First, acknowledge that Canada’s one-million-plus female entrepreneurs are not mini-men. Then, make new federal funding available only to women-led incubators and accelerators
In September, Mary Ng, the minister of small business and export promotion, announced a new $85-million fund to support women’s entrepreneurship programming.
That comes a year after a 2017 McKinsey consulting firm study on gender parity in Canada said it will take 180 years before women entrepreneurs and business owners will achieve gender parity in this country. While Canada is viewed as a leading nation in advancing gender equality, support for its one-million-plus female entrepreneurs clearly lags far behind.
As a female serial entrepreneur, I welcomed Ms. Ng’s announcement, but it’s not enough to pinkify startup and innovation funding. Wiping lipstick across current entrepreneurial programs will not reduce the challenges women face. We must first fundamentally change the entrepreneurial ecosystem – how it views women and what we encourage in these programs. In short, we must grasp that women who start businesses are not mini-men and alterations to the one-suit-fits-all approach to gender works to oppress, rather than unleash new economic potential.
Currently, the majority of incubator and accelerator environments that receive government funding to attract women act more like “re-education centres.” The programs aim to change female entrepreneurs so we behave more like men, herding us to leap into flashy tech sectors, embrace masculine approaches to starting and quickly scaling a business, and even abandon the very motivations that inspired us to start a business in the first place.
For many women, starting a business may be less about status, destruction and gaming the system than creating meaning and advancing justice.
Too often pink marketing tactics that attract female founders into accelerator programs fail on the retention side: After a few months of segregation and patronizing coaching, they run screaming out the door. Many segregated programs close down – not because women-only spaces are not needed, but because a segregated approach in a co-ed environment doesn’t work.
While I agree all-women spaces are truly important in many circumstances, due to the silencing and intimidation many women experience while in the presence of men (even those they love), lace-glove ghettoization in otherwise co-ed settings is the last thing women entrepreneurs need. These programs rarely succeed; women perceive these watered-down and otherwise undifferentiated programs as being sideline; they are for those who can’t cut it in the main ring.
For these reasons, I am challenging Ms. Ng to do something bold with this new funding: Use it to change the narrative on female entrepreneurship. Direct these dollars to supporting and validating women’s authentic approach to entrepreneurship rather than trying to make us more like men or steering us away from work we’re passionate about.
For example, the vast majority of female entrepreneurs today are drawn to start businesses in human-centred sectors such as care-giving, culture-making, education, health and wellness, hosting/tourism, food, community building and what we might call human development – belonging, spirituality, capacity-building and meaning-making.
Currently, these areas are perceived as mature, low growth, unremarkable, expensive to scale, and not export friendly. They have poor prospects of generating high wages, fat exit packages or monetary wealth for investors. As a result, investors and innovation policy makers deem these sectors to be an economic still pond. They look away, dazzled by rowdy tech startups with hockey stick growth curves. But if you are only looking for the fireworks, you miss the amazing things that are happening on the ground.
As the next wave of the artificial intelligence tech sector explodes – replacing human labour and creating social upheaval – that so-called still pond will look awfully deep. Human-centred businesses will become more vital than ever, with high-growth prospects and enviable process innovations that garner intellectual property value exportable to nations mired in worsening social decay.
If future value streams lie in funding companies that excel at work only humans can do, now is the time to support and drive entrepreneurship and innovation in these areas which, at present, tend to be women-led.
To unleash women’s potential as entrepreneurs, we also need to support process innovation (not just product innovation) and fund the growing number of alternative, experimental, community-based women-for-women programs and create opportunities to connect them so they might grow from strength to strength plus share points of view and best practices.
Such incubators should be generously sprinkled across the land to ensure local relevance and easy access and sparkle with colours – green, yellow, purple and raspberry, rather than corporate grey.
When it comes to programming, instead of typical engineer dude-developed curriculums, fund applicants who could deliver innovative curriculums based on newer and more relevant ideas developed by under-leveraged female thought leaders such as Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy), Saras Sarasvathy (Effectual Entrepreneurship), Barbara Orser and Catherine Elliott (Feminine Capital) and CV Harquail plus Lex Schroeder (co-creators of the Feminist Business Model Canvas).
And, finally, this time let’s make the funds available only to women-led incubators and accelerators with a leadership team and mentor rosters composed of a minimum of 51 per cent women. Rather than trying to change women, they are more likely to work on overhauling inequitable political, economic, social and power structures in order to help women-led enterprises thrive. Systems changes can deliver huge benefits. For instance, working to get more women on boards is important in advancing women in the economy, but what about securing basic maternity leave benefits for women who own more than 49 per cent of their own incorporated businesses?
Female entrepreneurs are not mini-men clamouring for increased access to expensive, personally secured debt and willing to outsource care-giving of their loved ones in order to work 100-plus hours a week. The majority of us pursued entrepreneurship to escape a system that was not built to include us. It should be no surprise when we are not eager to give up hard-won control of our businesses, time and values by getting back into the patriarchal maelstrom, selling equity in order to drive up Canada’s GDP.
