Unlike male-dominated investment firms in Utah, VAST is owned and managed by women. The business is part of a tiny sorority of women-owned investment firms in the country whose numbers are so small that no one can say how many exist.

"I can tell you there are very, very few, probably less than a dozen," said Emily Mendell, a spokeswoman for the National Venture Capital Association, a trade group that represents about 480 venture-capital and private-equity companies.

Three Utah women - Becky Anderson, Carla Meine and Barbara Zimonja - are setting up VAST to focus on women-owned companies with revenues of $3 million to $8 million that want to get bigger but may have been ignored by conventional investment firms.

The trio decided to establish the equity firm out of a sense of duty to other women. Although 41 percent of all U.S. businesses are owned by women, only 4 percent of the owners received financing from private-equity funds, according to the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington D.C.

Most women-owned businesses still rely on their personal savings, credit cards and family members to secure funding. Women business owners who did secure financing made an average of four attempts to obtain a bank loan or line of credit. They made 22 attempts to obtain equity capital, according to the association.

"I want to help other women find a way to own a business without having to go through what I went through," said Anderson, who by taking a second mortgage on her house in 1995 financed the start of her company, For Every Body, a Lindon-based maker of candles and bath products.

Only last year, when For Every Body did $25 million in sales, was she able to secure an unlimited line of credit from an out-of-state bank without her husband's signature on the loan.

"You already have one strike against you" if you are a woman, Anderson said. "Typically, women don't go out and grow a huge business like we have. We've been able to do it, and from the ground up."

Anderson's partners at VAST cleared similar hurdles to establish their own companies.

Meine founded O'Currance Teleservices, a Draper-based telemarketing company, in 1994 with a severance payment and a personal loan from a bank. Only when a friendly banker suggested she talk to a venture capitalist did she realize equity financing was possible. She sold the $22 million business last year to a private-equity company.

"Women aren't at the table. It's a network of men, and we want to change that," Meine said.

Zimonja is CEO of Premier Resorts, a Park City-based company that manages vacation properties in nine states and Mexico. Her company brought in more than $100 million in revenue last year. The business grew out of an earlier venture she started with credit cards.

So far, the trio has raised $1 million from investors for VAST. They hope to accumulate $10 million but say the weak economy is hurting fundraising. The money will be invested in profitable companies led by women primarily in the Rocky Mountain states as early as this summer.

"We feel like not only are we going to bring the money in to these companies, but also the expertise that they don't have access to right now," Meine said.

Why women-owned companies haven't tapped venture capital and private-equity financing touches off a lively debate among Anderson, Meine and Zimonja.

They say the reasons probably boil down to a set of misunderstandings. Many women know little about equity capital, so they avoid it. Others believe venture capitalists still harbor biases against women-owned firms. Still others fear they will be forced to relinquish control of their companies to outside investors.

"It was a concept that was so negative to me that I chose to run the ragged route of credit cards," said Zimonja, whose 1,700-employee property management company arose from a housecleaning business in Park City.

A reluctance to cede control is a big reason why securing true business financing remains a significant obstacle for women, said Sharon Hadary, executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington.

"We [also] find many women business owners do not understand what equity capital is, how they could use it and how it could benefit their businesses. Clearly part of it is understanding the value to business growth of equity investment," Hadary said.

Researchers have uncovered another reason that rivals other factors in importance. Hadary said many women emphasize the wrong things when they pitch proposals for capital.

"Women put a greater percentage of their proposal into why the product is important, what differentiates it, how valuable it is. Men put more emphasis on the financial. Quite frankly, putting emphasis on the financial and how the investor is going to get equity out of the business is very important," she said.

Todd Stevens, managing director of Epic Ventures, a Salt Lake City-based venture-capital business, said women have had limited access to capital because most financial-service firms have not put women in senior executive positions. Only in the past five years has the culture started to change, prodded by a surge of new women-owned companies whose numbers are growing at twice the rate of all businesses.

"It's a pretty recent phenomenon that women entrepreneurs are stepping forward and doing things on their own, as opposed to being just one of the management team in a male-dominated company. They are now starting their own companies and do their own business," Stevens said.

pbeebe@sltrib.com