Marie-Claire AssekoA Stark Contrast
I spent 8.5 months researching what prevents women founders from scaling their businesses.
Then I, myself, made a financial ask that did not make sense for a project.
> My ask was sized to turn an idea into a business and break even on a timeline I could defend in front of anyone.
> The number was honest. It was also wrong.
What I needed was not to break even. What I needed was the runway to build an indispensable product. To turn a vision into a reality.
So why did I shrink it? Believe me, it was not modesty. I had sized the ask to what I thought could be justified and would get approved, instead of to what the business actually required.
The ask was approval-sized, not business-sized.
If I can do that after 8.5 months inside this research…how many more of us are doing it right now unknowingly? đź«
What I Keep Running Into
The obstacle is not information. The founders in my group chats know their sectors like the backs of their hands. đź’Ż
The obstacle actually sits upstream:
- what shaped our relationship to money and impact the business decisions we make daily,
- which financing instruments actually exist and how much they cost us,
- how big the ask should be, and;
- who does the work once the contract is signed, working on the business vs. working in the business.
​These four elements create a clear gap between the decisions women founders are making every week and the numbers and processes those decisions should be resting on. And our businesses pay for this gap.
The survey we ran among women founders from visible minority and immigrant backgrounds confirmed that gap:
- ​88% named growing sales as their top challenge
- ​50% had no up-to-date financial statements to grow those sales from.
- ​63% said grant rules and applications were their heaviest administrative burden.
- ​75% said their own capacity would break first if their revenue or their customer load tripled.
Is that a discipline problem? No. It’s what happens when, for instance, a founder struggles to translate the numbers in their P&L into strategic business decisions.
What’s Going on Then?
That’s why I built the program of our working session of September 29th around these four frictions. ⬇️
Session 2: The money stories behind our business decisions
- 50% of the surveyed founders we surveyed would accept $100K only as a grant or a 0% loan.
- 13% refuse debt outright.
That is not a math error. Upbringing, migration, gender expectations, scarcity, what we owe the people who sacrificed for us — all of it prices our risk before we ever open a spreadsheet.
At the end of this block, participants will highlight one financial decision they’ve been postponing, and be clear on the information they need to settle it.
Session 4: Which kind of funding do we need?
DEI-designated programs account for roughly 0.13% to 0.15% of the entrepreneur funding pool in Canada.
We queue for a sliver and call it the market…
- Yet 63% of the surveyed founders name grant eligibility and applications as their heaviest administrative burden.
- Diversity lending clusters under $70K, institutional equity opens at $500K+. If you need $150K, you are standing in the gap.
- While ignoring many other forms of funding (non-repayable contribution, bank loan, revenue-based financing, angel, impact fund, corporate investor, etc)
We don’t fully understand what each financing instrument requires business-wise, how much it costs so we can’t decide which one actually fits our current business stage. That session aims to change that! 🚀
Session 5: What I needed versus what I asked for
Majority women-owned SMEs consistently request smaller amounts of financing and are more likely to be approved. I just did the same thing myself without realizing it. Thanks to a more seasoned founder’s perspective, I was able to catch myself but how many are not?
So I have asked women with different profiles to join us and share their insights on “what we need in order to build” vs. “what we need in order to scale” vs. “what we actually ask for”.
These women have had outstanding journeys themselves and I am convinced that they will be bring similar aha moments to the participants.
Session 6: Growing past your own two hands
The friction: 75% said their own capacity would break first if revenue or client load tripled.
That is not a scaling problem. That is a structure that caps growth by design.
A business that runs on a founder’s own two hands has a ceiling, and the ceiling is their capacity.
A prioritization problem? An outsourcing/hiring challenge? Either way, during this session, we’ll work through how to map, write down, delegate / assign / delete the right task.
It’s not about doing the right things, it’s mainly about stopping doing the wrong ones.
Can one day fix a founder-dependent business? No. But it can show them exactly where their business is capped and hand them the first move to break through the ceiling.
🗓️ Tuesday, September 29th · 9:00AM–3:15PM · In person, Montreal · English only ➡️ Register or share.
A business that only runs when you run it isn’t an asset. It’s a job with worse hours.
