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Bontu Galataa is an Entrepreneur Ecosystem Strategist at ATB Financial, dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs in Alberta. Her role involves developing and nurturing strategic partnerships with small business support organizations to understand community needs, facilitating learning opportunities for entrepreneurs and creating connections within the ecosystem.
Bontu's passionate about social enterprises that address social and environmental challenges. Originally from Oromia, Ethiopia, Bontu maintains a strong connection to her roots and integrates it into her daily life. She is a Social Entrepreneur who heads Sayyoo Consulting, a firm specializing in social business consulting, as well as Sayyoo Innovation, a startup dedicated to the development of rural African communities through engaging the diaspora.
In this episode, Bontu and I chat about:
How personal credit determines your business lending options till a certain stage
Why banks can't help with everything
The fantasy of being your own boss
Why crowdfunding, pitch competitions, and micro-grants might be better starting points than bank loans
When you should take your first loan
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Doing business in Canada
0:41 Intro
2:49 Culture shocks newcomer entrepreneurs face
6:53 Sell beyond your community
9:34 Common mistake newcomer entrepreneurs make
10:23 Go work in the industry first
14:42 Bet on yourself
21:56 Your personal credit affects your business lending
26:54 Entrepreneurship fantasies
30:46 What banks can and can't do
40:51 Three things to do the day you decide to start a business
42:41 The one myth about immigrant entrepreneurs that needs to die
45:18 Outro
Some takeaways:
The best market research sometimes is a job. Getting a job in the industry you're hoping to launch a business in means you have a front-row seat to everything. You'll learn the regulations, find the gaps, and even build the relationships that could lead to your first clients or your first mentors.
Starting a business as a newcomer can be hard. Not to be a downer here but people (myself included) often fantasize about how starting our own business can mean some form of freedom. But you get in and discover that if you can't fund the business, the business won't fund itself. Capital is scarce. Grants for for startups are hard to come by. Lending requires personal credit you might not have yet. So you end up running the business on top of a survival job, funding it from your nine-to-five, and testing your product on weekends. Know this and plan for it.
Immigrants sometimes come from economies that have solved problems the Canadian market hasn't even identified yet. The challenge is knowing how to position that expertise in a market that doesn't know it needs it yet. Bontu thinks one way to do that in Canada is to pair that knowledge with local understanding. And execute fast.
Network outside your community. It's natural to stay within your diaspora community when you arrive. But if you want to build a business that reaches beyond that community, you need relationships outside of it. Especially because in Canada, your network is a big part of far you go.
Links:
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