The time has finally come to let you in on a little secret that I’ve been keeping from you… After 2 years in business as the Secret Women’s Business Academy, I’ve decided it’s time to revamp, rebrand and rename!

In business, we review progress on an annual basis. We use the one-year mark as an anniversary, a milestone, a point of achievement…and we analyse that same period of time to assess how we have performed, where our strengths lie, and in what ways we can improve.

There is a worldwide movement happening right now, and it’s been more than a century in the making. In 1903, British Suffragettes began protesting for the right to vote. The female suffrage movement in Australia started making headway in the late 19th Century, until all women were finally able to vote and stand for parliament in 1923.

The tide is shifting, ladies. We can no longer be suppressed, and we’re floating to the top of the barrel.Female entrepreneurship is growing faster than that of male business ownership, with a rise of 7.6% over the past ten years (compared to .3% in men).

Every year, Oxford bestows its Word of the Year title on “a word or expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year…” It’s a word that has “…lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.”

There’s no such thing as universal beauty. Surely, some women are considered to be more attractive than others, but if you ask anyone to name the most beautiful woman in the world, you would lose track of the many answers.

These are exciting times for female entrepreneurs and women who own small and micro-businesses. Not only are our numbers growing, we’re logging bigger and bigger successes.

Support for women in business, and women in general, benefits our entire economy. Not only are numbers of female entrepreneurs growing, those women are bringing their unique gifts to the marketplace…which benefit all of us, regardless of race, gender, religion or industry.

There’s a new trend in the world of business start-ups, and it has to do with middle-aged women opening their own businesses. It’s no surprise, really. Older women have so much to offer, and they’re finally going after what they want. The men who love them, however, are suffering. They’re stunned. They’re feeling lost and left behind, saying to themselves, “My wife is starting a business. Why?”