As we wrapped up Women’s History Month 2023 with this Live Chat, Michelle and Katherine, co-founders and co-owners of dozanü innovations had the opportunity to recognize the remarkable achievements and contributions made by women in business.
From corporate leadership to groundbreaking entrepreneurships, there are countless ways that female leaders across industries have shaped history throughout the years. But yet, only 0.1% of marketing companies are women-owned — and dozanü is proud to be counted as one of them.
Katherine and Michelle share some statistics of women in business in the chat, starting with the fact that it was only as recent as 1988 that a woman could actually get a business loan without a male cosigner. So recent! Watch the video to learn some more.
A transcript can be found below the video.
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Transcript [Note: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain some errors. The team made some edits and notes for clarification to the best of their ability]:
Michelle:
Hello everybody. Happy Friday.
Katherine:
Hello.
Michelle:
I’m hoping this is working this time. We did have a few technical glitches. Social media is not perfect and it seems like this is working. You all can hear me okay?
Katherine:
Yes. I think everyone is good. I think this is good.
Michelle:
I can hear me all right. I think this is working now. Finally. Hello everybody.
Katherine:
Hey everybody. Hey, thanks so much for joining. I want to introduce myself and what we’ll do is we’ll do a visual description along with that. So I am Katherine Lees. This is my sign name. My visual description is that I’m a white woman with short brown hair trendy glasses with dozanü earrings on. They’re pink and teal. I have a black shirt on and a dark button up shirt over that in my background, it’s white with a dozanü logo picture and some square shelving units with two hard hats that are sitting in two of those squares. All right.
Michelle:
Beautiful. Hello everybody. I’m Michelle Lapides, and my visual description is I’m a white female with brown wavy hair, a dozanü black t-shirt with a sports jacket, black and white, and dozanü earrings as well. Pink and teal. A white background with the dozanü pink and teal logo. It’s our business card holder in the background. Shout out to Brooke of Raine Collective. Her Instagram account is @shopraineco and she made that and these earrings.
Katherine:
Oh, I just love it. All right. It’s the last day of March, and as we all know, it’s March. It’s Women’s History Month. So I’m excited to celebrate all of the women that have come before us that are here with us, and that’ll be here in the future with us here today.
Michelle:
Absolutely. And it’s the last day of Women’s History Month, and it doesn’t mean that tomorrow it’s in the past. We always want to continue recognizing what women have spearheaded historically fighting for our rights thus far after March. You don’t just put that in the past. You continue thinking of the future and for a better tomorrow.
Katherine:
Yes.
Michelle:
So Katherine and I, we’re just going to talk about ourselves as women owned business. dozanü innovations is a hundred percent woman owned business. Woohoo.
Katherine:
Yes. And then right now it’s a hundred percent women led. So everyone on our team is a female and not sure if it’s going to stay that way or if things are going to change. It wasn’t intentional, but I think we are powerful women. We are a powerhouse.
Michelle:
Yes. And we’re a team of five right now, and we’re all deaf women, which is incredible. We go about our everyday life with work, but then if we take a step back and look at it, this is huge. We’ve created a space for deaf women in business. In the business world. It has been dominated by men, male CEOs, male owned businesses, and women are the minority. So I’m honored to hold a space like this, and this is why we’re having this conversation.
Katherine:
That’s exactly right. We could go into so many different directions talking about women’s history or we could be talking about business. We can talk about us as women. So we do have some questions that we’ve fielded from you this week, and we have some questions of our own. And so if you see me looking off the screen a little bit, it’s going to be to see what the questions are in the first one. Out of curiosity, the question was whenever you go to the store, or if you just go into a retail space, most of the time you probably assume that men have the money and then women are just shopping or doing their thing. And if we use that logic and we’re just going to use that as our base, women would have 80% of the buying power, which means they make the decisions. And 80% still includes those women who let’s say are the breadwinners. They’re the ones who are heads of the family. It’s not only men that can bring home the money, but anyway, the point getting back to it. So if women have 80% of the buying power, this means that men only have 20%. So let me ask, why are there so many men that own marketing agencies? Think about that.
