated to lower professional rungs, by last year there were 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the United States, accounting for 38 percent of all companies doing business, 27.5 million employees and generating $3.6 trillion in sales.
In Rhode Island, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, women-owned businesses account for 35 percent of the state’s 37,371 businesses with annual sales of less than $1 million, as well as 35 percent (1,453 out of 4,152) of businesses with yearly sales greater than $1 million.
For more information about the Women Entrepreneurs’ Connection and the next Women in Business Breakfast, call Bedrosian at 278-7266 or visit www.fleet.com/smallbusiness
