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Welcome! You are about to join the many other women entrepreneurs on a journey to grow their business.
Our goal is to support you on your entrepreneurial and business growth journey by teaching you new skills, empowering you, and helping you apply what you’ve learned so you can move your business goals forward with confidence. But first, let’s introduce ourselves!
Here’s a little background on us: YES was founded in 1995 to help stem the outflow of young English-speakers who were leaving Quebec in search of other opportunities. A year later, we added entrepreneurship assistance for people of all ages to our mandate. Since then, we have introduced programs focused on Women in Technology (WIT) and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and have successfully supported countless women-led businesses.
Recently, we expanded our specialized support for women with our ELLEvate Women Entrepreneurs program which offers pre-accelerator cohorts, mentor matching, one-on-one business coaching, business education — and the list keeps growing.
And now, we’re excited to launch our newest initiative to support women in business – online learning!
In our experience, many women entrepreneurs benefit from a unique set of strengths and skills that help them to innovate and grow. Often, their ease at fostering empathy and healthy communication helps them build long-lasting relationships with customers and partners. In turn, trusting relationships with partners, mentors, and professional networks helps entrepreneurs initiate and support their business growth.
As leaders, studies have shown that women also tend to be great strategic collaborators. Ultimately, your emotional intelligence, empathy, and perseverance will help you identify and focus on your ideal audiences, then turn them into happy customers. And more importantly, your passion for what you do will fuel your belief in your product or service and give you the courage to take risks. Because as an entrepreneur, you know your product and services better than any anyone else and your belief in its value is crucial for the road ahead.
Before we begin, let’s take a look at Quebec’s growing number of women-led small and medium businesses and take stock of some of the challenges they still face today.
A women-led business is a business where women have more than 50% of the ownership and control. And the good news is that in Quebec, 16% of businesses are now led by women — that is a 10% increase in the last 5 years alone. To put this in a broader context, Quebec is a leader in this area having the second-highest number of women entrepreneurs in Canada. And that is not all, over the last 10 years, the number of women in Quebec who report wanting to start a business has tripled.
If we take an even broader look in all of Canada we see that almost 16% of small and medium Canadian businesses are women-led and 21% of such businesses is equally owned by men and women. Across Canada, most women-led businesses grow at least 10% every 3 years and many of these women-led businesses tap into sales techniques that allow them to grow even more than that.
Now let’s take a look at these businesses from another angle and look at how many employees they have. Although the majority of women-run businesses employ up to 20 people, the major trend over the last 10 years is that more and more women own companies with up to 100 employees! We are confident that the more women leaders can tap into different sales techniques, the more they will continue growing their companies in the future.
Of course, there are still challenges ahead, especially in the area of financing. For example, there are slightly fewer so-called high-growth businesses that are owned by women than by men. This is likely because there are fewer women entrepreneurs in high-growth sectors. Also, the women starting high-growth and small and medium-sized businesses are funded to a lower extent by venture capital and angel investors than men. While women have more equal access to bank loans to support their businesses, they still trail behind men, who tend to apply for loans in greater numbers and, thus, receive them more often.
These differences in access to financing might be partially explained by the fact that women entrepreneurs are not always aware of all of the financing options available to them. Women also tend to ask for financing less often and, when they do, ask for less money.
We believe that these statistics can be improved if we educate women entrepreneurs about different sales techniques and funding options that are available. By teaching you new skills in this course, we hope to empower you and other women business leaders to close these statistical gaps as you grow your own business.
