The Livonia-based founder of the Great Lakes Women’s Business Council knew in college exactly what she wanted to do with her career: break down barriers and provide resources and networks for women business owners.
Shortly after earning a graduate degree from the University of Michigan, Michelle Richards founded the nonprofit council, which offers loans to small business owners, peer group mentoring programs and executive education training, among other offerings that focus on primarily serving female business owners.
“My goal — my goal — was to help create an organization that removed those barriers so (women) could achieve what they needed to achieve,” said Richards, who is also the organization’s executive director. It was the early 1980s, and she said many people couldn’t imagine a woman owning a big business. “It’s just that there were some barriers and prejudices inherent in society that prevented them from easily getting to that point.”
It was not easy for women to own a business. The US government wasn’t even tracking how many women-owned businesses there were until after the passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988, making it difficult for her to argue why her nonprofit needed funding.
Forty years later, the world has changed, but the mission has not.
The Great Lakes Women’s Business Council has awarded $8 million in loans to small business owners who have created approximately 1,800 jobs. The nonprofit organization now represents more than 1,400 women’s business enterprises certified by the National Women’s Business Council, a certification that means a business is at least 51% owned, controlled, operated and managed by a woman or women. These businesses generate about $8.6 billion in annual revenue and employ 48,000 American workers, the nonprofit said.
Earlier this year, the organization was named a Women’s Business Center of Excellence by the US Small Business Administration.
As the Great Lakes Women’s Business Council celebrates its 40th anniversary, the Detroit Free Press spoke with Richards about the organization’s journey, the progress it’s made and the work that remains. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
QUESTION: How did you come up with the idea to create the Great Lakes Women’s Business Council?
ANSWER: I was getting a master’s in social work and majoring in community organizing. What I realized is that if I wanted to make things better for women in this country, the fastest way to create social change is through economics. The difference here is that small business has a different role in the economy than in trade training. You can teach someone to be a plumber, but if you teach them how to own a plumbing business, then you teach them how to have an asset to pass down to their family, become successful, and become a community leader , which creates the element of social change. . I understood that concept. I didn’t know how I was going to do this because there were no other women’s business centers. So it was a lot of rock rolling up the hill at first.
Q: How did you make the leap right out of school to start a nonprofit?
A: Growing up, I had some learning disabilities, and my mom was such a great role model that (she said), “These aren’t weaknesses. These are just challenges you have to deal with.” So I really always leaned into the hard stuff. I didn’t leave her. I (also) don’t believe in waiting to do what you have to do. I felt like it was my goal, and so if it’s your goal, go for it. The other was that I knew that if I put my mind to it, the plan would work.
Q: After you received $60,000 from the city of Ann Arbor to start the organization, what was the first thing you did?
A: We had several community hearings from small businesses – mostly women and minorities – who talked about the (difficulties of) being able to get business loans. There were many institutional biases. What we did is we started as a loan program, giving loans to businesses that couldn’t get financing from conventional sources. That’s how I became a banker, in a sense.
(The first loan I got) was for a woman-owned business that was going to do remote administrative assistance (for) other businesses. These days virtual assistants are a big deal and everyone is doing it, but in those days, it wasn’t, but I saw a future for it.
It was an interesting moment in time. I had a lot of people tell me when I went to foundations, corporations, cities and counties for money that it was really a bad idea. That’s basically what they said.
Q: When you were hearing from people that your nonprofit wasn’t a good idea, how did you handle that? Did this reaction ever make you question what you were doing?
A: Well, to be honest, I knew otherwise. Part of it is the arrogance of a 24-year-old … you know everything. The other part of it was that I just thought, “They haven’t seen it yet. They don’t understand the vision.” The truth is, I had to tell him. After it was a model, I thought, “They’ll be back.” They did. In particular, because I took community organizing classes, which talk about rebuilding and shaping communities, it helped me understand that it was about creating a foundation and a model that people could understand. Even if it was a small model, they would be able to say, “Oh, yeah, look, I get it now.”
Q: What is that model?
A: We focus on providing opportunities and resources that, frankly, would not be typical of other business development organizations. We continue to be a community lender rather than taking people to the bank. We have a couple of million dollars in our portfolio right now for the loans we took out. So if you can’t get funding – or often enough funding – we’ll step in and help you get what you need to do.
The second is that we have a women’s business center which is very unusual. We don’t focus on teaching women how to go into business. We teach women in business how to succeed, how to achieve sustainability and attract second-stage growth. How we do that is we have a peer group mentoring program where two or three women who are very successful will mentor anywhere from six to 15 women who are emerging. They share their networks, share their contacts and share their wisdom. The women in the group work together and sometimes enter together for contracts and opportunities. It’s a way to drive what I call exponential growth.
To be successful you must have capital, you must have capacity and you must have customers. What this does is it provides them with networks of women that continue to connect further and further.
Q: How has your mission evolved over the past 40 years?
A: Our mission hasn’t changed much in terms of really empowering those left behind in the economy to be successful. What has changed is the sophistication of some things. One: our team. Many of our team members have master’s degrees. Most of them have MBA. People should come here with business experience (working in a small business) or have one. The other is that the level of programming we offer is very sophisticated and focused on another level. We’re not trying to replicate what other bands can do. We are not learning how to write a business plan. We are teaching them how to create a highly successful, dynamic and sustainable business.
We also offer women’s business certification, which is one of the best ways to gain a customer base. Most Fortune 1000 companies recognize this certification by women from the National Council of Women’s Business Enterprises. We are one of 14 organizations nationwide that certify women and that helps them get into big corporations.
We also teach them through the Women’s Business Center how to put together their skill statement, a deck, to meet buyers and make connections for them with those buyers.
Q: More broadly, have you seen much progress in terms of women’s ability to get credit and get the tools and resources to have a successful business? Or is there much more progress to be made?
A: yes and yes. So we’ve seen tremendous progress (for example, with getting loans). But at the same time, women still receive less money in loans on average than their male counterparts.
Q: Looking ahead, what do you still hope to achieve?
A: Well, I think it’s twofold. One is that we are working more towards women helping women. There’s something really powerful about that, because we need to teach the women’s business community to invest in each other. There are more efforts around them for mentoring, training and financial support of the organization to pay for scholarships and other things for women.
The second is that I’m not leaving today, but we need to have a really clear path of how I’m going to leave behind my skills, talents and history within the organization. I am a strong believer that legacy is not what you create, it is what you leave behind. So I spend a lot of time making sure that I have the strongest leadership team here and making sure that everybody here understands not only the mission, but every knowledge, every network that they need, now it’s my main job to make sure that have it so that the day I leave, the organization not only doesn’t stagnate, it shines. New voices will even take a more prominent place and give it a new freshness and some new perspectives, and that’s really exciting. I will be both sad and happy to see this happen. Sad because I won’t be part of it, but happy that the organization will continue. What is most important is that we have always been relevant, regardless of the situation.
Contact Adrienne Roberts: amroberts@freepress.com