What we really want is access to diverse opportunities – to develop the opportunities we see, want to invest in, and pursue in our own way. It’s time we start looking at what we value economically, and how to create equity for and advance female entrepreneurs as they are, not what a system, arguably a broken system, wants them to be.
This article was originally published in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s National Newspaper on October 16th, 2018
More women are turning to entrepreneurship than ever before– Can we really afford to keep missing the mark when it comes to developing the infrastructure needed to amplify their potential?
There are no campfires, cabins or cookouts at Feminist Camp, but if you are in your 20s and want to plan for your feminist future, this is your first stop.
Feminist Camp is an initiative of Soapbox Inc., the world’s largest feminist speakers’ bureau, and is housed at the Ms. Foundation for Women in New York City. The camp brings together women of all ages (but mostly college-aged) from all over the world to meet and learn from feminists in the workplace.
The Camp was co-founded by Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. After a number of speaking engagements at local colleges, they felt that the curriculum being taught was outdated and not in sync with contemporary feminist experience. So the two set out to design an event to showcase professional possibilities for which a feminist perspective and a women’s studies degree would come in handy. Says Richards: “There are a myriad of jobs where one can practice their feminism, especially those professions and job sites that aren’t as obviously feminist.” Feminist Camp, like Soapbox and other projects, aims to bridge the divide between feminist theory and feminist practice.
A Typical Camp Day
A typical day at camp could start with a visit to meet and chat with some judges and police officers at a court in Queens. After lunch, campers might stop at a gallery showing feminist art, or take a trip to adoption clinic or a visit with a feminist publisher. Feminist Camp is an immersive experience intended to provide access to spaces and people bringing feminist values to the workplace.
Feminist Camp field trip (Catherine Drillis)
A key takeaway for campers is that you don’t have to compromise financial independence to be a feminist. “It is okay towant to make money and be a feminist,” says Richards.
Students learn that there are many avenues to bring a gender lens to social issues. Jillian Heller was a recent participant in the June 2018 camp and found the experience to be practical. “Since Feminist Camp I’ve prioritized community-building in digital spaces as one of my “must-do’s” in my career in digital writing and editing and aim to figure out just how to do that at graduate school this September,” said Heller.
Summer and Winter Camping
The New York location hosts camps twice a year in January and June with 12 to 15 campers per session. Feminist Camp is a not-for-profit with fees of $1,500 per session that are subsidized by profits from Soapbox and other supporters. Financial aid is available.
Other camp locations include Zambia, which has been taking Americans to Africa for the past three years to explore feminism outside a western perspective and meet local feminist organizers. In Massachusetts, Hampshire College hosts Feminist Camp for high school-aged feminists, taught in conjunction with their Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program.
Richards says plans are in the works for “more camps, more locations, mini-camps, more connections with alums as well as enlarging the program for the corporate workforce. Already, there is an active alumnae community of several hundred women to build from.”
Practice What You Preach
The best part? I met with Blaine Edens, Director of Operations at Feminist Camp, to check out their digs in Brooklyn, N.Y. We met in Gloria Steinem’s office the Ms. Foundation. Steinem, surely, could have commanded the corner office—the traditional symbol of success in the workplace—which would offer magnificent views of the Brooklyn Bridge Manhattan skyline. But that prime spot was given over to the communal lunch room, to be enjoyed by by all. To me, that reflected practical feminism at work, one lunchroom at a time.
Centre for Civic Innovation participants at dinner
Centre for Civic Innovation participants at dinner
In 2016, Atlanta earned the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of income inequality among big cities in the United States, after years of inching up the rankings. By then, Rohit Malhotra had decided to make it his life work to improve the city’s economic challenges, and he tapped into a unique source of talent to do so – women entrepreneurs.
Malhotra founded the Center for Civic Innovation (CCI) in 2014, after working on civic innovation initiatives in the Obama administration and studying how civic innovation could be a tool for addressing inequality in Atlanta at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. After hearing about CCI, perhaps the city’s most influential female entrepreneur, Spanx CEO and founder, Sara Blakely, reached out to Malhotra. She was interested in creating positive change in her community while also supporting female entrepreneurs and decided to partner with CCI to establish a residency to support civic-minded women entrepreneurs who are, as Blakely describes it, “the new guard of social change – operating at the intersection of entrepreneurship and philanthropy.”
The one-year residency provides financial and development support to entrepreneurs to cover salaries, health care and product development as well as coaching, mentorship and workspace in CCI’s offices. So far, 18 women leading startups have participated. This year, the residency will expand to include four men, though the women will still have an independent program backed by Blakely. Says Blakely, “I am inspired by the work they are doing and excited to see what their futures hold.”
So what is that work?
It’s about addressing “challenges that are at the root and the systemic reasoning for inequality to exist in the first place,” says Malhotra. And the residency measures its entrepreneurs by how much they achieve – not by financial indicators.
