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The faces of entrepreneurship and wealth holding are changing as women make gains in both facets of economic life. These shifts are affecting how they’re managing money — and who they turn to for help.

Whether due to life’s demands or the desire for professional autonomy, more women are jumping into entrepreneurship. According to a Gusto report, 49 percent of people opening a new business in 2023 were women, a 20 percent increase from 2019. And in the first three years of the decade, according to a Wells Fargo report, women’s businesses outpaced men’s in terms of growth in employment and revenue.

“The most exciting part of entrepreneurship is that you decide where the limits are, and you decide what you are worth, and you make that happen,” says Rachael Burns, owner of True Worth Financial Planning. “It’s energizing work, I think, when it’s your own business and your own ideas.”

At the same time, the Bank of America Institute recently estimated that of the $84 trillion younger generations will inherit from Baby Boomers by 2045, roughly $30 trillion will be in the hands of women in the next decade. This large shift of wealth will lead, in part, to women controlling more money than ever before.

As they navigate these economic changes, many women are turning to financial professionals they can relate to for tools that go beyond the nuts and bolts of money management — no matter where they’re starting. In Sacramento, independent firms are helping women strengthen their perspective on money and approach business ownership with confidence.

Innovatively, and independently, applying their skills

Rebecca Lobo, who goes by Bexi, was a postdoctoral student studying breast cancer at UC Davis and training as a research scientist when her health began to hold back her ambitions.

In 2010, when she took her concerns about fatigue, depression and dry, sensitive skin to her doctors, tests revealed nothing, and they offered no real solution. So she set out to soothe her lifelong skin issues by concocting facials using ingredients like avocado, banana and honey for at-home spa days. She developed ways to preserve her products in her kitchen lab.

“I translated what I learned during my Ph.D. and put that into how I developed and formulated these products,” she says. “I made this whole skincare line for myself.”

Within a year, people were asking how they could get their hands on such effective products.

She launched Bexi’s Bespoke Revitalisation in 2016, selling skincare tailored to customers’ conditions and more general products online and in-person. She was diagnosed with Sjogren’s syndrome in 2018 and has become an expert on the autoimmune disease that affects the glands, writing about it for her blog and the Davis Enterprise.

Her experience reflects one aspect of entrepreneurship’s appeal for many women, even when it’s not Plan A: flexibility. Lobo’s need for flexibility was tied to her illness, but for others it can be due to caretaking responsibilities for children or aging parents, which often falls upon women. 

For Lobo, as an unexpected entrepreneur, business management wasn’t her initial strength.

“I can talk numbers all you want, in calculus, math, physics, chemistry,” says Lobo. “You started talking to me about money and all of that, and I’m totally lost.”

It’s something that Priya Kumar, a Sacramento-based financial strategist, confronts often in her work with clients — a complicated and largely unexamined relationship with money. When she was formerly a business investigator for the California Franchise Tax Board, Kumar noticed another related theme among businesses.

“Oftentimes, they lack planning,” she says. “It’s almost like, ‘I’m going to start with the window and then build the house around it.’”

She’s seen restaurants open with treasured family recipes but no business plan; owners slash prices to attract customers, with no estimate of their overhead; and entrepreneurs who turn to CPAs only during a crisis or just to see how they fare each tax season.

“A lot of business owners have financial avoidance,” Kumar says. “They don’t review their numbers on a weekly or monthly basis.”

When Kumar launched Pivot My Profit in 2010, she knew she had to start with clients’ relationship to money. Even if the course or session is centered on a specific topic like budgeting, “financial trauma is always the foundation,” she says.

Lobo became a client of Pivot My Profit in 2023, after meeting Kumar through the nonprofit Davis Area Women’s Network. With Kumar’s help, she was able to connect her financial aversion to her upbringing as a daughter of Indian immigrants. 

“I didn’t get a lot of training in how to manage household finances and all that, because the assumption was you’re going to get married and figure it out,” she says, adding that the Catholicism she grew up with also influenced her perspective.

“‘Money is the root of all evil’ was a limiting belief I grew up with,” she says. “So that really worked against me when starting a business.” 
Through exploring these themes while gaining money management tools and strategies, Lobo has become more proactive. As she crunched last year’s numbers in January, she was looking at a 15 percent revenue increase, which allowed her to invest in a 200-square-foot production lab.

