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5 Challenges You May Face Being a Woman Entrepreneur Understand your passion and play along in that path and something fruitful will be bound to happen

By Shradha A Salla

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In French, the term entrepreneur roughly translates into an adventure. When a woman embarks on this adventure in the modern world of businesses, the challenges can be huge.

Here are a few challenges you may face being a women entrepreneur.

1. Family.

A lot of us are bound by parents/marriage/children which makes it very difficult to invest time in your business.

Solution - if a married woman has to strike a fine balance between business & family, her total energy in the family leaves no room for business. As long as she has the support of her husband & family as a backbone, it's easier to do so.

If it's your parents, they may have certain social stigmas because of which they're not okay with you working. That only stems from protectiveness. Once they sit and analyze the job, and know what you need to do, through a good talk, they will agree to what you want to do

2. Finance

Finance is the blood for any entrepreneurship - big or small.

Sometimes as women, we need to balance our finances and we might not even have enough hold on our finances. So we have to understand how to use it in a better way and how to get free flowing funding.

Solution - Partner with someone who can fund your brainchild.

If you have funding of your own, use it wisely. Get someone to talk to you and explain how it needs to be handled well because this can really limit your capability.

3. Competition From Men

It is called a male-dominated society because so many men can reach places. There's no time limit that they have, there's no social stigma that they're going through, so it becomes a little bit of a competition. For example, if there's a meeting that's late in the night or requires travelling, a lady will have to think twice but a man can just hop onto a flight/do the night travel. So sometimes, competition is a roadblock but that's gradually getting resolved in this market. Everything is a little more organized and society is becoming more accepting towards women where this field is concerned and we are gradually overcoming this situation.

4. Lack of Education

65-68per cent of women is not educated. Female entrepreneurs without formal education can face numerous problems when it comes to issues such as business development or understanding money matters or maintaining day to day accounts. There's also a lack of information on how to run the business to make it successful. Sometimes, we do things just because we're intuitive and instinctive as women, but the Indian society stops women from being well educated and going into higher education so we do face that as a challenge

Solution: Do what's close to your heart, do what you know best. Whether it's a creative line/food related/finance. Don't mix and match and do something that's not your calling from within. Understand your passion and play along in that path and something fruitful will be bound to happen.

5. Low-risk Bearing Ability

To be able to run a business, you must be equipped to deal with the risks because risk bearing is an essential part of being a successful entrepreneur. Women in India have lived a very protected life, because of which their mindset is streamlined to think on a limited platform. We're scared to jump into a bigger pool or do something bigger. That again comes across as a challenge.

Solution - Believe in yourself, belief in your intuition. If you feel something is right, it probably so goes take the jump. When a baby starts walking, the first step is a risk itself, and if he hadn't taken that, he wouldn't be walking today. So it's very important for us to keep that in mind and take the plunge!

Shradha A Salla

Founder and CEO at I LOVE ME & I LOVE EDAMAME

After undergoing extensive training and practicing for a number of years as a numerologist, tarot reader, Vastu practitioner and a qualified healer, Shradha has a loyal clientele comprising of the who’s who from all fields internationally. However, that wasn’t it for Shradha.

The entrepreneurial bug in her came to light soon after as she now has her own brand creations – I LOVE ME and I LOVE EDAMAME – which started off as an aim to make Edamame available as an affordable product for the masses. Three years down the line, she has a partner on board and the business is growing steadily.

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