Against the odds: Lessons in resilience from Canadian women business leaders

Globe and Mail

5 hours ago

In 2022, Kristy Miller, chief executive officer of The Scented Market, a handmade candle and bodycare company based in Guelph, Ont., went on a surprise vacation with her husband for her 40th birthday to Nashville. On the last day of their trip, as Ms. Miller was packing up her bags to head home, she bent over and heard a pop. 'All of a sudden, I had no feeling in my legs,' she recalls. 'I could not stand up on my own. I was completely paralyzed from the waist down.'
Ms. Miller, with the help of her husband, a wheelchair and their car, managed to drive back home to Guelph and get diagnosed with a 'freak spinal cord injury.' Two days later, she had surgery, followed by eight weeks of recovery. At the time, Ms. Miller had just opened The Scented Market's second retail location, in Fergus, Ont., and was growing the wholesale part of her business. 'I was hauling candles to shows and standing on my feet 12 hours a day,' Ms. Miller recalls. 'I couldn't carry anything.'
To keep her business running, Ms. Miller had to think quickly and reassign her more labour-intensive and in-person duties. 'One of those key players was my husband,' she explains. 'He left his corporate job of 17 years to work full-time for me as my production manager. That was a major load lifted off my plate.' Ms. Miller also brought on a wholesale manager and a social media manager. 'These people are very strategic in my business,' she says. 'They're all better at their jobs than I am because they're experts in their own right.'
By September 2022, after spending the summer in a zero-gravity chair, running her business from her laptop, Ms. Miller returned to work and saw it flourish. A November 2022 Dragon's Den appearance gave her sales a boost. 'The night our episode aired, we had employees working 24 hours, seven days a week, around the clock,' Ms. Miller recalls. She also secured bigger accounts (like the TV shopping network TSC), opened a third retail location in Blue Mountain, Ont. and moved into a larger warehouse in October 2023 to increase their manufacturing capacity. The Scented Market now has over 500 wholesale accounts across Canada and has just surpassed $12-million in lifetime sales.
While Ms. Miller's spinal cord injury could have devastated her company, it emerged stronger. 'I was doing a lot of nitty-gritty stuff before,' she says. 'Now I'm able really to focus my time and energy on how I'm going to grow the business and get us to the next level.' Giving up control over so many parts of her business is something that she admits was difficult to do but was an important lesson in resilience. 'That was a real eye-opener,' Ms. Miller says. 'I really do have incredibly smart people on my team who can help me. I don't have to do it all by lonesome.'
Ms. Miller is just one of many women entrepreneurs and business leaders in Canada who have overcome personal and business setbacks to bounce back. In 2021, Asha Wheeldon, founder of the Vancouver-based company Kula Foods, wanted to scale up her line of plant-based Afro-Caribbean sauces and entrees.
She knew she had to change her packaging away from glass jars, which were heavy and prone to breakage, to another sustainable option. Her research led her to a compostable pouch made in Canada. 'We ended up purchasing a higher volume for better pricing,' she says. 'But unfortunately, the bags didn't have a great protective barrier for the food. We had freezer burn and needed to switch out of those bags.' The lost funds and product were a frustrating challenge.
Ms. Wheeldon says that it wasn't until months later, when she asked for help from other food consumer packaged goods (CPG) founders that she discovered her packaging solution: a vacuum-sealed bag in a box. Another CPG founder also tipped Ms. Wheeldon off about a grant for B.C. businesses that needed marketing support. Ms. Wheeldon's packaging pivot qualified for the grant, which helped offset some of the costs involved in the change.
Ms. Wheeldon wished that she had asked for help sooner. 'Community is everything,' she says. 'Resource-sharing is the best way to do it. It's a give and take.' She's now part of a WhatsApp group of CPG founders that share industry news and advice. 'It's getting past that feeling that you can do it yourself,' says Ms. Wheeldon.
Learning to ask for help was a critical part of Saretta Herman navigating a parental leave and return to work as co-founder and clinical director of Layla, a company that provides mental health, counselling and psychotherapy services.
As Ms. Herman was preparing to take six months off after the birth of her second child in April 2021, the company had just signed a major contract with a hospital group in Ontario and had grown its team from seven to 21 people, including three full-time roles that would take over aspects of Ms. Herman's role while she was off.
Returning to work wasn't easy for Ms. Herman. 'I was exhausted, dealing with motherhood (think pumping breast milk four times a day, video off, on group meetings) and readjusting to a business where my position had changed in my absence,' she recalls.
She learned, yet again, the power of asking for help – this time, at home. Ms. Herman's husband works night shifts a few times a week, so the family hired a babysitter for the evenings when she was alone. 'Eventually, I could see that we really needed the help even on the days that my husband was home,' Ms. Herman notes. 'I needed another set of hands to be able to show up for work in the way I wanted, and to be able to show up for my kids in the way that I wanted.'
Ms. Herman recognizes that she's in a place of privilege to afford domestic help. But as a parent, she still had to overcome societal norms and expectations. 'There's a feeling that you should be able to manage without it,' Ms. Herman says. 'The mental shift was realizing that I could work less, but that that's not what I wanted to do,' she explains.
Asking for help has allowed Ms. Herman more quality time with each of her children – her attention undivided. She's less burnt out during her working hours, too. Since her parental leave, Ms. Herman has seen Layla grow to an internal team of 35 employees and a network of over 430 contracted therapists. 'I love my work and I'm really proud of my company,' she says. 'I get a lot out of it.'