Consider the Dharma Project, which brings yoga to organizations that experience high levels of stress dealing with effects of income equality, such as police officers. “What we’re looking for is not just does that yoga studio sell a bunch of yoga mats because that’s how they can make a ton of money. What we’re interested in is: What has city hall changed about the way that they measure performance and reduction of stress of police officers?”
Cooking Up Big Ideas
I visited one of the Residency’s newest members, Jenn Graham, at her breezy home on a tree-lined street in Old Fourth Ward, the diverse Atlanta neighborhood where Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. Graham’s seven-week-old baby was sleeping upstairs as we sat downstairs at the kitchen table where Graham often holds staff meetings for her startup, Civic Dinners.
The 34-year-old founded the company after working with Atlanta Streets Alive, a project that closes some streets to cars for a few hours to allow people to socialize and experience the neighborhood without the buzz of traffic. People often live in bubbles, she says, that prevent them from meeting with others with different perspectives or backgrounds, especially true in a financially unequal city such as Atlanta. But she saw the power in connection. And that’s what gave birth to her idea for Civic Dinners.
Its goal is straight forward: Gather diverse people for meals to discuss issues that affect them such as mobility, transit, and livability in their community. “We launched this idea of let’s bring people together over food, just make it fun, make it social and have a conversation,” Graham says. She started experimenting with the idea in 2014, officially launched the company in 2017 and today it has 10 employees with clients ranging from cities, regional planning commissions, nonprofits and even thought leaders eager to tap into diverse perspectives.
Anyone can sign up to host a dinner for six to eight diverse community members. Hosts pick a time and location, either a restaurant or their home. Every guest pays for their meal, and Civic Dinners provides organizational tools to bring people together as well as questions to spark conversation. In short, it’s a civic focus group fueled by the joy of sharing a meal.
Conversations at the intimate dinner parties bring up unique thoughts, ideas, and opinions on topics of concern to clients, whether it’s aging or affordable housing. After the dinner, Civic Dinners emails hosts and guests to gather insights discussed over dinner. Civic Dinners may also follow up with interviews and prepares a report for each client with key findings.
Change in action
The Atlanta Regional Commission, a civic planning agency, typically gathers feedback from meetings and surveys with Atlanta residents. It turned to Civic Dinners to tap deeper into community concerns. Graham says feedback from dinners they organized influenced ARC to create a new bike-pedestrian plan.
“We can reach further and deeper in conversation and allow for real dialogue, real questions and inquiry,” says Graham. “It’s been useful in convincing some political leaders who may not hear these perspectives in their day-to-day life.”
In 2016, Civic Dinners piloted a series of dinners about the state of women, to connect women and foster civic leaders among them. Two who met at one of the dinners became business partners and started a women’s co-working space in Atlanta. The dinners proved so popular, Civic Dinners is looking to partner with an organization to relaunch them.
Value of shared leadership
The company operates much like the events they organize. Graham describes it as a flat structure with shared leadership. Employees work remotely but gather together for lunch every Thursday, alternating who hosts and leads the team meeting. Graham says great ideas can come from anyone and usually come up at these lunches.
Saba Long, the chief marketing and communications strategist, concurs. “We are very much a believer in team. There’s no one-upmanship. If I need support on something, I’m not afraid to ask for support. It’s very much a collective type of environment. We’re working together for a common good.”
Graham, who has just begun her CCI residency, will use the support to help her company scale up. So far the company has held more than 900 dinners worldwide; it plans to hit more than 1,000 for 2018 alone. Graham wants Civic Dinners to become the go-to platform for holding community conversations and make it easier for organizations, governments, universities and companies to more easily engage people in creating social change.
Teaching With a Difference In Mind
A member of the first residency class in 2017, Tiffany Ray, founded Generation Infocus in 2013 to offer equal and inspiring project-based learning opportunities to kids from pre-K through grade 12, introducing kids to careers and entrepreneurial aspirations they may never have considered.
The social-innovation educational company is headquartered in a renovated historic building in Hapeville, a city adjacent to Atlanta. It has class space, an art gallery, a wearable technology lab, and a garden that supports vegan cooking classes. They work with schools, run after school and summer programs, and recently launched a “Mobile Maker Space” in the form of a bus that travels to community groups and schools to teach STEAM —science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics.
Generation Infocus charges schools and libraries for programs while parents pay for after-school programs, but the company secured a grant from the county to offer free programming for children from lower income households.
Ray, 37, says the CCI residency allowed her to meet and work with other entrepreneurial women. “One of the great advantages to being in a collective like that was to have other people who are in the trenches, who have different challenges,” she says. “The conversations that happen around those classes can be phenomenal at times, so you’re really learning a lot being with other women.”
Importance of self care
She also took advantage of the residency’s wholistic approach to supporting entrepreneurs, which means not just taking care of business but taking care of yourself. She used the health-care stipend to hire a personal trainer and managed to shed 50 pounds during the program.
Ray also used her year to explore expanding Generation Infocus, through franchising and licensing. Her long-term goal is to create services, including curriculum and leadership development, for educators starting business ventures.
