Image: Contributed
Ashely Ramsay
The Women’s Enterprise Centre is teaming up with local tech founder and CEO Ashley Ramsay for a mentoring program it hopes will help other female founders break out in the industry.
Over the next six months, Ramsay will facilitate a peer mentoring group with as many as eight women entrepreneurs who work in tech-related businesses.
Using the innovative EM3 model, the sessions will see Ramsay pass on her expertise in an informal, round-table setting.
As the Women’s Enterprise Centre points out, “in an industry where 95 per cent of business owners are men, women tech entrepreneurs face unique challenges in financing their ventures, breaking into networks and growing their business.”
Ramsay says she’s run into all kinds of challenges throughout her career as an entrepreneur and she is now at a point where she wants to help others, particularly women trying to scale up tech-related companies.
“I’ve lost a lot of skin and I think if I can save one woman entrepreneur just one toenail,” she says. “If I can make an impact there that’s the focus for me.”
Ramsay is the founder, president and CEO of Kelowna’s Yeti Farm Creative.
Over the last five years, she’s scaled her business from one employee to 100, building it into the largest independently owned digital animation production studio in the Okanagan.
Her work has brought her recognition as one of PROFIT W100’s Top 10 Rising Women Entrepreneurs, a place on the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce Top 40 Under 40 list, among other accolades.
Ramsay says all entrepreneurs face challenges and that many of hers had nothing to do with gender. However, she does see some lingering problems in the Okanagan—especially for women trying to secure funding.
“One of the barriers, for sure, is (securing) capital. It’s a huge one I’m still fighting with,” she says.
She says men still have almost all of the investment money in the Okanagan, and women founders are usually forced to face a group of dudes when they’re looking for more capital.
That’s not always a bad thing, she says, but it can make things tough.
“They find out you’re a mom and then immediately you can see the wheels turning, like ‘how is she going to do this if she’s got two kids?’ That happens all the time,” she says.
Ramsay herself was just turned down by a big group of local investors. She can’t say for sure whether her being a woman had anything to do with it, but she says for women there is always that question.
“You just never know, right?” she says, recalling a time when a potential investor, assuming she didn’t know her own books, took her aside and condescendingly offered to explain her finances to her.
She says she’s had her chief financial officer, who is a man, lead discussions with other investors because she “just knows” he’s likely to get a better outcome.
She’s quick to point out not all investors in Kelowna have this kind of attitude, and that things are slowly changing in the Okanagan tech industry but there still needs to be “significant change.”
She says she hopes to give the women she’s mentoring tools to help with situations like those but, more importantly, the confidence to just jump in and go for it.
“If there’s anything I can pass on it would be this idea that, look at all this risk I took. I jumped in, I’m OK. You’re going to be OK too, you’re going to be safe,” she said.
Applications for the mentoring program are being accepted now, and Women’s Enterprise Centre encourages women business owners to apply even if they don’t consider themselves a ‘tech’ entrepreneur.
Visit wec.ca/EM3 for full program and eligibility details, or to apply.
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