Meetings, personal mentoring and masterminds are part of the Fresh Idea Collective package
It’s been just over a year since Kerry Ramsay launched the Fresh Idea Collective (FIC), but this year has been productive, helpful and, perhaps most importantly, supportive.
For those who don’t know, FIC is a Stratford-based support network for female-identified entrepreneurs throughout the Perth County region to start, grow and scale their businesses. According to Ramsay, the goal is to shine a spotlight on women-owned businesses while equipping and engaging them for business success.
And for those who know: it’s more.
“Under my leadership, the Fresh Idea Collective hosts face-to-face meetings for female entrepreneurs at a different location each month – most of them women-owned. The purpose of the meeting is to make new connections and spark meaningful conversations about everything from marketing and finance to our mental health and well-being as entrepreneurs,” Ramsay said. “With only 18 per cent of registered businesses in Canada owned by women, there is a need to address the specific challenges women face when it comes to business growth and success. We can do this every month in a safe and respectful environment.”
These challenges include access to finance, mentorship gaps, work-life integration, health and safety, gender bias and social stereotypes. Ramsay and the FIC have been able to forge partnerships that include the Scotiabank Women Initiative, Perth County, investStratford and the Stratford Perth Center for Business. In addition to the monthly meetings, FIC hosts masterminds and organizes personal business mentoring every three months. The goal is to provide women with a space that empowers them to cultivate relationships and skills necessary for the success of their business.
“Many of our participants had never attended a networking event before getting involved with FIC,” said Ramsay. “Like me, many are introverts who found that regular networking events didn’t always meet their needs. What I want to say is that we consciously design networking events for women who love to hate networking.”
Ramsay and her family moved from Kingston to Stratford in 2022 and she was already supporting women entrepreneurs full-time through her role as Project Manager of the Women’s Entrepreneur Strategy at Queen’s University. It didn’t take long for her to recognize the need in her new hometown.
“After living here for a year, people kept introducing me to local women who ran businesses and wanted to network with other women entrepreneurs,” she said. “So I decided to hold a one-off meeting downtown to bring people together. The event sold out quickly and since then we have hosted twelve more sold out events with more than 260 attendees. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.”
The collaborations have been a big part of FIC’s success, participating nearly 50 times in various women-led businesses and organizations. Ramsay cited her work with Home & Company earlier this year as one of her many success stories.
“It was our ‘Ask the ExpHERt’ event we held at Home & Company – we had four women on site as business experts in areas such as law, finance, marketing and real estate,” she said. “Our participants benefited from getting to know these women personally, and the business people themselves benefited from the exposure and contacts made throughout the evening.”
According to statistics from the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, only 18.4 percent of businesses in Canada are majority owned by women, and female entrepreneurs lag behind men in income – 37.1 percent earn less than $50,000 per year, compared to 31.7 percent of male entrepreneurs; 10.9 percent of women entrepreneurs earn more than $150,000, compared to 14.8 percent of men. Access to funding remains a key concern for women entrepreneurs, particularly women entrepreneurs with intersectional identities who face even greater barriers to accessing funding, and female founders receive only four percent of venture capital funding in Canada.
“By building a community of targeted networking, training and development for women entrepreneurs, I hope to inspire women in our region to grow and scale their businesses in ways that enrich the entire local business ecosystem,” Ramsay said. “Diversity and inclusion are core values for FIC and we strive to prioritize representation wherever possible. This includes diverse and inclusive representation of our panels, speakers, trainers, experts and participants. Even something as simple as ensuring diversity and inclusion on our social media channels goes a long way in building respectful relationships between our participants.”
If you would like more information about the Fresh Idea Collective – its events, services and other activities – you can find its website here.
