Surrounded By Sandpipers
Mark Leger is the editor and part-owner of Huddle. This is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region.
For years, I’ve enjoyed sitting on the beach and watching sandpipers skip along the shore. What I didn’t know is they were likely females, roaming their territory and looking for food, while the males were back in their nests, incubating the eggs and caring for their young.
This I discovered in my conversation with Rhiannon Davies and Cathy Bennett, my guests on the Huddle “Home Office” podcast this week.
Rhiannon and Cathy are Atlantic Canadian business leaders and two of the founders of Sandpiper Ventures, which provides investment capital and mentorship to Atlantic Canadian companies led by women. They called it Sandpiper because the migratory birds behaved in a way that they found instructive and inspiring.
“There’s wonderful symbolism around the sandpiper that’s about growth and soaring and achieving great heights,” said Rhiannon. “If you walked along the shores of New Brunswick when they’re around, they are very communicative and collaborative and team-oriented creatures as well. But the thing that cinched the deal for us was that sandpipers are matriarchal creatures in that the women of the sandpiper species are out in the world creating and growing and being entrepreneurs, and the males are sitting home on the nest.”
PODCAST: Cathy Bennett And Rhiannon Davies Of Sandpiper Ventures
Rhiannon has been a leading executive and board member with large companies in North and South America, Asia and Europe, and was part of a board of directors that took a $5.5-billion retailer public on the Amsterdam stock exchange.
She also spent a year on a sailboat with her family, crossing the Atlantic Ocean before settling down in Halifax.
Cathy has more than 30 years of experience in business in Newfoundland, and once owned companies in foodservice, industrial manufacturing and real estate.
She also spent five years in provincial politics and served as the Minister of Finance and Status of Women when Dwight Ball was premier.
The seven other founders of Sandpiper have impressive entrepreneurial and executive backgrounds as well and together they’re putting together a $20-million investment fund to power the growth of companies led by women. They’re providing mentorship as well as money, sharing the skills and experience from their deep and varied backgrounds.
They’re operating in the face of apparent contradictions. According to data shared by Sandpiper, women make up 51 percent of the population yet receive only 2.8 percent of venture capital funding worldwide and just four percent in Canada. Companies led by women that do receive VC funding get less than half the amount that men do. And only 15 percent of the partners in Canadian venture capital funds are women.
These inequities exist even though women are arguably safer bets for investment. Sandpiper cites data from MassChallenge/Boston Consulting Group that shows that female founders generate 78 cents in revenue for every dollar invested compared to 31 cents for every dollar invested in companies led by men. They cite data from The Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation that shows that teams led by women deliver a return-on-investment 35 percent higher than teams led by men.
“This is not necessarily about women being better, it’s about making sure you have diversity in decision making and diversity of perspective around all of the tables as you create your business because that is going to lead to better decision making and better innovation,” said Rhiannon.
“But what those statistics are showing us is that women are significantly more effective in the efficient use of capital. The value proposition from the moment of investment to the moment of exit is significantly higher. They’re faster to revenue generation and faster to growth and their exit success is better. These are all metrics that we as investors are extremely enthusiastic about.”
Cathy says that women are organized and task-oriented and bring experience to the table from their personal professional lives.
“They’re really efficient and good planners, and there’s a preciseness to the to-do lists. The things that need to get done, get done because, just like the groceries have to show up, the to-do lists on growing the business have to get done,” said Cathy.
“From an organizational perspective, I’m pretty passionate about the fact that for 35 years I had the opportunity to grow my management skills. I’d suggest that from a leadership-perspective, women are significantly better managers because of the experience they’ve had, both personally and professionally, and that their attention to detail allows them to make decisions that are more capital frugal.”
As I listened to Cathy and Rhiannon, I reflected on my own entrepreneurial history. I’ve been involved in three startup media outlets in the last 20 years, a path I would never have taken without the influence, inspiration and involvement of two women, in particular, Tuck Studio owner Judith Mackin and Janet Scott, my former business partner and now life partner.
Judith and Janet were the entrepreneurial drivers behind the creation of here, a weekly newspaper we owned and operated nearly 20 years ago. After months of planning in late 1999/2000, the action-oriented Judith announced we’d better launch soon, or she was out. At the beginning of April, the paper published its first issue, and it became the focus of my life for the next five years and set the course for the rest of my career to date.
At the time I knew they were instrumental to its success, but I didn’t fully appreciate what that truly meant. Journalists often muse about starting their own media outlets without understanding what it takes to operate them as businesses that can be sustained and grown over time – building and growing a base of advertisers, managing payroll and office expenses, human resources management, and charting and executing growth plans.
A young man with no business experience, I didn’t fully appreciate that Judith and Janet had the characteristics Cathy and Rhiannon say are typical of successful women entrepreneurs and executives. I’ve worked with many more ever since.
I was, and still am, surrounded by sandpipers that help me soar.
Who are the sandpipers in your life? E-mail: [email protected].
Banner photo: Creative Commons.