The clever tactic 2 women are using to grow their startups into successful businesses

Margo Aaron and Pam Yang

RACHEL GILLETT - When Margo Aaron and Pam Yang met at a networking event in February, it took them less than five minutes to decide they should become “accountability partners.”

At the time the two were taking the same online course to help launch their marketing and branding businesses, and both felt tapped out going it alone.

Aaron, the founder of Argotics, and Yang, the founder of Dear Zero, were in need of someone to provide guidance and hold them to their commitments. They decided to try a new kind of mentorship to take their success to the next level.

“When we first met, we quickly discovered we were struggling with the same issues: how to scale our businesses,” Aaron explains to Business Insider. “We’d heard the term ‘accountability partner’ thrown around in our entrepreneurial circles, but weren’t too keen on the idea of being ‘set up’ randomly with someone.”

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Start-ups look the business as graduates seek to make own way

Guest speaker at the 2015 Student Summit Patrick Hamilton Walsh (left) with Greg O’Donoghue, vice president for welfare at the Union of Students in Ireland. Mr Hamilton Walsh spent several years travelling the world while documenting his trip with a mobile phone. That adventure eventually led him to Sweden where he has been helping develop the image-sharing platform PicHit

Mark Hilliard - It’s wise to say it quietly but one positive outcome of the recession is a growing shift in mindset amongst the country’s nascent generation of professionals. No longer do college graduates automatically hone their CVs, trawl the classifieds and brush up on interview techniques. In the emerging 21st century economy, entrepreneurship is the new prosperity.

For many, the idea of traditional jobs has become insipid.

Neophyte business minds are instead dreaming of innovation, progressing industry, inspiring change and, paradoxically, becoming the ones who provide employment.

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Fulfillment, Not Family: Why Women Business Owners Really Start Up, And What's Still In Their Way

Emily Inverso - “There’s no such thing as perfect work-life balance.”

That’s how Darla Beggs, National Association of Women Business Owners’ National Chair, tells it. “I think some women business owners feel frustrated by this conversation because they feel trapped into chasing someone else’s view of success.”

But for most, an outsider’s opinion is no longer the measuring stick that matters. Women business owners are finding fulfillment on their own, according to a new study released today by NAWBO and Web.com. For 92% of female entrepreneurs, the ability to do something they are passionate about was the main driving force behind business ownership. The chance to be their own boss and the potential for higher earning power followed closely, but flexibility and family brought up the rear in this year’s survey.

“The conventional wisdom is women want work-life balance or flexible schedules,” says Web.com CEO David Brown. “Our research points out it’s really something different. Women want to have a passion and a strong interest to be engaged in that activity.”

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Business plans, good ideas, and 8 other myths about startups – by Indiegogo's CEO

Kieren McCarthy - "We have the ability to be an entrepreneur beaten out of us," explained the CEO of funding site Indiegogo Slava Rubin, in front of a big picture of a kettle.

Rubin was giving the closing keynote at this week's Vator Splash in Oakland – his backyard, he told us. "I turned down South by Southwest, but Oakland? Yes to Oakland."

The picture of the kettle is to illustrate an interesting but fundamentally flawed idea: that we have the desire to test out things and keep an open mind beaten out of us as we grow up. Your mom always tells you not to touch the kettle because it will be hot. But as a kid, you touch it anyway, just to be sure.

The analogy kinda breaks down there. If being an entrepreneur was about ignoring good advice, you wouldn't go far, and there would be a lot of people with burnt fingers. The main drive of Rubin's talk took a similar line between making you think, and hoping you didn't think too much.

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