By Dustin Brown
Monique Greenwood had served for two years as editor in chief of Essence Magazine when she gave up the steady paycheck in July to run a Brooklyn bed and breakfast she had founded seven years earlier.
“I came to understand that if I focused more attention on my businesses that they in turn would be just as lucrative as the paycheck that I was leaving,” Greenwood said.
Greenwood plans to share her story with other entrepreneurs Friday when she gives a keynote address at the annual Queens Women Minding Their Business Conference, an event sponsored by the Queens County Overall Economic Development Corporation at the Citibank tower in Long Island City.
The program will teach female entrepreneurs about marketing their businesses, which QCOEDC Executive Director Marie Nahikian described as “how you position your service or your product so that people can find it.”
The event will also officially celebrate the creation of the Queens Women’s Business Center, which opened last summer in the QCOEDC’s Borough Hall offices, and the formation of an advisory board to support the development of women-owned businesses.
For Greenwood the entrepreneurial venture is likely to pay off. In addition to her bed and breakfast, Akwaaba Mansion in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, she runs Akwaaba Cafe down the street and opened Akwaaba By-the-Sea in Cape May, N.J. over the summer.
She also operates a real estate holding company called Akwaaba Properties with both commercial and residential properties, and published a book called “Having What Matters: The Black Woman’s Guide to Creating the Life You Really Want.”
Greenwood said female entrepreneurs often get mixed messages from people who do not understand why they would quit good jobs to try to get a business off the ground.
“There’s a lot of fear that women have about pursuing their own business,” Greenwood said. “I want to encourage them to replace their fear with faith.”
At the conference she plans to tell women to “define success on their own terms,” so they know what they want to achieve without being pulled down by naysayers.
Other speakers include Borough President Helen Marshall; Veronica Rose, the president of Aurora Electric Corporation, a major contractor for the AirTrain project that was recently listed as one of the top 100 fastest-growing firms in the country; Debbi Milner, the president of Jade Systems Corporation, one of the 10 largest women-owned companies in the city; and Vera Moore, whose line of beauty products caters to women of color.
The first such conference was held in 1999, although it was not originally intended to turn into an annual event.
“I don’t think we really had a strong sense of how the number of women business owners would grow,” Nahikian said. “I would say women have become a very formidable part of our commitment.”
To reserve a spot at the conference, call 263-0546.
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