Ray has established a track record on that front already, hiring local talent who often suffer precarious employment—such as an actress to teach theater or a seamstress to teach in the wearable technology lab. That helps creatives diversify income and still have the time to build creative careers.
Ray also offers monthly management training for her employees to develop leadership skills. “Sometimes, they may not have the skillset. They never hired staff before. They never learned how to manage in crisis or how to provide customer service to parents who may be upset. So there are so many different facets to being a leader, particularly in education.” She says it’s relevant and critical to build up the people that work for Generation Infocus. “Because then they’re not stagnant. Then they want to stay and then they want to grow.”
April Singley started with the company as a theatre teacher in 2016 and is now a program director. She says Generation Infocus fosters teamwork and encourages its employees to share ideas. “Everybody works together very much as a team, but also we are looked at as individuals. We do recognize the strengths in our peers and our colleagues. We want to foster that, and we also encourage people to keep cultivating that, keep bringing their ideas forward.”
And that’s exactly the sort of values the founder of CCI, Malhotra, looks for in supporting CCI residents. He says each entrepreneur has designed her business model with feminist values at the core. “What I love about ventures we work with is they are values-driven first. Those are values that will not be compromised for financial returns.”
The evidence is in. Supporting women-led enterprises in their efforts to scale will help grow the global economy to the tune of an extra $150 billion in Canada alone. Governments and corporations starved of economic growth have taken note. And today, support for women entrepreneurs is a key part of any forward-looking entities’ strategic plans, as well as power-seeking political party platforms.
While the increase in support initiatives for women entrepreneurs is cause for hope when it comes to creating new opportunities for women and girls in our lifetime, the fact is that the penny-opera-sized seed grants, free boot camps, and plethora of pink empowerment networking events do little to help an already established business grow and achieve financial sustainability. What ready-to-scale socially marginalized entrepreneurs need most is established, paying customers.
This is Where You Come In
Bar none, the best way to help women and, yes, other minority gender–led businesses scale is to simply be intentional about buying from them versus buying from the first name that pops up on Google the next time you conduct a vendor review or search for a new supplier.
How to Step Up Your Purchasing Levels from Women-Led Enterprises
It’s simple. All you need to do is establish a gender lens–based procurement policy. Take for example, LiisBeth,our indie, fast-growing, Toronto-based, B Corp-certified, “feminists-in-business”-focused media company. As readers’s know, LiisBeth’s mission is to help entrepreneurs and innovators build enterprises or new products and services that align with feminist values and practices. Its procurement policy (noted verbatim below) tightly aligns with its overall mission:
LiisBeth strives to do business with like-minded and values-aligned enterprises. In making purchasing decisions, we prioritize buying from women-led firms (minimum of 51% ownership by women) as well as entities with a clear commitment to gender equity. As a proxy for assessing corporate vendor commitment to gender equity, we ask all our suppliers to provide information regarding the percentage of women (1) employed in the supplier’s organization, (2) in board, executive, and senior positions, and (3) shareholders.
LiisBeth suppliers are also invited to (1) become signatories to the Women’s Empowerment Principles(WEPs) for companies with more than 10 employees (fee is $500), or (2) sign the Voluntary Agreement to Promote Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment for companies with fewer than 10 employees (free), or (3) complete the B Corp Inclusion Challenge free self-assessment and submit the results. Finally, self-employed suppliers are invited to complete the free Gender-Based Analysis Plusonline course available through the Status of Women Canada and let us know you have completed it by sharing your completion certificate.
Companies that have either signed the voluntary agreement or the WEPs and have exceptionally strong gender-responsive policies or outcomes will be invited to do business with LiisBeth.
Is a Gender-Responsive Purchasing Policy a Radical Move?
No.
The idea of leveraging procurement dollars to help women and minority-led enterprises scale is not new. In fact, organizations like WeConnect U.S. and, more recently, WeConnect International and WeConnect Canada, has been working for decades to help match government and corporate purchasing agents with qualified entrepreneurs as a way of providing them with the business opportunities they need to grow. Yet, despite all the advocacy and work behind the scenes, the number remains low: it’s in the 1% to 5% range depending on where you live and what report you look at. Governments are working to accelerate moving the dial by creating new targets. For example, as of 2018, the Canadian government has moved to allocate 5% of federal contracts to SMEs (primarily defined as incorporated enterprises with 5-100 employees) that are at least 51% owned by women.
It’s great that governments and some large corporations recognize the impact they can have by creating diversity procurement policies. But in order to drive real change, small to medium-size enterprises, the backbone of all economies, also need to participate in this effort.
Is it Hard for SMEs to Adhere to a Gender-Led Procurement Policy?
No. I know because I have founded and run two of them. Here is what I can tell you.
It simply takes will. Plus a little bit of additional effort at first to find and vet women-led firms that can serve as viable alternatives.
That said, sourcing for women-led suppliers is getting easier all the time. Today, there are a number of online directories available that can help you identify a women-led firm to buy from including Beacon DC and Women Owned. Google has added a new women-led attribute icon to the local panel, which means you can now easily search for businesses owned by women on the web.
