Sheba Zaidi, left, and Genevive Savundranayagam sold their first startup, a bike-led wine touring company in Prince Edward County that they launched with a friend, and then joined forces to create wellness company Mahara Mindfulness.SUPPLIED
Sheba Zaidi and Alyssa Furtado aren’t just entrepreneurs who built successful businesses – they’re part of a new generation of Canadian women rewriting the rules on what it means to grow, scale, and sell a company.
Over the past 20 years, Canada has made strides in addressing the lack of women entrepreneurs through government support, business incubators, and mentorship programs.
These efforts have led to a rise in women-owned businesses. Between 2017 and 2023, the percentage of female entrepreneurs grew from 15.6 to 18.4 per cent. This increase reflects more women like Ms. Furtado and Ms. Zaidi successfully exiting their companies.
For Ms. Zaidi, the path to entrepreneurship was unconventional. In 2017, while working in a public relations agency, she and two colleagues, Erin Bury and Genevive Savundranayagam, saw a gap in the market for bike-led wine tours in Prince Edward County, Ont., and seized on the opportunity to open a seasonally-focused local business, County Wine Tours. They saw Prince Edward County as an up-and-coming destination, under-serviced by tourism companies that could meet the vacation and weekend desires of millennials.
For Ms. Zaidi, her more conventional professional experience moving up in seniority at an agency, and having to learn how to handle human resources, finance and other operational skills, was foundational to her career as an entrepreneur. “Whenever I speak to aspiring entrepreneurs who are thinking about quitting their traditional careers as soon as possible to start a venture, I always tell them to get as much experience, and a breadth of experience too, at their regular jobs first. Because those day-to-day business operations skills are so helpful as an entrepreneur,” says Ms. Zaidi, who quit her agency job three years into running County Wine Tours.
Ms. Zaidi (shown above) and Ms. Savundranayagam's company makes a mindfulness journal.SUPPLIED
As County Wine Tours grew, so did interest from investors and potential buyers. Aiming to find a partner or owner as passionate about the County and sustainable tourism as they were, the three founders were happy to sell to Sandbanks Vacations, a local tourism company. “We were thrilled to find a company who would take care of our tour guides and take care of our brand,” says Ms. Zaidi.
The 2023 sale freed up time for the three owners to pursue other entrepreneurial pursuits they’d begun. Ms. Bury went on to found Willful, an estate and will planning platform with her husband Kevin Oulds, while Ms. Zaidi and Ms. Savundranayagam decided to break into the growing wellness industry with their new company, Mahara Mindfulness.
The brand’s premier product is a mindfulness journal, which was inspired by the practices both Ms. Zaidi and Ms. Savundranayagam used to find balance in their entrepreneurial lives. The Human Being Journal has been endorsed by big celebrity names like Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba and Gwyneth Paltrow, all of whom, notably, are entrepreneurs themselves. Their focus on expanding into international markets reflects the massive potential of the consumer wellness industry, which consultancy McKinsey estimates to be worth US$1.8-trillion globally.
For other entrepreneurs, staying close to the venture they founded and built into an attractive purchase is rewarding in and of itself. Alyssa Furtado, who co-founded RateHub in early 2010, a website that allows consumers to compare mortgage and insurance rates across brokerages and providers, has chosen to stay on after selling the company.
Through her 13 years as chief executive officer, the company expanded from providing only mortgage rate comparisons to include insurance, credit card rates, and more – engaging approximately 1.2 million monthly users and employing 170 people. During that time, Ms. Furtado welcomed three children, adding to the balancing act of entrepreneurship but also bringing perspective to the job. Ms. Furtado contributed more broadly to the Canadian startup ecosystem, volunteering for Toronto Metropolitan University’s DMZ incubator and investing in fellow entrepreneur Lauren Haw’s real estate listings site, Zoocasa.
With Ms. Furtado at the helm, Ratehub, like County Wine Tours, had several prospective buyers and investors. Ultimately, she says, “I’d been building Ratehub for 13 years, and I realized it had so much more potential, but I wanted someone with the energy to pursue those ventures and the experience to branch Ratehub out into new industries, particularly financial services.”
Ms. Furtado partially sold Ratehub to Novacap, a Canadian private equity firm, which she felt had more experience and expertise in insurance. Bringing in new people was the right choice; “Sometimes new partners push you in important new directions you wouldn’t have otherwise explored,” she says.
With the company bringing in a new CEO in June, Ms. Furtado now serves as a board member and strategic adviser for Ratehub and is expanding her board roles and investing in other startups.
Ms. Furtado and Ms. Zaidi have the unique experience of building a company up, both through the turbulent pandemic years, into an enterprise attractive to potential buyers. Choosing what to do after a successful exit can be difficult, but both women are committed to encouraging other Canadian entrepreneurs. “Having been there, done that and scaled, you can share connections and bring a different perspective,” adds Ms. Furtado.