Women turning to entrepreneurship have broken through the glass ceiling. Now it’s time to give one another a boost.

By Rieva Lesonsky

I have spent much of the last 22 years of my life advocating for women business owners. In the course of my career at Entrepreneur magazine (where I was the editorial director for many years), I started three magazines aimed at this market—and for various reasons all of them failed. I also helped Entrepreneur.com launch its website for entrepreneurial women, and I have given dozens of speeches to people like you.

And now I’m one of you. I recently left my job of 26-plus years at Entrepreneur to launch my own business, a marketing and communications company helping the country’s major business marketers better serve the needs of entrepreneurs.

All of us entrepreneurial women (I am so excited to be able to actually call myself that) have different reasons and motivations for going out on our own. Although there were many successful (and legendary) women business owners in “the old days,” women-owned businesses truly started taking off in the 1990s.

While a horrific economy propelled a lot of women out of recently attained corporate jobs into businesses of their own, another factor was the infamous glass ceiling. That ceiling definitely existed then and, sad to say, it still exists today. I recently read that younger women in college think the glass ceiling no longer exists, even though female college grads earn less at graduation than young men. In fact, working women aged 25 to 34 make 88 percent of what men in that age group do. While that may be progress, it is simply not good enough.

As a result, many women quickly figured out that the path to equal (or better) pay doesn’t lie on the corporate ladder, but in taking charge of their work lives and running their own businesses. I think that’s a lasting legacy from my generation of women—the baby boomers.

The beauty of entrepreneurship is it’s more or less customizable. As the owner of the business, you get to decide what you want to do and when you want to do it. Of course you need to be realistic—you’re not going to make millions working part time (especially at the beginning).

Now that I’m one of you, I can better understand your concerns, challenges and fears because I’m facing them myself. But I’m trying to heed the advice I’ve given over the years— here’s the abbreviated version, the 4 P’s of success: Follow your passion; plan; stay positive; and be persistent.

And I’m going to add one more here, even though it’s not a “P”: Help other women. Back in the ’90s, at the beginning of the entrepreneurial women’s revolution, a successful woman business owner asked me why should she help aspiring entrepreneurs when no one was there to help her. I told her that was the wrong attitude. And that’s still true today. I strongly believe we women owe it to ourselves (and our daughters and granddaughters to come) to help one another succeed. As Madeleine Albright, the nation’s first female Secretary of State, said, “I think it’s important for women to help one another. There is a special place in hell for women who don’t.”

Rieva Lesonsky is CEO of SMB Connects and Editorial Director of Moran Media Group. She can be reached at askrieva@gmail.com