Michelle:
It doesn’t make sense, right? So marketing owned companies, only 0.1% of those are owned by women. That doesn’t make any sense, especially when 80% of the buying power belongs to women. Why would you give marketing strategic campaigns, marketing methods to men to capture 80% of the buying power – who are women?
Katherine:
So I think that we are going to open, well, the reason why we opened for this is because we have some weird societal norms. Now we can never probably figure out right now in this chat, but these are the foundations of exactly why women, whenever we band together, whenever we make magic happen, we’re going to go to the moon. We are going to far exceed anything that’s happened. And I think going back to that point, we’re going to have to trust ourselves. We have to set aside all of the imposter syndrome that we, and I’m sure many of you feel, and we’re going to have to understand where some of those societal norms are coming from. And so I’ll share with you some statistics. And I think we did mention previously that 1974, and this is in 1974, that was the first year that women were able to open a bank account on their own, which is fine, but you fast forward a little bit later to 1988, this was the first year that women could actually open a business and get a business loan without a male cosigner. That male co-signer usually was a husband or a father or male business partner. Any male had to be there. So males were dominating and controlling us for so long. And so now it’s history month and it’s all about women. And we are reclaiming our position here.
Michelle:
The perspective 1988 is just one year before I was born, and I’m only 33 years old, 33. So for 34 years ago, women were finally able to have a business bank account with no cosigner.
Wow. Katherine and I, we were born and raised knowing that the world had a place for us as women and as business owners. But prior to our time, there was not a place for women business owners. And you come to a realization that women’s rights and women’s access to the world of owning a business and holding a space in general was not accessible for us until not too long ago. So Women’s History Month was established in 1986. That’s 36 years ago. So happy 36 Women’s History Month. So 36 years so far. Why is it really important to have this recognition of this type of month, Katherine, why is this important? It seems like men and women are more equal, but why do we still celebrate Women’s History Month in the month of March?
Katherine:
That is a great question. Pillars, they always have to be built before you can lay the foundation for anything. So you see this all the time in construction. So if we go back to thinking about the pillars that create societal norms, all of that hard work in the past, let’s say in the 1950s, up until now, voting rights, we’re looking at bank accounts, business owners, all of this history has to be celebrated and used as a reminder, just like any other awareness month that we have. And I want to recognize that I want to honor every awareness month that we have. And right now in this month, we’re talking about Women’s History month and recognizing that. So we’re recognizing all that hard work that everyone’s done before us. And this is a reason why we’re here. It’s the reason why Michelle and I right now can have a business that is leading a team of women who are serving our marginalized community, including women, including LBGTQIA+ communities, including disability communities, and the list goes on and on. So women are the foundations, we’re the foundations of all other marginalized communities.
And with that, so to be reminded, to be grateful, it’s just to be recognized to acknowledge all of this work that people have done over the years and still with recognizing that gives us hope that we still have so much more to do. And I want to add, I admit a hundred percent admit I’m all about being a woman in woman power, but I don’t want to recognize that I may be less than as far as my pay grade goes, my capacity in business is a little bit more diminished than a male is certainly because of ego. And I went to this conference in Nashville. It was the WBENC, which is the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, and they had a conference recently in Nashville, and I realized that even male buyers, so let’s say they’re in the procurement department and they’re leading procurement departments, they showed up there and they said, most products, most services that we would get from females or from women way beat out anything we would get from a male, but men are naturally the ones that are centered in all of this space.
And so he showed the data and he is saying, look, we’re going to have to look at that, and we’re going to have to prove to ourselves this whole male bro club has to be set aside and they have to offer some positions to women. And if they feel this way, that means it’s still out there. It’s still happening. And I admit, I usually just ignore it and say, I’m fine. I can do it on my own. But I think I could do that with a lack of support. It’s with a lack of that perspective. There’s so many things that go into this. So I think this is why we’re having this women’s history month to remind us and to tell us that we need to keep up the work.
