Female Business Owners in Public Relations by Weidhaas Allison;

Author:Weidhaas, Allison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Choosing to Stay Small

Working in a virtual environment often allowed people to craft an organizational size of their choosing because adding staff didn’t necessarily require them to add office space. Interestingly, many of the women discussed their desire to stay small, regardless of the opportunity to expand. As Karen, a business owner for more than twenty years mentioned in an earlier section, maturing as a business didn’t necessarily mean growing in the size of accounts, number of employees or the volume of work. As another said, “I never wanted to be big. You lose all quality control. You lose the ability to make a decision. You lose the ability to react quickly, to be nimble.” Still another person tried the model of a large agency and scaled her organization back, “I keep it small so that I can manage the quality of it and ensure that we deliver, but absent that I had no desire to grow a big enterprise. I did that within the first eighteen months and I wasn’t happy, so I keep it small.”

Women expressed a desire to control the quality of the work, and in the case of independent practitioners, the ability to control their own destiny as opposed to the responsibility of worrying about others’ needs. For example, several independents said in previous jobs they needed to fire or downsize people, which led them to realize they didn’t want to manage people based on the potential for a similar situation to arise. One woman said a layoff doesn’t just affect that person, but the individual’s family as well. Instead, she preferred to remain an independent practitioner and worry only about her own needs.

The women’s comments about size might have reflected the economic trouble in 2012, but instead of framing this as a negative, such as “we don’t have enough business to grow,” these women primarily communicated it as a choice that enhanced their abilities to respond to market needs. The aspect of choices also connects with the entrepreneurial narrative that suggests business owners have more control over their lives than the average employee.

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