Women Shining Magazine Women Shining Spring 2018 | Page 40

Women’s Enterprise Centre
Interviewer: So would you say it is the best of
both worlds for you? The needing to help and
the entrepreneur?
LD: Yes, and you know, I have never had a job
this long because I have never been interested.
My attention has not been captured for that
long at any other job. It is here because of this
interesting combination of:
• I run a commercial lending organization, we
lend up to $150,000 and we partner with BDC
and Van City and sorts of other players.
• I also run a consulting agency, so I have
business advisors all through the province
that work 1-1 with our clients and help them.
Mostly we work with existing business
owners - about 70% of our loan clients are
existing businesses. I have a whole bunch
of smart talented people working with me
and we try and enhance the small business
owners who are female in the province.
• Then there is the whole training and
mentoring, and resources, and events, and
stuff. Also quite energizing!
We are also community builders. We are part of
the ‘We for She’ movement, we are one of the
organizing partners. ‘We for She’ is all about
gender equality, in leadership and on boards for
entrepreneurs and emerging industries.
We brought together a lot of women’s business
networks and formed the web alliance which is
a consortium of women’s groups around BC. We
basically interface with all of them. There are
about 40-50 of them in the province.
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It adds value to the member organizations -
joint events and initiatives.
We are making a difference
in the world by helping
other women and that
is quite rewarding
Interviewer: Would you say that is how the
word gets out about who you are? Is that how
your clients find you? By word of mouth more
than ads?
LD: We partner a lot. We rely on organizations
like women business networks. That is our
strategy, members of the network are potential
clients of ours. Being a non profit we have a
pretty limited marketing budget so we have to
be creative and innovative. We definitely try to
get our brand known by working with not just
the networking groups but also other business
service providers such as Community Futures,
the Chamber of Commerce and various other
Economic development type organizations.
It is a big province and we are limited because
we are a small team - at any given time around
15 people in total - so you can only do so much.
We invest a lot in working with partners and
our web presence so people can find us. If
you Google loans to women entrepreneur,
hopefully we will show up!