Michelle:
Let’s go. Yeah. So we are a certified women-owned business, and that conference that Katherine and I went to last week proved that there are corporations and companies that have that corporate responsibility where they need to recognize that they want more women owned businesses, vendors, contractors. So being certified is just one step into getting into so many more opportunities. I think that certifications can be part of a process. You start up a business and then you get certified. But after that conference, Katherine and I had a conversation that just wowed us. People really want to recognize the importance of women owned business businesses and changing the standard that women are ignored. It is now a corporate responsibility to bring these women owned businesses in there. So I encourage you, if you have a business, get yourself certified and get yourself in the door that way.
Katherine:
Definitely.
Michelle:
And sorry to interrupt, but with the certification, we talk about businesses. Now, the US government is run on small businesses, so having a certification also gets you in the door with government contracts. And it is their social responsibility to look at their vendors who are certified, whether they’re women, business certified, disabled certified, minority owned, certified, and there’s a lot of different certifications. But the government will look at the list and they will recognize your RFP bid first over a male certified business because if you can meet what they need, then they are pursuing a woman owned business first. So the government owned business is really owned, is really run by women owned and minority owned businesses. And times have changed, and we haven’t arrived to Utopia quite yet, but we’ve still got a little more work to go. But we’re getting there.
Katherine:
There’s two things, speaking of two things that Michelle mentioned. So personal responsibility and corporate responsibility. And in both ends it means people who are buying services and how they serve their customers. It goes both ways. And so realizing the number one way that we can hold corporations to social responsibility is to remind them that they have a corporate responsibility, and that means they have to pay attention to serve, to provide. I mean, the list goes on, but it’s just paying attention to their customer base, especially women who have 80% of buying power disabled, people who have 16 trillion, they have that buying power. They call it disposable income. But what this means is that once everything is paid, the money that they have left, they could buy things from Target or they could buy things from Costco, just different retail stores. If they don’t pay attention to them, they’re not going to be paying and using their money there. So this starts at the top. This starts at government, starts at corporations, small business owners, all of you. You can hold them and hold us accountable. You can make sure that we do everything and we’re doing everything we can with our resources to pay attention and to deliver all the things, products and services to all of you.
Michelle:
The power is in our hands.
Katherine:
That’s right.
Michelle:
So in speaking of business owned, now let’s talk about female CEOs. That is a whole other shocking number that we learned of just in 2023, the Fortune 500 company, the first time in 68 years of history, they finally have women as rating as 10%.
Katherine:
Yes. Yes,
Michelle:
It it’s, it’s a low number. But wow, those are the numbers that came from January of 2023 and it 10%, it is a number, and we’re looking for that to increase, but total 53 women are CEOs of those Fortune 500 companies. And so that’s what equates to the 10%. Now, let me ask you, Catherine, why is it important to have female leaders? Why is it different to have a female CEO?
Katherine:
I’m going to warm up my hands here. I asked that question myself before we get into it. Yeah, I think it goes back to nature versus nurture. It really does that whole concept, who it’s been around for so many years and we’ve been talking about it, but if we really start focusing in on nurture this piece, it could be something that’s innate in team building or something that’s already a piece of, it’s not something that is how you grew up. And so me as a female ceo, a leader of my company, I’m automatically more nurturing and it’s because of my upbringing. I’m a female identifying individual. And so I think that female CEOs are more powerful and more empathetic and more just, I think it really comes down to just rallying support and getting everyone on board and wanting to see growth in my team members. I think that’s what it’s about. And so female CEOs are more powerful in this nurturing environment in the workplace.
Michelle:
I think that’s a great perspective.
Katherine:
Yeah. I was going to ask what you thought Michelle.