Sophia Kanaan is director of the California Capital Women’s Business Center, one of 21 centers around the state that offer primarily free educational and networking services to all entrepreneurs. Through the center’s Motivated Entrepreneur monthly meetup program, Kumar taught financial basics classes with a depth that went beyond their topic.

“Priya was very intuitive with how your background influences the decisions you make as a business owner,” Kanaan says. By personalizing these lessons and themes, she adds, “you can really get an understanding of how you want to show up for your business.”

Inherited approaches to money

It’s been 50 years, about two generations, since women were granted legal access to financial tools, like credit, without a husband or male family member co-signing. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited creditors from discriminating on the basis of sex or marital status.

These structural conditions, along with culture and family upbringing, can shape a person’s relationship with money.

An examination of the roots of money behaviors is embedded in the work of Anita Johnson, a financial behaviorist who offers services to clients nationwide. Last year, she earned her Ph.D. from Walden University, where she researched the financial upbringing of African American women. Well before that, she faced her own financial reckoning.

“If I haven’t seen it, I’ve done it,” she says, citing her own financial past that included debt, being subject to predatory home loans and ending up underwater on a house.

Sorting through her own money troubles and sharing her lessons with other women was the foundation of her first book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: Taking the Emotion Out of Finances.”

But there was an even larger story for her to help shape and tell.

Working as a tax accountant in the mid-2000s, she noticed a pattern of educated, working women coming to her with a limited understanding of their finances. Johnson remembers one woman who, after her husband’s death, was so unfamiliar with basic tax paperwork that Johnson made her a scrapbook of examples.

“I wanted to know what that meant. Why?” she recalls wondering. “It’s not like these women weren’t educated, it’s that they weren’t financially educated.”

She delved into finding answers, in part by launching a business of her own. She’d always longed to be her own boss, but after a divorce, the need to be physically there for her kids drew her to entrepreneurship. She raised them with a financial education that included budgeting their allowances and, as they got older, managing their bills.

These kinds of familial interactions were the basis of Johnson’s dissertation, through which she and colleagues examined the financial socialization of African American mothers living in Sacramento County. In her abstract, Johnson describes financial socialization as the learning process around money, which “is impacted by various factors, including family dynamics, cultural values and socioeconomic conditions.”

In her interviews last year, 13 women were asked questions like, “How skilled were your caretakers at managing their finances?” and “What can you teach your children and future children about managing their finances?”

They found these conversations were largely absent in the interviewees’ upbringing, which Johnson attributes, in part, to economic inequality and the need for past generations to focus on civil rights and survival.

Among the mothers she interviewed, she sees signs of a promising shift.

“Now you have a younger generation than me that I had interviewed with kids, and they are involving their kids in their business, in their household chores, their household budget, showing them that kind of stuff,” she says.

Navigating new terrain

Along with laws and social norms, a change in wealth is underway, with women taking charge of money. This is partially due to factors that include increased entrepreneurship among women and wives being younger or living longer on average than their husbands.

This is one aspect which Burns of True Worth Financial Planning has built her firm around. The Folsom-based certified financial planner exclusively takes on clients who are women, with a focus on those going through a major transition or loss. While most of her clients are divorcees, they also include those whose spouses or parents have died.

“The commonalities seem to be they’re women, they’re managing their finances by themselves, and it’s usually a somewhat scary thing for them,” Burns says. “It’s more than just money that they’re dealing with.”

Burns was thrust into entrepreneurship while facing uncertainty within her own family. Days after she and her husband, Rob, found out they were expecting twins, they also learned he had a brain tumor, which doctors initially thought was benign. Months later, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of brain cancer.

“My goals and my life priorities shifted really drastically, really quickly,” says Burns, who was on maternity leave from Ameriprise Financial Services. She’d also worked as a financial advisor with Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and, needing flexibility and stability for the road ahead, launched True Worth Financial Planning in 2020.

Her husband is healthy today, but Burns feels the experience left her with a unique insight.

“I thought, I have the skill set to problem-solve there, but I also have the personal experience, going through really scary life transitions,” she says. “It gave me some perspective that made me more helpful to clients who were going through similar situations.”

Today, five years in, she feels more connected to her work and her clients’ lives, and she earns a living that’s surpassed her salary working full-time for larger firms.

Burns acknowledges that while entrepreneurship isn’t the solution or even accessible for everyone, given the risk involved in getting a business off the ground, she has seen it become an empowering decision for her clients, and herself.

“It ended up being this unintentionally amazing career path,” she says. “It’s the most rewarding work I’ve ever done in my life.” 

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