You can also learn about new emerging enterprises by subscribing to magazines focused on surfacing the work of women entrepreneurs, like LiisBeth.com, which has created a list of over 100 women entrepreneur support organizations for its subscribers and routinely profiles innovative ventures like Katrina McKay’s Uplevel Solutions, Bold Betties, a women-owned adventure company, and City of Women, a women’s business directory in Toronto. You can also follow women-led investment funds like SheEO, the Big Push, engage with women-founder community organizations, join organizations like the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce, or engage with women-founder-oriented co-working spaces like Women on the Move and Make Lemonade.
All It Takes Is a Decision
If you run and own a business and care about equity and inclusion, then reviewing your procurement practices is something—other than marching in the streets and retweeting slogans (also good)—that you can do now that will have real impact.
So the next time you need a caterer, AI developer, executive team-building event, or strategy consulting firm, consider a women-led alternative.
Driving real change will take more than an allocation of federal contracts to level the playing field.
Katrina McKay is the founder of Uplevel Solutions.
During a dark period in Katrina McKay’s life many years ago, she visited a temple in India dedicated to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity. The only visible foreigner, and unfamiliar with local religious customs, she was overwhelmed. When she reached the temple’s altar to offer some crumpled bills, two poor women handed her flowers and treats to leave instead. “I felt so loved and so connected,” McKay recalls.
A thought occurred to McKay: “I want to be a living Lakshmi.” At the time, she didn’t know how she would accomplish this, but she was determined to create some kind of abundance for others.
Today, the serial feminist entrepreneur and founder of Uplevel Solutions, a provider of outsourced business services for startups and emerging companies, is on her way to fulfilling her mission. She has created sustainable employment primarily for women in the Philippines, while helping entrepreneurs in Canada and other developed countries grow their own enterprises.
The Path to Entrepreneurship is Rarely Straight
I met with McKay at The Spoke Club, a private club in Toronto, to talk about her entrepreneurial mission. The 35-year-old CEO nestled into a chair beside a sunlit window and looked, well, decidedly anti-corporate: long black hair, a nose ring, and the word “Sisu” (Finnish for “will”) tattooed on the back of her neck. Indeed, she describes her path in business as circuitous.
Her start was rather traditional, however. Grew up in a prosperous family in Mississauga, a city just outside Toronto. Attended Appleby College, a private school. Looking back, she says she was always an entrepreneur at heart. “I know that’s super cliché,” she says, adding that even as a kid, she was always trying to create value in the world, starting an environmental club and organizing charity fundraisers at her school.
Yet, she steered clear of business, pursuing a degree in French literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2005. At the end of her first year, she took another unexpected detour, falling in love with an Australian who was in Canada on a holiday visa. “I didn’t have little girl princess dreams of being in a white dress,” McKay says. She married at the age of 20 so her boyfriend could stay in Canada. She also thought she could help him overcome his mental health challenges. “I believed I could love him more than he hated himself.”
After graduation, McKay worked in various fast-paced and demanding marketing roles in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). “I was bright and inexpensive,” she says. When her bosses had an idea, she ran with it. Looking back, she says, “I was living entrepreneurship. It just wasn’t my company.”
But as McKay’s husband deteriorated mentally and physically, she decided to join a major Canadian health charity in 2009. It was a conservative, bureaucratic environment for a progressive go-getter like McKay, but it provided her with a steady salary, benefits, and predictable hours. This allowed her to fulfill her “strange role as housewife and also breadwinner.”
Despite her efforts, McKay could not save her husband. He died by suicide a year later. “Super dark,” she says of that time. “There is no playbook for being a widow at 27.”
She also struggled in her job, which had become “soul sucking,” especially since the sole reason she was in it was gone. She thought, “I refuse to be stuck.”
So McKay started to moonlight.
Creating Your Own Opportunities is Key
In 2010, McKay launched Ohhh Canada, an online shop for sex toys and apparel. This entrepreneurial venture, she says, was about celebrating life after what had become a sexless marriage. “Sexual empowerment is a big part of healing,” she says.
She also started freelancing as a marketing consultant for SMEs. However, she didn’t quit her day job just yet. “There is this idea among some entrepreneurs that you are only a real entrepreneur if you burn those bridges, cut those ties, and put things on a credit card,” she says. But McKay is pragmatic; she knew the value of a steady paycheque to finance her dreams.
But by 2011, the juggling of a salaried position and her side businesses became too much. McKay fell into a loving, stable romantic relationship (they’re still partners). There was no personal care-taking involved but she regularly worked 100-hour weeks at her various ventures and was exhausted. “My partner would ask, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ and I would burst into tears.”
What little time she had to herself was quickly filled with invitations to lunch from marketing clients and people in her network who noticed the sudden growth of Ohhh Canada. They wanted to pick her brain about how to fix their own company or launch an e-commerce business. She said sure for a while then realized, “Wait a minute. What I’m actually doing is coaching.” So she expanded her marketing consulting business and added business coaching to help entrepreneurs realize their entrepreneurial vision.
