Empowering Female Founders | Jill Morenz

We’ve been making an effort to cover more female leaders in the business world and I have quite the leader today.

I introduce to you Jill Morenz - Jill runs a accelerator for female founders called Aviatra Accelerators where she helps founders take their startups from 0 to 1.

Here is her story and insights for new founders on how to go from 0 to 1.

Q: What is your story, how did you end up getting into business?

So when I got my interior design degree, I worked for a designer for a couple of years and then decided I would create my own business.

I started offering services around email marketing, email newsletters and website copy. Then when the position for CEO became open at Aviatra, I just realized it was such a perfect fit because they needed entrepreneurship experience and nonprofit experience, and fundraising experience and project management, public speaking.

Q: What are your outlooks and predictions for female founders in 2024 and beyond?

A lot of the types of entrepreneurship that gets a lot of attention in the press is for tech startups and I think those are really popular because they tend to explode suddenly. They either have huge growth or they fail very quickly.

Whereas the type of entrepreneurs that many of the women, through our programs, they have businesses where they have a product or they have some kind of a food business, or they have a little store or they provide services. Those kinds of things aren't as sexy in the media, but they're part of our everyday lives.

The little stores and the people who help you do things to make your life easier, those are the people who we work with generally. When somebody starts their own business, it's hard, but potentially perhaps greater ups and downs than there are if you're working for somebody else. But it makes you feel like you have control over your own future when you work for somebody else.

Even if you work for somebody else and then just have a side business, you still are more flexible. You're freer to make decisions about your job or to weather economic downturns where your w-two employment might be affected and so during the pandemic and the years afterward, where so many service industry jobs were affected, and those were, a lot of those people were women decided to start their own businesses

Many of them are realizing what an impact that is going to have and that is having on their families and their lives and their futures. So I think that's going to continue to happen.

One of the biggest things I will say, I think in the early stages, there's not a lot of difference between a man starting a business and a woman starting a business. It's very similar. It. But when it comes to getting funding, accessing funding that you need to grow, when you get to a certain point, you need outside funding and unfortunately, it's still harder for women to get loans and investments than it is for men.

So that's where I really see a change coming. Where we already are, there are some banks who are creating loan products that are intended for women, minorities and veterans where the criteria is a little bit different, a little bit looser,

We’re actually creating a new program this year called Capital Ready Women, which is designed to help women get their businesses ready to access capital, to successfully access.

Q: What advice would you give to a young lady wanting to start her own business?

I would really share that there are so many people and organizations that are have been created and full of people who want to help entrepreneurs start and grow.

I think the average person doesn't realize how many support systems are out there and they feel alone. But truthfully, they're not. There's organizations like ours and so many others that will just give time and expertise and ideas and mentorship and strategy to help entrepreneurs so that they don't have to reinvent anything they can learn from others.

So it sounds like it's going to be really hard and tough and you're going to have to make all these big decisions yourself and ultimately you do. But having other entrepreneurs around you and other experts who are giving their time is absolutely necessary.

I've talked to a lot of women who are not aware of that, one woman said, it's just so lonely here in my basement, right where I work, where she works, so lonely down here.

Then I had another woman tell me she's always talking to her husband about, well, what do you think I should do with this employee? And do you think I should set up my billing system this way? He has absolutely no idea. He wants to be supportive, but he's just not an entrepreneur. He doesn't know the answers to these questions.