Michelle:
So for me, right now, male dominated fields, business really needs to have a different perspective, needs to be framed in a different manner. We’ve been framing it in the same way for so many years that it needs to, we need to step out of the frame. Having a woman owned business is already different in itself. It’s different than any other business since you automatically have an alternative perspective, which is amazing in itself. Now looking in the future when men and women are completely 100% equal, then it won’t be unique to have a female CEO. But you made a really great point about a female CEO being more nurturing. I saw a statistic, I can’t remember exactly where, but when Covid hit in 2020, businesses took a toll supply chains, factories shut down, services were suspended, people stayed home. And in looking at the statistics, female-led companies and male led companies, female companies, they were able to pivot faster. And their reaction to the crash during Covid was able to give them a moment to uptick shorter in a shorter fashion, whereas men took a lot longer to take that uptick. So I’ve really noticed that shift, and that’s an important trend in being able to rebound and change quickly. Life changes, and we’ve got to take those in stride. So as women based led companies, they were able to rebound quicker.
Katherine:
This makes me think about women led companies and it will not always be women and team dynamics. It changes, I’m sure when a woman leader is telling a man, hey, I don’t want to tell you everything. I just want you to navigate this with me instead of telling you what to do. Can you imagine the power of co-creating and co-working together and having males saying, Hey, I’ll support my female lead. I’ll do whatever it takes to support the company. So let’s not think about the 10%. Let’s think about 20 or 30, maybe up to 30%. Let’s do it. Let’s go.
Michelle:
Bring it on. That’s right. I love it. And I am a big fan of movies, the entertainment industry, and I just recently watched a documentary I started yesterday. I didn’t finish, but it was called, This Changes Everything. It’s a documentary by Geena Davis, who is a well-known actress. She’s one of the main characters in the League of Their Own or in Thelma and Louise, such a great actress, and it was powerful to watch. She recognized that Hollywood has gender inequality, and she did some research and it Gina Davis Institute on Gender in Media, she recognized that the income was life changing. She noticed that there was a lot of complaints about inequality in women in Hollywood. However, there was no data to prove that. So she collected that data and that documentary was powerful. It showed that we grew up watching movies and that had an impact on us as girls. We didn’t see a lot of main characters or women that owned businesses in these movies. Now, looking at the top 100 revenue of films in 2017, only a small percent, 24% were leading. So in 2017, how many years ago that, that’s very recent. Five, six years ago, math, math isn’t my strong point. Six years ago.
Katherine:
Michelle:
So in 2017, 6 years ago, a girl who might have been six years old, and seen a lot of good role models, female strong characters in Hollywood was only 24%. So that starts there as well. We as dozanü, we notice that and recognize that our responsibility is to show that we are a hundred percent women owned and women led. We have five women who are all deaf women. And we maybe take that for granted. We took a moment, we stepped back and we had this conversation and realized that we need to be showing how powerful we are, and we need to also set the space for creative, professional women businesses. We have a place for ourselves and we need to show up.
Katherine:
Yes, that’s the philosophy behind dozanü, that we’re going to show up, we’re going to do our best, and we will make sure that anything we do for corporate, for government, for our fellow deaf community makes that impact. And it’s about impact not only on just one person, but impact to the mainstream as well as to our own community. Whatever community you identify with, that’s our heart. That’s it. You.
Michelle:
You’re hitting a point right there. I often get a lot of questions, not in this chat, but our team is monitoring the comments. I will try my best to answer any questions that pop up through the chat, but I have received in the past a lot of comments saying that since dozanü is a deaf woman owned business, do we only serve deaf owned businesses or women-only businesses? No, we are a deaf woman, led owned business, but we serve mainstream.
And that’s where we can make that impact. Because oftentimes deaf person running a campaign for a government entity, maybe that is dispersing awareness about a person with a disability. Usually there are straight white hearing men doing these types of campaigns. Do they really understand how to capture a proper audience? No. If they do a lot of research and they collect a lot of data, maybe, but the heart of the company’s intention is not that the heart of our company, the heart of our intention is making sure we angle and curate those messages to impact the right type of audience. So we are not only a deaf woman owned business serving deaf women owned businesses, we serve the mainstream.
Katherine:
That’s right. I think that is the perfect note to point out. We are a company that wants to participate in corporate responsibility. We’re a company that wants to make an impact to us, to you, to them. Let’s go. Let’s go.
Michelle:
I also want to mention another perspective. It’s another movie that I watched on Netflix called Madam CJ Walker.