But McKay became desperate for any help to lighten her load. She tried hiring locally but found it difficult to attract and retain talent as a small business. “It was expensive for my little fledgling business when I was trying to put money aside to quit my full-time job.” People would quit and she would be back to square one. “It’s a gig economy,” she says. “How much loyalty will they show you when another employer offers more hours or money, and a more enchanting opportunity?”
That’s when the idea of hiring a virtual assistant dawned on her. She had trained virtual teams in India before for a client in the conference marketing industry. She thought, “Why am I not doing this for myself?” She advertised for Ohhh Canada on an outsourcing site. Metchell Jackson, a Filipino woman in her early 30s living in Dumaguete City, answered her call.
Jackson, an IT graduate, was doing outsourcing work in the call centre of a large retailer at the time but says her “brain cells were dying.” She was intrigued by the opportunity to work with a female entrepreneur, especially one working in the sex business. “I’m very open-minded,” she tells me via Skype. “I have a different view than regular Filipinos. They view [sex] as taboo and bad.”
McKay conducted a job interview with Jackson via Skype and the two said they loved each other instantly. “It sounds so cheesy but it’s true,” McKay says.
When McKay asked her to work full-time, Jackson jumped at the chance. “I believed in her mission.” Jackson initially provided customer service for Ohhh Canada then became McKay’s executive assistant for her coaching business, interacting with clients virtually. Soon clients began to ask McKay, “How can I get access to people like Metchell?”
McKay realized her clients faced the same business challenges she had in finding competent, reliable help that they could afford. That’s when yet another entrepreneurial idea hit McKay.
Creating Opportunities for Others is Good for Business
In 2013, McKay launched Uplevel Solutions. By then, she was doing well enough to bootstrap the non-profit on her own.
It helped that Jackson was her “boots on the ground” in the Philippines, sourcing talent there. Uplevel currently has more than 30 team members, mostly women in the Philippines. It also employs a handful of people in Toronto, led by McKay, who focus on strategy development and management of the business.
McKay has now brought all of her ventures (outsourced business services, marketing consulting, and business coaching) under the Uplevel Solutions banner. She says Ohhh Canada is currently on “hiatus” as she repositions it. Typical clients of Uplevel bring in revenue ranging from $250,000 to $1.5 million. “This is our sweet spot,” says McKay.
Her clients are mostly headquartered in Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. They pay US$5 an hour for virtual administrative support, which generates about 70 per cent of Uplevel’s revenue. The other 30 per cent is comprised of more strategic services such as marketing consulting, public relations, and business coaching (at $2,800 per day).
Half of Uplevel’s clients are female entrepreneurs. Shannon Crane, the founder of Brass Vixens in Toronto, turned to McKay for business coaching when she opened the first of her four pole dancing studios in Toronto six years ago. Back then, she says she was doing everything (“I cleaned the bathrooms, I was answering the phones, I was teaching classes”). She had struggled to find good help since she couldn’t offer predictable hours. Some weeks required 20 hours, other weeks only two. “People weren’t banging down my door [for work],” she says. And as a self-described “control freak,” she struggled with the idea of outsourcing, which requires sharing sensitive information such as passwords with people she had never met. But she trusted McKay and decided to give it a shot.
She was initially surprised by the low rates. Before signing on, she sought confirmation that Uplevel’s employees are paid fairly and the company helps women be successful in their communities. “It’s important for me to align myself with other businesses who are not only like-minded but are also very female positive,” she says. Now, Crane relies on Uplevel for administrative support such as webmaster services.
McKay says that many of her clients would not be able to afford help at all while starting their businesses, even at minimum wage rates in Canada. In the Philippines, Uplevel is able to pay well above that country’s minimum wage, which McKay says varies between rural and urban areas. Her company also pays for training during probation, which is less common in the Philippines. Jackson, McKay’s original hire, is now a manager, earning almost five times what she made in her previous call centre job.
It’s not just the ability to afford help that makes outsourcing attractive to Uplevel’s entrepreneur clients. They often don’t have the time or inclination to find the right talent, invest in training, and deal with thorny HR issues such as performance problems. “I love leading and training people,” McKay says. “And in some cases [entrepreneurs] just don’t have the time to do that. It’s a hassle they don’t really want to be adding to their life or their business.”
As McKay says of many Uplevel clients, “They need to pass some of [the work] off so they can go out to do what they do—continue to grow their empires.”
Staying True to the Mission Takes Work
McKay acknowledges that a stigma has developed around outsourcing due to the exploitation of foreign labour, poor work quality, and the perception that it takes jobs away from Canadians. She says her company has to work hard to overcome that stigma. To her, she sees outsourcing a little differently; it’s a way to give women a leg up in developing countries.
“There aren’t a lot of opportunities for brilliant and talented women,” she says, pointing out that many Filipino women move to Dubai or Canada to work as nannies and send money home to support their own small children. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Jackson, who does most of the recruiting, has a bias towards hiring women. “Because in the Philippines, it’s like they are stuck to be like a wife, nothing more,” she says. “I want to change that.”
