Aspin Santos has owned a mobile barber shop in Abilene since 2018. Her business grew organically until Santos enrolled in the AccelerateHER program.
“We didn’t know how to do business plans or anything like that,” Santos said, “I mean we had to just make relationships in the community, so we just stayed active in the community, which kept us growing that way. But business plans, things like that, we didn’t know.”
According to the most recent Census data, Abilene has about 300 women-owned businesses. Men, meanwhile, oversee about eleven hundred. AccerlerateHER aims to close that gap.
Over 15 weeks, AccelerateHER teaches women to mock up a business plan, manage finances and market their business to the ideal customer. It just launched a cohort in Abilene after starting similar programs in Denton, Dallas, and Houston.
“You can see as they see women in those roles and being successful, it inspires the generations that are to come that you can have your own business, you can be successful at it and that you can be a great business owner, you can be a great parent. You can really do all the different things,” Tracy Irby, TWU’s AccelerateHER program director, said.
In a state-commissioned studyabout the challenges of developing small businesses in rural Texas, business owners expressed a strong need for help with basic business education, things like figuring out insurance or IT training and marketing.
Irby says those issues can be even more challenging for women in rural areas.
“They don’t have any technical assistance. It’s harder to get funded [in rural areas], so we knew we needed to get out where women are that really don’t have all the services that they need to be successful business owners,” Irby said.
Christy McCann, Santos’ business partner, says the hardest part about being a women entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry is building trust with clients.
“Clients [are] coming in and trusting to sit in our chair and giving us the opportunity to show that we’re just as skilled as the men are,” McCann said.
McCann and Santos moved into a storefront in 2020 and they’re hoping to open a second location, in Clyde, in August. McCann says she’s applying the skills she’s learning through AccelerateHER to their expansion plans.
“This class has actually given us a breakdown of–you know–how to work with your finances, your marketing, how to figure out your target group that you’re going after. It’s really broken it down and given us a better spectrum of an easier path to follow,” McCann said.
Irby says that in addition to the nuts and bolts, AccelerateHER gives women business owners a sense of community.
“One of the greatest things that we see in all of the cohorts is how they work together and then how they start learning from each other and that’s the greatest thing to see there because many times, entrepreneurship is very lonely,” Irby said.
AccelerateHERwill begin looking for its next location for a cohort in the coming months and once the location has been announced, women will be able to apply.