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A woman with potential

Written by: Mandy Garner

Article Overview: Roberta Jerram has spent her life setting up businesses and running party plan organisations so she is well qualified to moderate a social networking forum for businesswomen.

A woman with potential

Roberta Jerram has been through the whole gamut of working mom experiences and lived to tell the tale. She has worked in the travel industry as a trainer, worked in and set up several party planning businesses and been a single mom to four young children. Two years ago she pooled all her experience and set up a website called Giant Potential, a social networking site for businesswomen. The aim of the site is to put women in touch with each other so they can develop ideas, share good practice and get support. It now has 1,500 members, mainly in the UK. Many came through Facebook where Roberta has a Giant Potential page. She says that with the rise of mompreneurs there is a real need for a space for them to connect with like-minded people. However, she stresses that the site is not just for women with young children. "There are a lot of women in their 50s who are thinking of starting businesses and looking for support," she says. "There has been a big surge in online use by older women. There are also a lot of moms' websites talking about things like nappies or, at the other end of the spectrum, very corporate-style sites about being an entrepreneur. I wanted something that was in between."

She describes the site as "like Facebook, only prettier". She used Ning to set up the site because it was so easy to use. "I liked that fact that members could just go on the site and post photos of their products and put links back to their own websites," she says. The most active members have the best contacts, she says, and can direct others to experts in the field if they don't know the answers themselves. There is all sorts of advice being swapped, from PR to printing and manufacturing.

Entrepreneur

Roberta says she has always had an entrepreneurial streak and has worked in direct selling for almost 20 years. When she had her first child 16 years ago she went back to work as a trainer in the travel industry. She felt she was trying to keep everyone happy and had forgotten who she was. She spent one and a half hours commuting a day, getting home just in time to bath the baby and he was calling the childminder mummy. "I thought why am I doing this?" she says.

When her second child came along two years later she decided that she wanted to do things differently, on her own terms. She had a musical background. She had a music qualification and was a singer/songwriter - indeed she still does this and four years ago released a CD which she describes as pop and folkly acoustic music "for my own gratification". "Music and children were a big part of my life so it made sense to combinte the two so she set up a business called Maraca Jacks, named after her eldest son Jack, which runs music and movement sessions. She originally planned to franchise the business nationally.

That was before she had twins, now aged 11, and her husband left her. "It was a learning curve," she says. She sold the business to a pilot franchisee who sold it on, but she still works for it behind the scenes and says it gives sessions to 300 children a week in the south of England where she is based. She is planning to bring out a CD of the songs she has written for the workshop.

Single mom

Roberta says she spent four years as a single mom with her four children and at that point her main purpose was keeping a roof over their heads. Then she met her second husband and returned from honeymoon ready for a new challenge. She signed up to a party plan business called Mini-IQ, selling educational toys, books and games for children. She built up a team of over 100 women selling the Mini-IQ products over a three-year period.

She says she loved having the opportunity to shine in the business and her self-confidence blossomed over the three years, but she wanted to be able to pull her own strings. Her entrepreneurial spirit was too strong. She could see the business potential from social networking and she wanted to exploit it. In addition to Giant Potential she has just launched a new company, Linen at Home, which sells personalised, embroidered linen products such as towels and bathrobes.

Using her experience in direct sales, she has built up a network of 25 consultants across the UK and launched a website to promote the products at the end of the summer. "It's one step on from party planning," she says. People can be recruited online and marketing can be done via emails and social networking. "It's still about person to person selling," she says, "but it is more hi-tech."

The consultants have their own replicas of the main Linen at Home website and this helps them with marketing. She believes there is a massive appetite for the products Linen at Home sells, such as towels with logos on for golf clubs, spas and other organisations as well as gifts for individual customers, including bathrobes with family names on them.

She is working with a quality textile company with years of experience. "They have big clients so they can keep the prices down lower," she says.

Teenagers

Meanwhile, as her children move into the teenage years, she says the whole dynamic of balancing work and family life has altered. "There's more rushing around between 3 and 9pm," she laughs, "so organising parties for party planning is not right for me now. I'd rather be behind the scenes. My time slot is 9-3pm." She likes being at home when the children come through the door. "There are different demands when they get older," she says. "I like to know where they are. I had underestimated how much parents need to be around for their teenagers to listen to them or give them homework support."

She says they have grown up knowing mom works from home and are quite respectful of her work. They all have a strong work ethic and all of them have jobs. Indeed, they are already showing a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Her 14 year old has sub-contracted an extra newsround he took on to the twins.

Roberta does most of her work online from home, but travels to exhibitions and conferences. She spends a few hours every day moderating the Giant Potential forum. She has learnt some interesting lessons in the process. She now vets all new members as on one occasion a member joined and introduced a lot of spam. "Within 10 minutes of him joining there were hundreds of people uploading porn and other material onto the site," she says. "Within minutes I could not control it and had to close down the site and rethink my policy. It's been a very interesting learning curve. Now new members have to wait a short time to be approved, but it's worth it."

She strongly believes in the power of business women networks like Giant Potential. "Our members have embraced our motto Givers Prosper," she says. "People who give time and expertise tend to be the most successful in business."

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Article Tags: entrepreneur, social networking



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