One of Jackson’s recruits is Edna Viola, a neighbour. The 23-year-old single Filipino mother had dropped out of teacher’s college after becoming pregnant. “I imagined myself teaching,” she says. “I so loved children.” Instead, she returned home with dim prospects to her parents, who worked as subsistence farmers.
She was considering taking a job at a call centre but it entailed risky night travel. “There are a lot of robbers and bad guys out there,” she says. She was relieved when Uplevel offered work. Though she has to work similar hours, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. to coincide with North American business hours, she is able to do so safely from home, which also allows her to be close to her son. She also saves on the cost of travel and work clothes.
Viola, like all new hires, started with non-client-facing work. Her skills and attitude were assessed during an eight-week paid probation period, then she was given a development plan, which involved meeting with McKay or another senior manager to discuss past performance and future aspirations. Viola is now a team leader. When McKay first approached her to take on the role, Viola said, “Oh no, I can’t do that. Can you assign to other people?” McKay was adamant. “No, you can do it; we believe in you.”
For McKay, investing in people is important. While all new hires have to be competent in written and spoken English, Uplevel offers internal coaching to support advancement and external resources such as English teachers to help managers communicate with greater professionalism. Employees can receive paid time off to volunteer in the community as long as it is not for political or religious organizations.
Perhaps what is most unusual for a virtual company is the sense of team McKay strives to create. She makes quarterly video calls with everyone in the company. “The team loves that,” says McKay. She also travels to the Philippines annually to bring people together in face-to-face meetings. “We ask how people are feeling and we actually care. Don’t get me wrong, we get on to business; we talk numbers; we talk progress reports and spell out KPIs but we are a people-based business.”
She encourages employees to talk about their life mission at every meeting. McKay takes pride in how people’s missions have changed since joining Uplevel. At the start, Viola’s was to support her family and afford a birthday party for her son. Supporting her family remains her priority but she has begun to dream bigger, setting a goal to travel to Paris. “Her experience and understanding of abundance has changed dramatically,” McKay says.
Uplevel distinguishes itself from other companies providing offshore talent in a key way, according to David Creelman, a corporate consultant on human capital management and co-author of Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment. He says not many companies leveraging technology to build virtual teams invest in people the way Uplevel does. “I would say this is unusual,” he says.
Creelman explains that the more standard practice is for North American employers to treat people as dispensable freelancers—even though investing in creating a stable team and a high-involvement culture is a high-performance model. “It’s an interesting competitive strategy that McKay is adopting because we do know if you can pull off a high-involvement work culture, it’s very productive. There is good research on that.”
But Creelman adds a cautionary note: “The evidence also shows that [a high-involvement culture] is hard to sustain and most companies that try it eventually give it up.” Short-term financial pressures often cause managers to lose sight of longer-term strategic benefits. “They start cutting back on training, take career pathing less seriously, and find ways to cut back on compensation and benefits.”
McKay is determined not to let that happen. She says she is not in this business for a quick win. A key part of her mission since her encounter with the Hindu goddess of prosperity so many years ago has been to create abundance for others, though she admits Uplevel was an unexpected way to go about it. “I did not set out to create a business-support services company,” McKay laughs. “How unsexy is that? Yawn. I go from sex toys and lingerie to business support services?”
But her mission continues to fire up business. Uplevel’s top-line revenue has grown steadily, about 25 per cent annually. In the next twelve months, McKay anticipates doubling that, in part by partnering with other service providers to expand Uplevel’s range of services. She wants to be the “go-to company for entrepreneurs looking to grow their company.”
She also wants to live up to the ideals of another hero, Richard Branson. “He always says he takes care of his employees first and then relies on employees to take care of clients,” McKay says. “I feel the same.”
Her Story in Black–A photo project featuring 150 black women entrepreneurs
Just over seven years ago, Emily Mills found herself up late, angsting about juggling what felt like “a zillion balls.” She posted a picture of herself on Facebook working in the boardroom of her then-employer. The premise of her post: She was driven, always hustling, but she had reached a point of exhaustion.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
Almost immediately several women in her personal network responded both on her Facebook wall and in her inbox, saying they were wide awake and feeling like they, too, were on a never-ending hustle.
“I was a bit surprised by the amount of conversation I was having at that hour of the morning,” she says, with a laugh. “And the conversation just continued so, I just kind of said, alright, fine, why don’t we get a bunch of us together – let’s talk about what we’re doing, how we can best support each other, maybe what we can learn from each other? How can we balance it all a bit better?”
From that, How She Hustles was born, a network that has grown to include more than 5,000 diverse women who (by their own definition) hustle. The network includes women ranging from teachers and academics to media personalities, corporate professionals and entrepreneurs. Mills says she started her enterprise without any clear business plan or five-year prospectus to achieve goals. Her entrepreneurial venture simply caught fire from that late-night Facebook confession.