Katherine:
Oh yes.
Michelle:
Oh, you have not watched that. You have to. It’s a must watch on Netflix, but it was a first women owned business ever recorded and established was by a black woman. I mean, wow. And the first self-made millionaire,
Katherine:
Right?
Michelle:
CJ Walker is a Black woman, and the business Madam CJ Walker led was established in 1906. It’s not like it was yesterday, 1906 is almost a hundred years ago. More than a hundred years ago. So that perspective is that women have been showing up for a very long time, they just haven’t been given the space. And it is time to change that. And the time is now.
Katherine:
Let’s start thinking about space. Right now that you’ve mentioned space, let’s make the space have questions. So I’ll go ahead and read through the questions as much as we can. We have a little bit more than 15 minutes, so if anybody has a question, make sure you take the time and ask away.
Michelle:
I have to laugh at one of these questions. It says, when will Costco hire dozanü? And that was posted by Tate Tullier. Hey, they should have hired us yesterday. We are big fans of Costco. I love Costco.
Katherine:
Michelle:
Really good video on our personal Instagram. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. But it talks about Costco related information. If you want to know more about it, go look at Katherine’s Instagram. There’s a lot of questions here. Let’s see.
Katherine:
Wow.
Katherine:
We’ve got some really good questions. I don’t know how to pick. I think it’s better if we just go in order with the questions. So first question that I’m seeing it was asked earlier this week are, what are your three, five and seven year plans? Wow, that’s a very good and very loaded question. So I’m thinking back about that brief statement. Women are very good at pivoting. So my seven year plan may not be the same seven year plan that it is now, so don’t quote me, but the three year plan is to really break into corporate, the corporate market and to serve their internal as well as their external resource centers. So meaning that they have an employment research resource group, special interest groups in other groups like that. So I want to make sure that I can support them so their employees feel better, that they feel more connected inside the company and they do better work.
Also, external corporations, general marketing, we could focus on that for their services, products, company. As far as our five year plan goes, I think it’s growing a little bit more. It’s making sure that we can have enough team members to make more of an impact. Probably we’re going to be looking at doing that a little bit more with mentorship, a little bit more with hiring people who may don’t, maybe don’t have a hundred percent of all the experience that we’re looking for, but we know we got to start somewhere. So right now, just to share with you, we’re always looking for new people to hire. And with that, we’re still new, we’re still growing. So the time to mentor, the time to take, to pay attention to really supporting someone, I know I can’t give that a hundred percent, but I’m hoping in two or three years we’ll be able to focus on that and we’ll be able to provide all of the resources, including the experience that Michelle has, and I’m sure she thinks the same way. And so that’s our five year plan. And then our seven year plan is to sell the company. No, I’m just kidding. No, I’ve already decided this is going to be our legacy. This is going to be, we’re in it for the long term, and I’m hoping that in 10 years we can look back and we could say we’ve been in business for 16 years. So that’s really looking forward to breaking that 15 year mark.
Michelle:
Yes, that was a great answer. Three, five, and seven years. I, as a business owner, I do look at what’s on my plate, and sometimes you just look at what’s in the short term, but sometimes it’s really important to take a step back, look at the large scale, and be able to work towards long-term goals. So what Katherine’s mentioned about the three, five, and seven year, I’m on the same track. Our feelings are mutual. And as a deaf woman, business owner, what I’m seeing and having the opportunity to work really closely with other companies and corporations and looking at their structure and their goals, marketing is very personal, branding is very personal. So we have that front row seat to businesses, we see how they operate, and that gives us an opportunity to learn so much. I’ve learned so much in six years that thinking long term, we’ve only just scratched the service surface.
And we’re here to stay the three, five and seven year plan, gosh, seven years. I would like to be able to share with everybody what we’re learning right now. We are still feeding ourselves. We are growing, we are showing up, we are providing that support. And deaf owned companies is such a small number. We want to change that narrative. We want to change that shift. We have to grow our team. And then I look forward to being able to share with the community where we’ve gone because we have a corporate and a social responsibility as an individual and as dozanü.
