Ten years ago, SmartSweets founder Tara Bosch participated in the inaugural Odlum Brown Forum Pitch: an accelerator program for early-stage women-led businesses in Canada. At the time, Bosch’s fledgling candy brand was still in its infancy, and the young founder was in need of mentorship and funding. She ended up winning the grand prize, and, in doing so, found both of those things and then some.
“Of course, the cash prize was helpful as a startup, but even more than that, it was the authentic support from the community,” says Bosch. “All of a sudden having all these women rallying around me and SmartSweets—it was truly game changing. It helped me believe in myself, and, from a growth perspective, I was able to close the funding I needed in two weeks because that whole community rallied and supported me.”
Bosch, who went on to sell SmartSweets for an eyewatering sum of US$360 million, returned to the Pitch earlier this year—but this time, she was on the other side of the table. For her, it was coming full-circle.
“Being able to come back as a judge was one of those surreal moments, because I remember being on that stage for the first Pitch and how it impacted my life,” she says. “So getting to come back and show up in that way for others—I just had an immense sense of gratitude.”
The event was launched in 2016 by the Forum, a Vancouver-based national charity with the goal of supporting self-identifying women, non-binary and trans-femme entrepreneurs across the country.
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“The Forum has a long track record of bringing together entrepreneurs with the right community, the right network of people, the right capital and the right knowledge, at the right time, to scale their businesses,” says Forum CEO Kirsten Koppang Telford. “And do it in a way that is unique, really, in leveraging a massive network of people across the corporate world—across the entrepreneurship community—to make that happen.”
The Odlum Brown Forum Pitch is just one of the Forum’s many programs but is perhaps its most well-known—and one of its most successful. Companies started by past Pitch participants have to date raised a collective $70 million in venture capital and created 1,000 jobs.
Designed for entrepreneurs with existing startups that they are ready to scale, the Pitch offers mentorship and coaching, and opens doors that can lead to capital. To apply for the program, founders must submit a one-minute pitch video. From there, the Forum Community Panel—a diverse selection of business experts across industries—reviews submissions and chooses nine semi-finalists, who are paired with a mentor to revise and refine their pitch. Those nine entrepreneurs then present updated three-minute pitches to the panel at events in Toronto and Vancouver; then, three finalists are selected for the Vancouver finale, where they present to two judges, also called Champions (this year the Champions were Bosch and Michele Romanow of Dragons’ Den fame). All three finalists receive a prize package with an estimated value of $30,000; one winner is awarded an additional $20,000 in cash.
This year, that money went to NovaSonix Healthcare Inc., a medical-tech company based in London, Ontario, that created an attachment that turns any regular ultrasound machine into a real-time 3D scanner. By instantly capturing 3D musculoskeletal images and corresponding data, it can offer similar results to an MRI—without the long wait times or high costs. The business is actively fundraising for its series A, which is where the Pitch becomes particularly valuable.
“Women-led companies really need to be put in front of people who can provide them with resources and capital to actually take their company to the next stage, and that’s what the Forum does,” says NovaSonix CEO and co-founder Randa Mudathir. “Not only does it provide us with that mentorship piece, it actually puts us in front of people who can provide us with capital and resources that we need to complete the next milestones in our company.”
Funding is, after all, one of the biggest barriers that women entrepreneurs face. More than 20 percent of Canadian businesses are owned by women, and women make up more than 37 percent of self-employed Canadians. And yet, women-led companies only receive around 4 percent of venture capital financing. In Vancouver specifically, that number drops to less than 3 percent.
“Women still face a lot of unconscious bias, and it comes from many different places,” says Koppang Telford. “There’s still a lens of what a successful entrepreneur looks like in the unconscious mind. Men get asked how their business is going to be wildly successful; women get asked why their business won’t fail.”
It’s why programs like the Pitch have proven so crucial. By helping women founders refine their actual business pitch and then expose that pitch to more established entrepreneurs who can open funding doors, the Forum plants a flag that says: Business is for everyone. And also: A good idea is a good idea.
Beyond that, the program plays another important role: reminding women entrepreneurs that yes, in fact, they’ve got what it takes.
“When you see part of yourself in somebody else who has been around the bend and done it before, it inspires a confidence and a conviction within yourself that you’re capable, too—and I think that’s exactly what the Forum does by championing women in so many different ways,” says Bosch. “For me, it was really a transformative, guiding light that allowed me to have that same grit and gusto to wake up every single day and embrace the hardness.”
Entrepreneurship is a difficult path no matter what. The idea still has to be great; the plan still has to be strategic; the product still has to work. The Forum doesn’t change any of that. Instead, it provides necessary support for women entrepreneurs so that, one day, hopefully, they can walk into a room and be afforded the same assumption as their male counterparts receive: that their business is likely to succeed.
