Marie-Claire AssekoThe First Gap in the Growth of Women Founders: Reality vs. Numbers
I spent 10 months learning about what prevents women founders from scaling their businesses.
And one thing stood out: the math is not mathing‼️
- We can estimate that there are 254K women founders/SMB owners from visible minority backgrounds, including immigrants, in Canada.
- Supporting these women to scale their businesses could boost Canada’s GDP by up to 1.5%. That’s CAD$53.49B.
- Which means that their businesses would need to generate between CAD$210K and CAD$181K in gross annual revenue.
Yet 69.3% women founders/SMB owners who participated in women entrepreneurship programs reported making under CAD$50,000 in annual profit. 🤔
That’s a very large CAD$160K-130K gap between the story numbers tell and the story reality shows.
The Second Gap in the Growth of Women Founders: Focus vs. Actions
A survey among dozens of women founders from visible minority and immigrant backgrounds revealed a second gap:
• 88% named growing sales as their top challenge WHILE 50% had no up-to-date financial statements to grow those sales from.
• 63% said grant rules and applications were their heaviest administrative burden WHILE DEI-designated programs account for roughly (only) 0.13% to 0.15% of the entrepreneur funding pool in Canada.
• 75% said their own capacity would break first if their revenue or their customer load tripled.
Basically, the decisions that we are making every week are somewhat disconnected from the numbers and processes those decisions should be resting on. And this second gap, this gap artificially caps our businesses’ growth.
Intentionally or not, we’re shrinking our businesses to the size we can handle.
Instead of expanding them to the size they could reach.
What’s Next?
If you are a woman founder from a visible minority and immigrant background AND you’re interested in breaking that ceiling for the growth of your own business, I would love to count you, or a woman founder you care about, among the participants to ECHELON Lab 00 🤓
🗓️ Tuesday, September 29th · 9:00AM–3:15PM · In person, Montreal
