Northwest Arkansas Business Sector Sees Influx of Women

Local women are going into business for themselves in record numbers.

Lance Sexton, center director of the Small Business Development Center at the University of Arkansas, says 45 percent of the prospective entrepreneurs his organization has consulted this year have been women. Only 40 percent have been men, and the rest have been combination of the genders.

“In 11 years with the SBDC, I’ve never seen our consulting stats reflect that before,” Sexton says. “I think over the years females are realizing that there are more business opportunities for them, and that we can provide a lot of information that can help.”

Johnelle Hunt helped her husband, J.B., start J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. from scratch in 1961, and it’s now the largest long-haul carrier in the nation. She says she’s encouraged by the rising number of women starting businesses of their own in Northwest Arkansas.

“We’re seeing more women rise to management-level positions than we used to at our company,” says Hunt, a board of directors member and corporate secretary since 1972.

“I love to watch both women and men come in at entry-level positions and rise up to management. If they’re committed to their work, that’s how they get there. In my case, I just did what I had to do to help our company grow. That’s what any business owner has to do to be successful.”

A portion of the SBDC’s consulting activities include helping small business people apply for grants and loans. Fifty percent of all the loans packaged and funded by the UA’s SBDC through July were for women business owners. Sexton says in the past that number was skewed much more in favor of men.

In addition to consulting, the SBDC provides information services through its business book and video library and its Internet and computer software station. It also does about 80 annual training programs for small business owners or people thinking about starting businesses.

About 700 people annually utilize the information services, and around 1,250 annually attend the SBDC’s training programs. Of the 724 people who have attended training programs so far this year, 458, or 63 percent, were either current or prospective women business owners.

The U.S. Census Bureau in 1996 estimated the number of women-owned businesses nationwide to be about 6.4 million or one-third of all domestic firms. That included 40 percent of all retail and service firms. Those businesses generated $1.6 trillion in revenues and employed 13.2 million people.

According to the same report, there were 50,440 women-owned firms in Arkansas that generated $4.4 billion in sales and receipts.

Nina Gupta, a professor of management at the UA Walton College of Business, says in the past more women probably didn’t go into business locally because opportunities were limited in the more rural, agriculturally driven Northwest Arkansas. But she believes as population expands, so will women’s role in local business.

“I’ve been here for 15 years, and most of the restaurants in town used to tend to be the standard old American Southern fare,” Gupta says. “But as more people move in from all over, a greater diversity is creating a diversity of needs and opportunities. We’ll continue to see that as the area becomes more urban.”

Ellen Beeler owns EB Graphics of Fayetteville and is publisher of the Northwest Arkansas Business Women’s Directory, an advertising-based annual publication. It lists 75 local businesswomen who advertise with Beeler, although she says there are obviously countless other women-owned businesses in the area.

And as long as more women are likely to join the business community, Sexton says it’s important for them to first consult a group of professional service providers.

“The emotion and excitement of starting a new business sometimes causes people to make poor decisions,” Sexton says. “Any woman or man thinking about starting a new business should consult the SBDC, their professional service advisor, an attorney, a CPA, a bank officer and an insurance adviser to get as much information as possible.”