Top Business ideas for women in 2020
Let’s talk about the best business ideas for women! It’s so important for our world to have women in business. After all, we’re half the population—that’s billions of women with unique ideas, skillsets, and visions for the future. Female business owners employ nearly 9 million people and generate 1.7 trillion dollars in sales per year. They help keep the economy running while improving their own lives and innovating new ways to make the world better.
While any woman can start any type of business she has the knowledge and experience for, here are some of our favorite and best business ideas for women!
1. Educational services
If you love absorbing and sharing knowledge, an education-oriented business could be a great fit. Often, these are flexible businesses where you can choose your own hours, work from anywhere, and keep it as a one-woman operation or scale it to employ others.
Tutoring in-person or online
Women with academic skills can use them to help students succeed in their subject of choice. You can offer tutoring for elementary school students, high-schoolers, college students, or even adults. Learn more about starting a tutoring business here.
Teaching English online
Since English is a global language, there’s plenty of demand from adults who want to learn it and parents who want their children to grow up bilingual. There are already plenty of companies like VIPKID and Qkids where teachers can offer their services, but you can also start your own private teaching business if you have the marketing chops or connections.
Starting an online course
If you’re an expert on a certain subject, building your own courses can be a highly efficient way to teach it to others. It’s a lot of work upfront, but once you’ve written the materials or recorded the videos, the bulk of the job is done. There are a variety of online course platforms where you can build and sell courses.
Teaching music
This can be a great home business for women skilled in an instrument. Advertise locally and have students come to you for lessons in piano, violin, guitar, or whatever your specialty is. You can even teach virtually. There are requirements to teach music in schools, but anyone can give private lessons.
2. Design businesses
Women unquestionably have an edge in the design industry. We quite literally have an “eye” for it: research shows that women are able to distinguish shades of color that look identical to men. Depending on your other professional skills, this can spark several types of small business ideas for women.
Interior design
Help people create attractive and functional spaces in their homes. Note that in some states, starting an interior design business requires that you have specific licensing.
Graphic design
Use your art skills and graphic design software to make logos, infographics, advertisements, web banners, and more. This is a great small business idea for women who’ve already worked in a similar industry and are ready to strike out on their own. Learn some dos and don’ts of starting a graphic design business here.
Web design
It’s common to see self-taught professionals in the tech industry, so you can easily find resources to teach yourself web design and start seeking clients. There are several different tech skills under this umbrella, including visual design, UX (user experience) design, and sometimes basic coding like HTML. Your goal is to make websites attractive and easy to navigate.
3. Skincare & beauty
Despite women comprising the bulk of consumers in the beauty industry, only 29% of executives and board members at top beauty brands are women. In the top 100 beauty companies, only 10 had a female CEO. But since these products are primarily used by women, it makes sense for them to be created by women as well, right?
To help inspire beauty business ideas for women, here are 17 female-owned beauty brands spanning lotions, cleansers, skincare for women of color, makeup, and more.
A small Etsy shop or farmer’s market stall can be the perfect jumping-off point in this small business idea for women. Hone your craft with artisan soaps, dry shampoo, body butters/scrubs, or other natural beauty products you can make at home.
4. Home, life, & financial organization
It’s not just a stereotype that women are more organized. Research shows that women are more organized under pressure and better at multitasking. This makes them perfect candidates to run businesses where these skills are paramount.
Virtual assistance
For many fellow men and women business owners, virtual assistants are their lifeline—the ones behind the scenes who keep everything running. They typically perform a
variety of administrative tasks like answering emails, organizing calendars, doing research or data entry, etc. You can work on your own, or scale up and hire other virtual assistants so you can take on more clients.
Professional home organization
Remember when everyone was talking about Marie Kondo? It illuminated the fact that many people aren’t happy with the amount of clutter in their homes. However, sometimes it takes an un-emotionally-attached third party to manage the purging process. With a
home organization business , you can charge an hourly fee to come declutter a home and restructure rooms in a better way.
Bookkeeping
If you liked math in school and have a knack for numbers, you might make a great bookkeeper. Bookkeeping is a great small business idea for women because you can easily find free bookkeeping courses to get trained in the right skills. You can often find flexible online work doing bookkeeping for small businesses, so it’s a business you can have on the side or take full-time.
