Women appear to be more risk-averse and therefore more cautious about making business acquisitions. Still, it's not that women don't make acquisitions at all. "They prefer to grow their businesses organically rather than go on acquisition paths.
Women and acquisitions it is still a rare combination. Yet there seems to be somewhat of a turnaround where women's sales of businesses are concerned. As early as July 2023, Brookz research showed that 1 out of 5 businesses for sale on Brookz 's acquisition platform at that time was run by a woman. Of the 1,200 businesses for sale at the time, as many as 17 percent were found to have a female owner. To illustrate, in 2019, the number of women entrepreneurs selling was less than 4 percent.
Caroline Jansen, named "Acquisition Advisor of the Year" by Brookz in 2020 and owner of Traction M&A Services, confirms the view that women are less likely to make acquisitions. Indeed, she says, this is because women are more risk-averse than men. 'I myself have only advised a woman twice,' Jansen said. "For the rest, it was all men.
And, according to Jansen, another factor is that there are too few examples of successful role models for women entrepreneurs to emulate. "I think Thecla Bodewes of Thecla Bodewes Shipyards, who took over her business in 1998, is one of those few successful role models. She is and woman and entrepreneur and has shown in the past that she also dares to take over businesses.'
Jansen also thinks it is because there are also still too few women in businesses' boardrooms; in the 2021-2023 period, only 15 percent were female directors. Furthermore, she believes it is because there are now fewer women entrepreneurs.
Structural challenge
That this is so is also shown in an ABN Amro report from June 2024. It states (admittedly) that the number of women entrepreneurs is still growing steadily, but also that there is still much to be gained in terms of female entrepreneurship. Although some sectors show an increase, only 37 percent of all entrepreneurs remain women, according to the report. Admittedly, in 2010 the figure was still 32 percent. But if you take a closer look at the figures, according to ABN Amro, you will see that this increase has stagnated in recent years. The number of women starting out as entrepreneurs still remains considerably lower than the number of men, according to the bank.
I also preferred to transfer my business to a female entrepreneur
'But we should not blind ourselves to only the differences between men and women in entrepreneurship,' says Gerarda Westerhuis, retail and leisure sector economist at ABN Amro. 'That actually perpetuates inequality. Our figures reflect the structural challenges women face and scare many women away.'
If you pull out the detailed and most recent figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), you will see that the number of female entrepreneurs increased by 72 percent between 2010 and 2022, from over 487,000 in 2010 to nearly 837,000 in 2022. The number of male entrepreneurs increased by 45 percent over the same period. Consequently, the proportion of women out of the total number of entrepreneurs has grown: in 2010, as mentioned above, 32 percent of all entrepreneurs were women; by 2023, it had grown to 37 percent.
Female successor
Of course, it is not true that women do not make acquisitions at all. A good example is the acquisition of Art Support, a business that provides support staff for the cultural sector, by Josja Zijlstra. She took over the business in June 2024 from Grace Jagdewsing. Coincidentally, it was also a deal involving not one, but no less than two women. The acquisition came about in part thanks to Brookzs online acquisition platform .
Says Jagdewsing, "I had a financieel adviseur when I decided after 25 years that I wanted to sell a business. That adviser actually wanted to go the traditional route when selling. I thought differently and said to him: why don't we just put the sales profile on Brookz? We eventually did that and a surprising number of potential buyers came forward. At one point I was even at an advanced stage with one of them. But then Josja came forward and I had a better click with her. Apart from that, I actually preferred to hand the business over to a female entrepreneur.
Zijlstra: "I originally come from the publishing profession and I had been looking for a while for a business I could take over. I saw Art Support's sales profile on Brookz and it appealed to me because it also matched my interests. In addition, I too immediately felt a click with Grace.
Access to capital
Besides the fact that, in general, fewer acquisitions are made by women, female entrepreneurs also find it a lot harder to raise (start-up) capital to finance the growth of their company than their male counterparts. For example, Chantal Korteweg, Director of Social Impact & Inclusive Banking at ABN Amro, wrote a witty column in which she suggested to her readers that the best strategy for female entrepreneurs to get money from investors was to bring a man along to their pitch. According to her, that was a joke, but one with a kernel of truth.
She supported her argument with figures from the Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, which show that only three percent of venture investors' money in 2022 went to businesses with a female (co-)founder. Techleap, the Dutch organization dedicated to the growth of startups and scaleups, added to this in 2023, stating that investments in female tech entrepreneurs also lagged far behind. Only 0.7 percent of venture capital investments end up at Dutch tech companies with a female founder team, according to Techleap.
Korteweg's desire to increase entrepreneurial opportunities for women led to the Dutch Code Stimulating Female Entrepreneurship, or Code-V for short. More than 60 organizations signed this code late last year to encourage women to start their own businesses and to simplify access to financing for them. Because the Dutch economy can grow faster if more women become entrepreneurs, is the idea. According to an earlier joint report by ABN Amro and organizational consulting firm McKinsey, better support for women entrepreneurs could generate 139 billion euros in additional gross value added for the Dutch economy.
Autonomous versus acquisitions
More women entrepreneurs are offering their businesses for sale, and that number has quadrupled in five years, Brookz research thus found . At the same time, the number of women buyers of businesses is also rising, although not as fast as the number of sellers. In 2019, female buyers made up four percent of the total, four years later that percentage had risen to six percent.
So on the acquisition side, that growth is a lot more difficult than on the sales side. Arguments given by acquisition consultants were that women are more risk-averse, so they find the risks associated with an acquisition too great. They also argued that women are more realistic and therefore do not overestimate their chances of success. In addition, they would believe more in organic growth and the acquisition market is also mostly dominated by men, something that deters women.
In absolute numbers, there are still few successful examples of business acquisitions by women. This creates the image that this says a lot about the success rate per individual, but that is not the case. This unjustly creates a vicious circle that is difficult to break. A great shame, because taking over a business is also a way for a woman to get to the top.
Zijlstra also recognizes the picture outlined earlier by Jansen regarding takeovers. "Women are generally more reserved where takeovers are concerned. Furthermore, I think they generally prefer to let their business grow organically rather than go on an acquisition path.' Although Zijlstra has been working for less than six months, she does not rule out going on a takeover path with Art Support in the future. 'But of course it depends a bit on what else comes my way.'
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