Katherine:
That’s right. And thank you for that question,
Michelle:
@deafstein. Thank you. @deafstein. I see one person asked, where did we study digital marketing?
Katherine:
That’s a great question. I’m sure you’re noticing lately there’s a lot of coding people that are showing up in the workforce, and I’m sure that you’re probably thinking that they’ve gone through testing, they’re not studying in a corporate environment first they test, they learn along the way and then they start getting a hang of it. And I do my own self maintenance in my own education journey. But I can tell you that from my perspective as a deaf woman, my perspective as an LGBTQIA member in the community and as a disabled person, it does make me a better marketer. I could tell you that I have a lot of secrets of the trade and foundations that help me to really be a great digital marketer.
Michelle:
We’ve got, we’ve definitely got some tricks up our sleeves.
Katherine:
Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
Michelle:
That was a wonderful answer, Katherine. I would say that my best teacher is Google. I Google everything. If I’m not sure what type of platforms, softwares, and programs are new out there, I’ll Google it. Katherine is a wealth of knowledge as well, and I have to recognize that. And I enjoy learning from you, Katherine. I learn from you every day. And I learn from my team every day. Google and lived experience, real life experience. I throw myself in these situations and I throw myself in the pit and I say, okay, here’s the issue. How do I solve it? Figure it out. And so showing up and figuring it out is the answer to constantly learning. Every day I might say, yes, I know my stuff, but I’m ready to learn more and more every day. And I think having that attitude and having that approach is the key to running a business and living life. You just have to jump in and do it, and you’ll learn from there.
Katherine:
Yes, thank you. And beautiful answer too. Okay. All right. So someone asked a question, what do you do? It’s a good question. So we’re a marketing company first and foremost. And I can expand on all of our services, but that’s not really the point of this live that we’re doing now. But we are a marketing company and we do traditional as well as digital marketing efforts. And we do that to support companies in their goals. So that’s pretty much what we do. And marketing is a huge concept. It captures so many things.
Michelle:
It is an umbrella term. Yes.
Katherine:
Absolutely. It is an umbrella term. And really we have the goal that we have. And then what we do is we start working backwards to include as many marketing strategies, methods, knowledge, the experience, the expertise that we need to then achieve that goal. Check out our website, dozanu.com to learn more about that.
Michelle:
And to sum it up, we have five core services. We have creative marketing, social media, digital marketing, business development, and strategic campaign. And that’s what we do. And these are broad term terms. It is an umbrella term, and that’s what we do in marketing.
Katherine:
Exactly.
Michelle:
A person asked me a fun question. They said, why did you pick those colors, fuchsia and teal? Are there any meanings behind that?
Katherine:
It started with just thinking about what your favorite color is. And my favorite color is teal. Michelle’s is fuchsia. Really, magenta.
Michelle:
Magenta, yes. It’s magenta. Thanks for changing that.
Katherine:
Yes. Yeah. So we both thought to each other, those are cool. Those are cool colors. And then later on we found out from different sources, and it’s not official by any means, but people, company and organizations refer to teal as a deaf color. So I wanted to capitalize on that. We’re a deaf company. And so really that’s the short and sweet of it. It also was our favorite colors.
Michelle:
Yes. And in six years, I actually am seeing the benefit of using random colors like this, because so many businesses, their favorite colors are navy blue, the blue spectrum, and oranges. And so there’s nothing wrong with that, but a lot of marketing company companies are straight male white owned, and it’s a very uniformed color. And we show up with these bright pink and teal colors. You can’t miss us, you shouldn’t miss us, it’s honest. So I think it’s her favorite color, and it stands out from the sea of navy blue. We show up.
Katherine:
Right, right. All right. Eric Wayne had asked, what kind of company are we looking into? And we are a small, lean, but mighty company. And so sometimes we have to really navigate things and pick and choose what companies we feel are going to make the most impact, and what companies we feel like we can offer the best services too. We also have to think about our capacity that we’re working with. And so that’s a big part of navigating business growth as well as the business jurisdiction direction that we want to go. We want to maintain our team. We want to make sure that everybody’s okay. We want to make sure that myself and Michelle are doing okay. And so right now we are focused on large scale impact. And with that, typically we look at corporations, government entities. And so that’s going to be, that’s our focus right now.
