Since its inception, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s Wings program has helped a diverse, eclectic range of entrepreneurs and innovators successfully launch their businesses. Run by a team experienced in helping startups take flight and drawing on experts in a range of fields, the program has taught participants how to recognize their strengths, focus on what it is they are really selling, and identifying their customers. The program welcomed its final cohort of fledgling startups this January 2023. These are their stories.
Nancy Dionne faced a challenge with launching her new company, Insite Project Consulting Inc. A professional engineer with 25 years’ experience working as a project manager for real-estate investors and government agencies, she was at home with the world of data and things. Working as the lead consultant on a new housing project or infrastructure upgrades, her work might involve engineering designs, certifying construction, or dealing with authorities over permits they needed. Demanding and not straightforward.
As a trained civil engineer and project manager, she was comfortable dealing with the physical world. But for her, the ins and outs of business seemed to rely more on the intangible, and she admits, “Creating a new business wasn’t something I knew about.” She didn’t want to waste time and energy that should actually go into the business just trying to get it off the ground. As she put it later, with a bit of a laugh, she needed someone “To direct me to where I needed to go, to get to where I wanted to be.” Through her connection to the WE-CAN Project led by Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI), the local program that offers various programs and services to help women entrepreneurs, she was able to connect with QPI’s Wings Acceleration program.
She found the help she needed: first in the weekly sessions which she found “applicable and useful,” and which were enlivened by the contributions of her fellow participants, who were, she says, “really intelligent and had great ideas”, and then, outside of those sessions, working one on one with mentor Elza Seregelyi.
“She was phenomenal,’ says Dionne. “She was really able to lead me down the right path.”
Wings brought about two key discoveries.
“The strengths I thought were really important to my clients, tended not to be. Because of my vast knowledge and great attention to detail, my most appreciated strength is really to help clients with planning and execution to keep the project on track,” but not so much with the day-to-day grind of getting the job done.
In addition, she discovered that her clients foremost appreciate her “more hands-on, transparent approach to client relations.”
Too often, consultants don’t seek to understand the clients’ objectives and keep them informed, which leaves them vulnerable to surprises on their project delivery times and costs. She now takes a refreshing approach when responding to requests for project proposals, making sure that she tailors hers to address the individual needs of the client and how they can benefit from her company’s services.
For Dionne, the benefits of the program were almost immediate. “As soon as I started the program, I began implementing what I learned,” she says. And the day after the program ended, she was rewarded with an exciting new job. As project manager of Homes for Heroes Foundation, she is overseeing a tiny homes development for veterans being built in Kingston near Lake Ontario Park. All made possible in no small part by the lessons she had learned through Wings.
In the near future, she also hopes to continue growing her company with an agile group of like-minded people, while maintaining strong relationships with her clients, taking advantage of her years of experience and the lessons Wings gave her.
Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) offered the Wings Accelerator program, along with many other programs and services, with support from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, through the ScaleUp Platform, an initiative led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which QPI is a regional partner.