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Having founded The Polling Company in 1995, Kellyanne Conway has learned quite a bit about Americans and the way they work, providing qualitative and quantitative research for political races, trade associations, Fortune 100 companies and the federal government.

She’s also the co-author of What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live. Conway sat down with Business Report before her speech at the luncheon to honor the 2007 Influential Women in Business winners.

Question: What advice would you give to people who are thinking about starting a business?

First of all, I would tell them to politely entertain, but not necessarily follow, other people’s advice because only you know yourself, your energy level, your commitment to that certain profession and to entrepreneurship and your skill set. The other thing is be willing to hear the word “no” more than you actually say it. What I mean by that is be able and available to receive rejection and be told no, but don’t say no. Don’t bellyache that something conflicts with your schedule and you have other plans or you’re tired. Too bad. You’re building a business, and you are trying to explode into a marketplace that is already teeming with talented individuals. Another thing I tell small business owners, particularly women, is to go get an office. You need a presence outside of BlackBerries and Web sites. And I also encourage people to return phone calls and write thank-you notes. These are two fundamental actions that cannot go overstated.

Q: As an entrepreneur and married mother of twins, how have you learned to “shoulder the burden?”

You have to shoulder the burden by really triaging, not prioritizing. You need to triage your calendar. When I was first starting out, I had to do to lots of lunches and dinners and meetings for in-person presentations. It’s like I had had 85,000 ounces of liquid and five meals by day’s end. I still think there’s no substitute for the in-person presentation or pitch or deal. Now I’ve become very disciplined in seeing if something can be converted into a conference call or something can be converted into an e-mail exchange.

The other thing for women is you have to think more like a man by day than a woman. You should give very little time to your college friends who you love dearly and the family members who want to tell you about the latest gossip. You need to actually be focused by day. You can still give your time to them when you’re taking a break from the business day or at night certainly or on the weekends. The workplace is a tremendous place for passion, but it’s really no place for emotion.

Q: What are women expecting with jobs today?

Flexibility is truly the watchword in the 21st century workplace. No. 1, women are not necessarily demanding institutional flexibility, trying to mandate through government action or through a petition-signing at work, that you have an on-site day care or that new mothers and fathers have 10 weeks paternity and maternity leave rather than six or eight. It’s not really institutional change they want. It’s individual flexibility. It’s having technology at home and on the go that allows them to complete their work and be result-focused, not in lieu of showing up at the workplace, but in addition to.

No. 2, many women in this country will continue to leave the traditional work force, that being defined as working full-time, outside the home for someone else and receiving compensation in exchange. They will continue to leave the work force, temporarily because of motherhood, but they’re going to start to hemorrhage from the traditional work force permanently because of entrepreneurship. Failing to simply see flexibility in the work force, they are creating parallel tracks of their own, and they’ve decided that they can do it.

Q: Do you think there’s still a pressure for women to choose between whether to be the caretaker or the provider?

Yes, there’s tremendous pressure. It’s a perennial challenge only because a provider who then becomes a caretaker—or a caretaker who then becomes a provider—somehow you don’t get along with your 401(k) and your guidebook to being a great parent, you don’t get six extra hours in your day. There’s still 24. That’s always going to be the challenge.

Q: Why do you think we’re still seeing few women at the top?

We’re still seeing few women at the top through a combination of history and desire. Battleships turn very slowly. If the average age of a CEO or a board member for a Fortune 500 has been steadily creeping up, then it’s going to take that much longer for women to get there, to travel that longer path.

You’d be surprised how many women don’t want that. And the presumption is usually everybody wants to do everything, which is so not true. I can tell you as a researcher. Or it’s that women believe that corporations are impersonal. It takes longer to climb up the ladder, and most importantly they found they can feel as fulfilled if not more so either hanging up their own shingle or working for another small business. Those combinations have led to a lack of desire.

Q: Do you feel there’s an expectation of what women need to help women?

There is an expectation of that. There’s an expectation of anybody in a similar situation helping their own. There’s an expectation that women will help other women and I think that’s true, but women should also be reminded that they have fought for equality, which is really fighting for fairness. Equality says you and I should end up with the same thing. Fairness means you should start out with the same thing. I think that the expectation that women will help other women is true, but women should recognize that in their decades-long fight to be treated fairly in the workplace and in society, that they too should step back now and be as gender blind as they’ve been demanding everybody else be. That’s the great irony here.

Q: You recently presented to one of the House committees in March. What’s more nerve-racking: Doing that or being on TV?

Nobody goes on TV and takes an oath, which is unfortunate because I think the quality and content of TV would be very different. Anytime you’re under oath, you should be more vigilant. I would have to say testifying before Congress because you walk into that room and you are imbued with the gravity of the place, of the decisions that are being made there.

I have to say neither going on live TV nor testifying before Congress can ever make you more nervous than eulogizing a loved one or speaking before a classroom filled with like fourth- or sixth-graders, which I’ve done. The fourth- and sixth-graders, they’re looking at you like you better have something new to say. You better be hip and cool like they are.

Q: What one thing do you hope people take from your presentation today?

When I started in 1995, I started like any other entrepreneur with a wing and a prayer, a dream, a very thin bank account, the whole thing. By June of 1996, on the first anniversary of The Polling Company, I got a call from a speaker’s bureau asking me to deliver a speech in Washington, D.C. They said I was specifically requested along with Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. Now, theretofore, my speaking fee was a big goose egg because I always thought the First Amendment and right to free speech was whenever anybody invited me to talk.

I sat there, and I struggled. I knew whatever I said was going to be too low. Rather than do that and moan about it, I took a quote out of When Harry Met Sally. I said, “You’ve invited Mark Mellman, right? Well, like they said in When Harry Met Sally, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’ We’re getting paid to do the same thing, show up the same amount of time.” They said, “Well, he requested $3,500. Would that be OK?”