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St. Louis Character: Erin Joy empowers women leaders with the help of others

"Our reason for being is to support women business owners and leaders in excelling in whatever their goals are"
Credit: SLBJ
Erin Joy, founder and CEO of Black Dress Circle at Oak Knoll Park. Photo by Michael Thomas for SLBJ.

ST. LOUIS — Erin Joy founded what was then Black Dress Partners nearly 10 years ago to provide business consulting and coaching services for women business owners, company leaders and C-suite executives. 

In addition to one-on-one coaching, Joy offers roundtable groups for female entrepreneurs called Black Dress Circle, and the company adopted that as its name in early 2019.

“Our reason for being is to support women business owners and leaders in excelling in whatever their goals are and still driving that life satisfaction while they’re doing it,” Joy said.

During the pandemic, Joy has been using her experience to reach beyond her clients to other businesses in need of support. In May, she launched the St. Louis Small Business Task Force, comprised of two dozen executives from a variety of industries, to virtually meet weekly to discuss resources to deal with the crisis, then share them on a public website.

“The Anatomy of Accomplishment: Your Guide to Bigger, Better, Bolder Business Results,” Joy’s compilation of advice from a variety of entrepreneurs, was published in March. 

She’s currently working on her dissertation for a Ph.D. in business psychology.

Why did you focus Black Dress Circle on women business owners and executives? When I started this company and I was looking around at how I wanted to segment the market, and not be a generalist, it just was so obvious that women business owners and women business leaders were under-supported. There were a lot of companies that coach and consult large organizations, and also the really small startup organizations. But our clients tend to have several hundred thousand dollars a year in annual revenue all the way up to $50 million. That is a category that there aren’t a lot of companies positioned to help. So it’s an underserved audience and it’s also where my passion lies, having been an entrepreneur my entire adult life, being raised by small-business owners. My mother was an entrepreneur. My grandmother was an entrepreneur. It’s just in my bones. I’ve actually dedicated my life to empowering women.

What led up to founding Black Dress Circle? Immediately prior, I was a consultant to the homebuilding industry. I had a small, successful consulting practice working with local homebuilders, loft developers and condo developers. And you know what happened in 2007 and 2008 — the housing industry crashed. I held on as long as I could. I knew that my skill set was transferable, that the skills I had developed as a consultant in homebuilding could be repositioned and redeployed to work in a variety of industries. And that’s exactly what I did. I pivoted like so many people are doing today and I launched Black Dress Circle. So this (the pandemic) was my second pretty major downturn that I’ve experienced as an entrepreneur. 

How has the pandemic impacted your business? Our primary offerings are these Black Dress Circle peer groups, where women are learning not only from me but from each other. We used to do that in person, half a day a month, in my office in Olivette. When the pandemic hit, we immediately shifted to virtual. I would say that’s kind of a surface level impact. Probably more importantly, we have used this opportunity to really dissect every part of our business and determine what we’re going to keep moving forward and what parts of our business need to be transformed. And we are designing a business model that will carry us for the next 20 years. Our revenue has been impacted slightly, and frankly, we’re still servicing clients who can’t afford to pay us right now because they have zero income, because that is what’s in alignment with our core values. 

What’s been the biggest surprise since you instituted the roundtables? How similar businesses are. It’s not how similar the leaders are. It’s how similar the challenges are that they face, and how much of the entrepreneurial learning curve can be shortened by learning from someone who’s been there and done that. 

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