46 ◾ The Guide to Entrepreneurship: How to Create Wealth for Your Company
3. Professional services businesses—attorneys, CPAs, doctors, den-
tists, etc.—tend to be dominated by men. When these rms request
expansion loans or business lines of credit, they encounter far less dif-
culty in securing capital.
3.6 Role of Angel Groups
It is well accepted that early-stage equity nancing in the entrepreneurial
sphere plays a critical role. There are two major sources of equity nanc-
ing for business ventures: (1) business angels in the earlier stages and (2)
the institutional venture capital market, which invests primarily in the later
stages of the business cycle.
10,11
Taken together, angels and venture capitalists provide the majority
of high-risk equity capital for the startup venture. While women control
a substantial portion of the U.S., net worth is a necessary, but not suf-
cient, condition for attracting angel investments. Angels are typically
cashed-out entrepreneurs; individuals who have successfully started and
exited their ventures. This pool of female-owned businesses represents
the potential female angels of the future.
12
But this female-based source
of angel investment is frequently denied to many female entrepreneurs
because women investors tend to be more conservative in their invest-
ment choices.
13
Angels rely on their individual network for deal ow, co-investment
opportunities, and general guidance in making, monitoring, and due-
diligence activities of angel investments.
14
Additionally, this network often
serves to spread awareness to other angel investors. If women are outside
this traditional network, it often proves to be a signicant impediment to
participation in angel rounds.
Currently there are well over 150 angel groups operating within the U.S,
but less than 25 are afliated with women. An angel group is an organiza-
tion that provides a structure and systematic approach for bringing together
entrepreneurs seeking early stage capital and business angels searching for
investment opportunities. In this context, an angel group is a formal collec-
tion of angel investors that meet regularly to examine potential investment
deals. The primary goal is to increase deal ow for both parties. As such,
angel groups behave closer to professional venture capital rms than to the
lone angel of yesteryear.
Women and Entrepreneurship ◾ 47
3.6.1 Angel Capital Market and Female Entrepreneurs
Angel capital is either a rst step in eventually qualifying for venture capi-
tal or a viable substitute for early-stage venture capital. However, research
provides evidence of discrepancies in access to participation between men
and women in the angel capital market. Based on annual data from angel
organizations between 2000 and 2004, Becker-Blease and Sohl found evi-
dence that female entrepreneurs receive a small portion of the total angel
capital awarded.
15
The authors contend that the low rate with which women
entrepreneurs are awarded investment dollars in the venture capital market
is reected in the early-stage angel investment market.
3.7 The Green Alliance. A Female-Owned Business
The Green Alliance was born from a partnership of business ingenuity and
community environmental advocacy. In 2008, Green Alliance founding busi-
ness, Simply Green Biofuels, was trying to break into a market dominated
by fossil fuels, when it realized that an alliance of similarly green-minded
businesses might bring results that are more tangible. Simply Green owner,
Andrew Kellar, knew that Seacoast residents using biofuel would similarly
be interested in green landscaping companies, green restaurants, etc. Kellar
had the idea of teaming up with these other local green businesses, where
each business would offer each other’s customers mutual discounts, while
sharing best business practices and marketing techniques.
At the same time, community activist Sarah Brown was working on com-
munity environmental issues in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery,
Maine. As the environmental advocacy widened to include towns and local
business, Brown recognized that some businesses, including Simply Green,
were leading the way in sustainability. She began to ask how she could
bring attention to those local businesses doing the right thing for our planet,
as well as encouraging and providing support for the more timid businesses
trying to “go green.” Hence, the Green Alliance was born.
3.7.1 Prole of Sarah Brown, Owner, Director
Brown’s background was far more robust in community activism than entre-
preneurship. Brown has been an environmental advocate in her community
48 ◾ The Guide to Entrepreneurship: How to Create Wealth for Your Company
for the last 10 years. She has served on Kittery’s Town Council and the
Zoning Board of Appeals. Brown created Kittery Progressive Action, a com-
munity action coalition that responds to and organizes around progressive
issues in Southern Maine and the New Hampshire Seacoast. She also formed
St. John’s Stewardship of the Earth Committee in Portsmouth, a group that
educates the Seacoast community on environmental issues, and is dedicated
to reducing energy consumption and promoting conservation.
Brown spearheaded Cool Kittery, which convinced the Town Council
to sign the Mayor’s Agreement on Climate Change and then regrouped to
become Kittery’s current Energy Efciency Committee—a town-sanctioned
board that is now working to reduce Kittery’s energy use and promote
conservation in the schools and the community. Sarah Brown always cared
about the environment and was attracted to initiatives that sought to create
a more environmentally friendly community. However, she never dreamed
she would go from being a stay-at-home mom of three young girls who, in
2008, served on the Kittery Town Council and Zoning Board, to become
the founder and director of the Green Alliance, a Portsmouth-based orga-
nization that partners with businesses and consumers to make eco-friendly
choices.