Mills continued to cultivate the network through unique online and offline experiences such as brunches, after-work socials, pop-up shops spotlighting women of colour small-business owners and panel discussions. Paramount for Mills was creating an environment that would be welcoming to all women and not just those with a corporate title and corner office, which tended to be the clientele of the many well-established women’s networking events she had experienced. Those events, she says, “just weren’t working” for her. The energy was not as warm or congenial as she would have liked, and she wanted to flip the model on its head.
To make her events welcoming to all women, she put an intentional focus on younger, digitally savvy, diverse women and women of colour who had different priorities, lived experiences, journeys and concerns than more typical executive types.
“There are not a lot of spaces where you are going to have Brown and Black women driving and leading an event, yet there are women who may not reflect them who can participate and join the conversation,” she explains. “That takes a lot of courage I think.”
She also kept the cost affordable. There is no fee to join the network and admission to individual events ranges from $20 to $50.
Her strategy worked. The first brunch drew 50 women, and in the seven years since, all but one event has sold out. And those events typically draw 150 to 400 women. Mills built her network predominantly on word of mouth, social media and authentic engagement with other women and has yet to spend a dollar on paid advertising or PR that might have garnered media publicity.
Entrepreneur Michelle Berry, 46, was an early joiner. The owner of Shelley’s Catering & Special Events connected with Mills via Facebook six years ago after seeing a post announcing Mills’ engagement. She ended up not only catering Mills’ wedding, but also several How She Hustles events. “For someone who was leery of women friendship, the How She Hustles network has made me more open to sisterhood,” says Berry, “that there are truly awesome people in the world who are rooting for you.”
From Mills’ recommendations and networking in How She Hustles, Berry’s client roster has expanded to include top corporate clients such as CBC, Women in Film and Television and the City of Toronto’s Identify & Impact Youth Awards.
Mills injects energy and excitement into the How She Hustles network by making each event unique. Each event is held at a different venue –Tract9 creative media space, Wind Up Caribbean restaurant (now closed) and North York Central Library to name a few.
Says Mills: “I think it’s a wonderful way to show different venues and establishments in the city that there’s actually a whole different demographic you may not be connecting with. It’s also a very impactful way of taking up space.” In fact, everything Mills does is intentional. “I’ve been very mindful to make sure that every single How She Hustles event really puts women first. So, if I’ve got a budget to pay for an AV technician, yup, I’m going to be negotiating with the venue and saying, ‘no we’re not using your standard corporate AV supplier. I want to bring in a young woman of colour who is a freelancer and she’s going to run the boards.’”
The most recent How She Hustles endeavour was Her Story in Black, an idea Mills put together after recognizing a noticeable void amidst the Canada 150 celebrations: the voices and stories of Black women in Toronto. She came up with the idea of creating a photo series reminiscent of high-end magazine spreads she had seen in Essence, Ebony and Vogue, featuring 150 diverse Black women excelling in their field.
In passing, Mills made mention of the project to a management executive at the CBC, where she works full-time in media communications. Her initiative piqued immediate interest, and the project ballooned into a one-hour documentary that aired on CBC as well as several television and radio segments about some of the women – ranging from a DJ to a neuroscientist – and culminated with a Black History Month event in the atrium of CBC’s Toronto offices that brought together 400 women. The 400 took a selfie that was retweeted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Mills was thrilled with the project’s impact. Women wrote to tell her that, until then, no one had ever invited them to public speak in their field of expertise, but after the project they had received multiple requests. She heard from mothers, sisters, grandmothers, daughters, even men, about how the project led to new conversations and opportunities for them.
At a private screening of the documentary for the women featured in Her Story in Black, Mills asked attendees to write on two sticky notes: their ask and their give. Mills then prompted some women to share what they wrote, understanding that for women (including herself) asking for help is often difficult. One shared her journey of entrepreneurship, the obstacles she had faced raising capital, as well as the personal challenges she had experienced losing loved ones along the way. Tears flowed from her eyes. When she finished her story, two others raised their hands. One woman offered her expertise in writing sponsorship proposals and grant applications. Another offered a cheque for $1,000 – no strings attached.
“I wonder how many networking events in the city would allow for people to stand up and be that vulnerable,” ponders Mills. “And how many events would create a space in the city where that demographic of women could even have that conversation?”
Ebti Nabag, one of the photographers who worked on Her Story in Black and has documented several How She Hustles events, says what Mills has built is rooted in sisterhood. “It’s just so heartwarming to see a large number of women attend and take over a space and make it their own because the energy is so positive, they just feed off each other,” says Nabag. “There are moments when you’re laughing, moments when you’re networking and then there are moments where your eyes are getting watery and teary because someone is sharing a personal story.”
And creating opportunities for such experiences is exactly what motivates Mills to continue to build the network, while juggling a career and being a mother to two young children. She has no plans to turn her business into more than a sideline venture; rather, her goal is to nurture a community of women and connect people in meaningful ways.
“This isn’t a full-time enterprise for me – I have a full-time job, it’s no secret. But I do think that there’s something – there’s a texture there. There’s a very specific calling to create spaces online or at events where women of colour and diverse women in this city can connect.”
New York City (Catherine Drillis)
