What $10,000 Can’t Buy

BY JACKELYN GILL
Congratulations—you’ve just received a $10,000 grant!

Getting to this stage was hard. You built the business. You made the pitch. You’ve fought for every hard-earned and hard-won dollar. You’ve even made plans for how to spend it.

But what actually happens two days from now? Two months? Two years?

For women business owners like Liz Cripps, founder of WACADS Group, those answers aren’t always so clear.

The cash investment she received from the BMO For Women Celebrating Women Grant in 2024 was a welcome infusion. But it wouldn’t solve the credibility roadblocks she faced scaling her smart automation technology business beyond narrowly scoped SMB projects into larger-scale, complex contracts with enterprise-sized clients.

That ambition required more.

The Power of Why Not

BY JACKELYN GILL
The expert opinion was in: Meighen Nehme wasn’t going to make it.

Her business, at least. In the middle of the Great Recession, she decided the Job Shoppe wasn’t shutting doors, but rather opening new ones a few cities over.

And the Fortune Hunters’ cameras caught it all for their 2009 season on CBC. Where she was going to open her second location. Doing business all day. Feeding her six-month-old son Lucah. Who her competitors were. And the advice from an established veteran in the staffing field, with 200 employees and $10 million in revenue.

“Her advice to me was to just work in Windsor,” Meighen says. She even remembers one of the show’s celebrity guests agreeing in a less-than-optimistic way.

That’s the part Meighen didn’t see until the show aired, and it’s the pivotal moment that reinforced that she was actually on the right track.

BY CHEF NUIT REGULAR
When you sit at a table in one of my restaurants and order the Gaeng Phed Moo—my Red Curry Pork—you’re in for a treat.

In my home, Gaeng Phed Moo goes by a different name: “Birthday Curry.” I learned to make it the same way I learned most dishes—alongside my mother in the kitchen. She worked all day in the rice fields, growing vegetables, and serving her food at markets and cafeterias. She came home tired. As a child, I hated cooking, so much so that I eventually picked a different career path in nursing. But even then, every evening, my little hands helped her anyway. My love for her was so great that I would endure anything.

Birthday Curry was special because it meant spending the entire day with my mother.

The Unmasking of a Dealmaker

BY JACKELYN GILL
Reece Tomlinson steps out of her heels and into a pair of cowboy boots.

She’s at a ranch in the middle of nowhere outside Calgary. It’s cold, there are seven more wardrobe changes to go, and each one means new makeup, too. The cowboys on set keep staring. There are nine hours left.

The photoshoot is harder than she expected—this, coming from someone who regularly advises on multi-million-dollar transactions as founder of RWT Capital.

“These are things that are a just a bit intimidating,” she says. “Not that they’re massive things, but you start to see that the next version of you needs to be willing to do things that the current version wouldn’t do.”

This version of Reece is going to be seen.

Jennifer Harper is the Little Fish who Changed the Tide

By Jackelyn Gill
Jennifer Harper just needed a place to start. So she did what most people would do: she Googled how to make her own lip gloss.

Simple DIY recipes weren’t in short supply, even back in 2015. A little beeswax, some coconut oil, a splash of pigment from your favorite lipstick. “It’s not that difficult. You could do it in your own home,” says the founder of Cheekbone Beauty.

Now, if only Google had the recipe to compete with global cosmetic conglomerates in a ruthlessly competitive market.

Ten years on, she’s earned her spot on the shelves of small boutique shops and global retailers like Sephora. Cheekbone Beauty even made an appearance at the Met Gala.

And still: “If I knew what I knew now, I would have never started.”

She Didn’t Get Even. She Got Building.

BY JACKELYN GILL
Lesley Steele had done everything they asked.

She wanted into the club—never mind that it was only men. They had the purchasing power and the education opportunities. It was exactly the kind of group a young, independent veterinary clinic owner needed to be part of.

The first time she knocked on their door, the threshold for entry was a million dollars in sales. “I was probably at $300,000 or $400,000,” she says, “but I was confident I could do it.”

When she got there, she knocked again. They moved the line. A million and a half. She hired another vet, stretched the business, and hit the target a second time.

So she knocked once more. Two million. And along with that number came the truth.

Unmuted: From Pop Star to Powerhouse Founder

BY JACKELYN GILL
“Promise me you’ll come back through butterflies.”
Anna Sinclair sat beside her father, squeezing his hand in his hospital room. She reached for a tissue from the box resting on the table beside him. A box splashed in bright butterfly print. It would now be their symbol.

As stage 4 lung cancer claimed his final breaths, it was how she wanted to remember him. In that moment, her journey from rising pop star to founder to award-winning agency CEO finally made sense.

Because that butterfly also described her own life: a series of metamorphoses, each demanding she fall apart before she could become something stronger.