“My life’s work is advancing women and girls. It’s not just my job. It’s why I wake up in the morning. It’s why I’m here on the planet,” said Tiffany Dufu, president of the Tory Burch Foundation.
Right now her focus is on women entrepreneurs, which the foundation aims to champion nationwide by lining up access to capital, education and community.
“I’m one myself and the Tory Burch Foundation is here to empower other women entrepreneurs through capital, through community, through education,” she said. “I’m bullish on entrepreneurship in part because of what’s happening in our country right now. There’s a lot of divisiveness and I actually believe that a big cause of that divisiveness is that a lot of people in our nation don’t feel that they have access to economic mobility in the way that we used to, certainly in the way that my parents did.
“Entrepreneurship is one of the last levers that’s accessible,” she continued. “It’s an important lever for women’s economic power and it’s an important lever even if you’re not an entrepreneur yourself.”
“Acting like an entrepreneur and really tapping into some of the assets and the skills and the mindset and ability of an entrepreneur I believe can really help us to accelerate our careers,” she added.
Each year, 50 female entrepreneurs are selected for the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program. Through the program, the biggest pain point Dufu sees in that the entrepreneurs do not have access to some of the same resources that their male counterparts do — including capital.
“The biggest challenge that we have with women entrepreneurship right now in this country has to do with revenue and it’s one of the biggest reasons why I took this job,” she said. “Most women-owned business never get to $1 million in revenue and only a little over 4 percent do. At the foundation, 42 percent of those entrepreneurs that we brought into the fellowship program blew past the $1 million mark. What they need is access to capital. They need access to educational opportunities at their own pace on their own time. They don’t have time to go back to school. They need access to advisers.”
The foundation strives to combat this, partnering with financial institutions to ensure that it’s getting capital into the hands of women entrepreneurs outside of the grants it provides itself. This included teaming with Bank of America to provide more than $100 million in low interest loans to women entrepreneurs.
Away from capital, though, Dufu said the most important thing that she’s learned is that entrepreneurs need community. “People that have gone through the same thing that you’re going through, particularly because entrepreneurship is a very isolating experience,” she said.
In addition to talking about her work at the Tory Burch Foundation, she discussed her book, “Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less.”
“I’ve spoken with hundreds of women and I find it so disheartening and disturbing that every single one of the women I’ve ever met is doing everything she can on a daily basis to do right by herself and her family and in her community and her workplace and somehow in the process she feels like she’s committed some kind of moral transgression, which is what guilt is about. I’m a big proponent of dropping the ball, and for me dropping the ball means that I’ve gotten rid of unrealistic expectations that I’m supposed to do it all and that I’ve done three things in now a deliberate way,” she said.
The first task, according to Dufu, is getting clear on what matters most, separate and apart from what matters to advertisers or in-laws or maybe the people you grew up with.
“Right now for me, the three things that matter most are advancing women and girls, nurturing a healthy partnership, because I was married for a long time but I didn’t have a healthy partnership, and three is raising conscious global citizens. There are some parents that care about their kids getting in Yale and Harvard. I care about my kids being conscious global citizens,” she said. “That’s the first part of dropping the ball, because if you don’t have clarity about that, it’s hard to figure out what should I not be doing.”
That leads to the second piece, which is getting clear about your highest and best use in achieving what matters most so that you’re not just saying yes to everything that comes into your inbox. The third piece is about asking for help, which is what Dufu learned you have to do in order to be an effective entrepreneur.
“When I say asking for help I mean ether very deliberately if it’s in the workplace getting support from a manager, getting help from the people on your team,” Dufu said.