Her educational background and initial professional experience in jour-
nalism did provide skills that would be put to use in her nascent business.
Brown worked for 5 years as a journalist in Moscow, Russia for CNN, BBC,
NBC, and the Associated Press. Prior to her experience in Russia, she
worked at CNN’s New York bureau. Brown earned a degree in Russian
studies from Columbia University. She lives in Kittery with her husband and
three young daughters.
3.7.2 The Green Alliance Business Model
From the Green Alliance’s new ofce in the Franklin Block on Congress
Street, Brown said they now have 93 businesses and nearly 2500 consumer
members who are Green Card holders that stretch from Portland, Maine, to
Concord and down to Newburyport, Massachusetts. Those businesses include
restaurants, dentists, builders, landscapers, printing companies, and merchants.
Brown can often be heard on The River, 92.5 FM, a Haverhill,
Massachusetts, radio station, and WSCA Community Radio in Portsmouth
giving helpful ecologically friendly tips to listeners on how they can make
their world a little greener and better for themselves, their children, and
future generations.
Women and Entrepreneurship ◾ 49
By getting businesses to adopt greener practices to reduce waste and use
less fossil fuels and getting consumers to patronize businesses that are going
green, Brown believes the Green Alliance has made some signicant inroads
that amount to real cultural change. “We’re getting them to think about
things they hadn’t thought about before,” Brown said. “More and more,
people are thinking about where they work, where they go out to eat, what
they buy for clothes, furniture and how they heat their homes,” she said.
Besides recruiting Seacoast businesses and consumers to be “greener,”
Brown also attends weekend events to promote the Green Alliance’s mes-
sage. She also employs three full-time writers who generate insightful arti-
cles for the Green Alliance’s websites to show readers how different Seacoast
businesses are putting environmentally friendly values into practice.
3.7.3 Business Conceptualization
However, Brown is very quick not to take all the credit for the Green
Alliance. She said it was really the brainchild of Andrew Kellar, the owner
of Simply Green Biofuels. In 2008, Brown said she and Kellar became
friends and Kellar conceptualized the idea and business model for the Green
Alliance. Brown formed a partnership with Simply Green Biofuels and
Purely Organic Lawncare of York Harbor, Maine.
While Brown was pushing Kittery town ofcials to create a Green
Committee, she discovered that there were some individual businesses like
the Beach Pea Baking Co. and Robert’s Maine Grill in Kittery that were
using green practices. However, they did not have the time or resources to
get that message out to the public. “So that was sort of the spark for the
idea,” she recalled.
Brown actually went to work for Kellar and used her background in jour-
nalism to advocate for Simply Green Biofuels. She said Kellar saw the ben-
et of creating a group that could unite all the businesses that had adopted
green business practices. “There was a green customer base that we all
could be sharing,” Brown said.
With 115 business members, Brown said the region’s green sector has
more than 1800 employees. The more the Green Alliance can get members
of the public to support green businesses, the more those businesses will
grow, the more jobs they will create, and the greater the cultural change will
be to go greener for more people.
The Green Alliance’s Green Card members also enjoy special discounts
when they purchase merchandise or services from green businesses who are
50 ◾ The Guide to Entrepreneurship: How to Create Wealth for Your Company
alliance members. “The consumers, they are the ones who are driving this,”
she said.
3.7.4 Green Alliance Mission
The Green Alliance mission is composed of four principles:
1. To increase the prots of those businesses having the least negative
impact on the environment.
2. To encourage more sustainable business practices through “business-to-
business” mentoring and strength in partnership.
3. To educate and inuence the public to consider the goods and services
they use in their own communities.
4. To encourage more sustainable choices.
3.7.5 The “Green” Business Enterprise
The Green Alliance is one of the “Green Business” or “Sustainable Business”
enterprises that have appeared in the American business lexicon in the past
two decades. A green business or sustainable business is an enterprise that
strives to have minimal negative impact on the global or local environment,
community, society, or economy. Often, sustainable businesses have pro-
gressive environmental and human rights policies. In general, a business is
described as green if it matches the following four criteria:
1. It incorporates principles of sustainability into each of its business decisions.
2. It supplies environmentally friendly products or services that replace
demand for non-green products and/or services.
3. It is greener than traditional competition.
4. It has made an enduring commitment to environmental principles in its
business operations.
A major initiative of sustainable businesses is to eliminate or decrease
the environmental harm caused by the production and consumption of
their goods.
9
The impact of such human activities in terms of the amount of
greenhouse gases produced can be measured in units of carbon dioxide and
is referred to as carbon footprint. The carbon footprint concept is derived
from ecological footprint analysis, which examines the ecological capacity
required to support the consumption of products.
10
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