bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998) — Spring 1998 // Printemps 1998, pp. 3–5
From November 12-14, 1997, the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC played host to the first-ever Canadian Businesswomen’s International Trade Mission. With Minister Marchi at the helm, over 120 participants, and no less than the Royal Bank as main corporate sponsor, the mission generated valuable business development for Canadian women in the United States. Every major newspaper — every national broadcaster in Canada — carried positive, extensive news coverage of these scores of businesswomen conducting their own successful trade mission. And there they were, in print and in person, saying what a great job the Embassy was doing for them, and how valuable Canada’s Trade Commissioners are to them!
The Minister, the Ambassador, the Deputy Head of Mission, the Royal Bank representative (all members of the necktie set) beamed with satisfaction. Businesswomen from all over Canada dealt and parleyed, bought and sold, and thanked the Minister for the very existence of a Trade Commissioner Service.
But you’re already thinking, “Yeah, yeah. And visions of performance appraisals danced in their heads!” Oh dear. “Where was Fotheringham, when we needed him? Where was Limbaugh, or Stern, or Amiel?” you ask. “How did such a marginal idea become so mainstream?”
Hmmm. A cynic, are you?
“But I needn’t worry,” you say to yourself, “this is too big an act to follow for a small post like ours.” All this uppity women stuff’s not for you, you think. You’re not a feminist, and if women don’t bother to try exporting, why should it matter to you? And besides, as an egalitarian and fair-minded person, you are adamant that the Government of Canada should not discriminate along gender lines in providing service to the Canadian public.
Except the reason it might matter to you, gentle reader, has less to do with your degree of feminist sympathies — and a lot more to do with your marketing skills — than you might think!
Case in point… Let’s say you’re an ambitious, experienced Trade Commissioner.
You’ve developed market intelligence reports, updated websites, submitted items to CanadExport, but you’re looking for something new. A new idea, a creative outreach program to tap into the entrepreneurial energy out there, a way to draw in some really spirited businesspeople who would really appreciate your talents, not just your book of harmonized codes!
Or let’s say you’re a policy analyst in the economic development field, and you’re convinced that export development is an important component of a “jobs and growth” strategy. You know small business is the real greenhouse for new job creation, and you wonder what it would take to help these firms learn about exporting.
Or let’s just say you’re a Foreign Service Officer or Executive pondering the new rhetoric about what it would take to make our Department more relevant to Canadians in their communities. ’Listening to your clients’ is all the rage these days… heck, it might be even good for your career, so you nobly decide it’s time to start listening to small businesses, and this is what you hear…
• 30.3% of all Canadian firms are owned or operated by women, and the 700,000 women-led businesses in Canada provide 1.7 million jobs. That’s more than the Top 100 companies combined!
• Studies show that women’s firms are creating jobs at four times the average rate.
• In Saskatchewan, where I in 20 active companies actually disappeared in 1996, the number of companies led by women grew by 10%.
• In Québec, where the number of companies grew by 3%, the number of firms led by women entrepreneurs grew at eight times that rate.
• Businesses owned by women in nontraditional sectors (for women) like manufacturing, mining and construction have grown by a rate of 116%.
• A survey shows that for one third of these women, developing new export markets is a top priority.
So? Good for them, you think. Everyone knows women can make it in business. But hang on a minute. When was the last time you counted women business owners as one third of your trade show or trade mission participants? Is this the proportion of women calling your trade desk for information? Is this the proportion of women among your visitors, or your correspondence? Eureka, Archimedes. There’s your untapped potential, there’s your marketer’s dream.
But you’re still thinking, “Washington is flush, Washington can pull it off and we can’t.” Well, I haven’t finished with you yet. You see, even for a big mission like this one, reaching out to women entrepreneurs is not exactly an obvious tack to take. It took quite a few coincidences before anybody said, “Aha!” And believe it or not, Americans were saying it first.
One year earlier, in the fall of 1996, the Embassy received a call from an American, the former president of the National Association of Women Business Owners. She wanted to know if Canada could host a daylong policy conference among representatives from NAFTA countries, to prepare for the OECD Conference on Women Entrepreneurs slated for April ’97 in Paris. We agreed. Astrid Pregel and Judy Bradt represented the Embassy, which brought them in contact with the Canadian business delegate, Andrina Lever, past president of the Women Entrepreneurs of Canada (WEC). The conference was well-attended – the US Small Business Administration, the White House, the Department of Commerce, and several Mexican women were among the subscribers. Impressed by reports like those above and with the energy and enthusiasm of the conference, the Canadian Trade Commissioners began to wonder what our Embassy could do to address this dynamic segment of the Canadian business population.
The result was an outreach program, simply called the Canadian Women’s International Business Initiative (CWIBI). It was a simple concept that involved targeted marketing to women entrepreneurs, who seemed to be “plugged” into parallel networks and associations and not our usual sources of contacts. With so many new exporters out there already who don’t know what we do, it was surprising to find that here was a new opportunity to reach out to a whole new group.
So CWIBI became a road show for the Embassy. Astrid Pregel went to Central Canada, Judy Bradt went west, and Kathy Aleong went east. When Trade Minister Eggleton came to Washington with the Prime Minister in April, he heard the statistics on the success rate of women entrepreneurs and what the Embassy was doing to reach out to them. It wasn’t a huge leap between taking Washington to the entrepreneurs and taking the entrepreneurs to Washington, and when Astrid Pregel and her Embassy team suggested a trade mission, Eggleton’s Communications Director Nicole Bourget. sensed an opportunity. Nicole was able to secure Eggleton’s support for a full-fledged, Minister-led trade mission to Washington in the fall, and even wrote it into the speech he was to deliver to the WEC-hosted meeting of “Les Femmes-chefs d’entreprise mondiales” a few weeks later in Toronto.
The rest is history – Eggleton’s speech, the OECD conference, half a dozen private sector sponsors lining up, nearly 500 expressions of interest from companies, a mission size that grew from 25 to well over 100, lipstick smiles on TV with the US Capitol in the background, a whole network of enthusiastic business partners among the women entrepreneurs in the Washington area, business deals signed with Minister Marchi looking on proudly, an armload of policy and program recommendations to the Minister, a private meeting of businesswomen with the Finance Minister, a new business coalition for national unity, and promises of many more good things to come.
And what is coming? A women’s mission to the World Bank (March 98), a Canadian ministerial research coalition on women in business, a Canada-US women’s trade summit in May of 99, and another OECD conference in 2000. Moreover, with the creation of the new “Export Services — SMEs” (TSME) under the direction of JoAnna Townsend in TCD (whose mandate includes serving the export needs of women, aboriginal, youth and multicultural entrepreneurs), the mission has left a sizeable database of Canadian businesswomen and their representative organizations as its lasting legacy to Trade Commissioners.
Coming soon to an Embassy near you? Well, that still depends on you. Maybe the business culture in Teheran is not ready for women entrepreneurs, and maybe a trade mission far beyond the North American continent is not for every small business that wants to export. But you already knew that there are other networks of entrepreneurs in Canada who still haven’t heard of us, and that you don’t have to run a trade mission to “get your message out”. What you should know now that you didn’t know before, is that this mission has created a database of several hundred new names with JoAnna Townsend in TSME, and it’s there for you to use. And what you might consider that you hadn’t considered before, is that women entrepreneurs are making their mark on the domestic economy, are coming of age as exporters, and want to learn more about us and how we can help. So what are you waiting for?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998) — Spring 1998 // Printemps 1998, pp. 3–5. Read the rest of this issue →