Michelle:
Yes. And I did want to mention, it’s not a question, but oftentimes, like Katherine mentioned, we want to make sure that we’re taking care of our team and ourselves. That’s priority number one. Our goal as a company, as we’re growing, it’s very exciting, but it’s also taxing in a lot of different ways. And so we recognize that on social media, you probably see the glitz and the glamor. It looks like they’re just doing wonderful and doing great, but you’re only seeing such a small percentage of the daily life. We’re live and we’re explaining all of these things and we’re inspired. But part of our everyday life is sometimes we take a minute and we go, ugh, this is hard. And we realize we’ve got to pivot sometimes and we’ve got to change how we show up. And sometimes just showing up takes a lot of courage, confidence, energy, because we do have a limited amount of energy and we need to realize what we need to invest our energy in. So you don’t always believe what you see on social media. Exactly. I wanted to throw that out there because business, being a business owner is a lonely road. It’s, it’s a process. And there’s no one size fits all. Different businesses have their different goals and different types of services. And so what we do is one of a kind. And we do see some similar experiences with others. However, it is a very lonely road. And if you feel that way, it’s okay because that is part of the process. Just continue to show up.
Katherine:
Okay. We have five minutes left, so let me see if we have any other ones.
I think there’s some questions about enterprise. And so we’ll go ahead and look and do that for another chat. But another question is, from @ifyouwereachild specifically, the average cost of WBENC is it’s, well, it’s a hard question to answer. Cause you have your regional, so we’re talking about your regional organizations that participate in WBENC. And so in Austin, we’re a part of the, it’s the Women Business Council of Southwest for certification costs. So we have our own pricing, our membership fees to join, and then they’ll certify you and they’re going to certify you for the WBENC. And so for that, honestly, I forgot the amount for that certification, but I know the annual membership is going to be under your regional area, your regional organization. And so if, I mean, it’s really going to be based on state by state, and then the region that you’re in. So some states are going to have their own, some are going to be just a regional area. So for example, like a Southwest, which is the one that we’re in, there’s a southeast regional area. Some states, I believe California has their own regional area. It’s what it’s considered. So it really depends on where you’re at.
Michelle:
And the WBENC conference just happened a few weeks ago now. The next conference coming up is DisabilityIN. Now that conference is another conference for disability owned businesses. That’s going to be in July, and we’re going to be there. So we really hope to see you all there as well.
Katherine:
Right. What else?
Michelle:
Yeah, I think we’re good. Oh, was there one more question?
Katherine:
I think there’s one other question. It was a business question. So do we offer workshops and maybe in our three year plan, it’ll be theirs, so we can be our best selves and we could show up for all of you.
Michelle:
Wonderful. Yeah, there’s a lot of business enterprise related questions. I’m thinking that we might need to consider another live chat. However, I would like to wrap this up. Are there any final words that you would like to comment on before we close this live chat?
Katherine:
Just breathe. Yeah, it’s just, I mean, really, I think it comes back to just showing up and being proud, being fearless. I think that’s really the point. It’s just being fearless. You’re here on this earth for a reason, be you. Be fearless. Do your best. Your best is not going to be the other person’s best, but do your best. You’re only responsible for yourself and the impact that you make. Yeah.
Michelle:
Mic drop on that.
Katherine:
Mic drop. Right.
Michelle:
That’s it. Well, my final word is happy Women’s history Month, 36 years of recognizing that since 1986 life has changed drastically. Does it mean that once the month of March is over, we go on to the next month? No, you continue to show up all year long, and that’s our key word for this life chat is show up. Thank you all for joining us today.
Katherine:
Thank you. Thank you everyone.
Michelle:
Happy Friday.
Katherine:
Happy Friday.
Michelle:
Bye. Take care y’all. Bye.
