Sarah Bennetto-O’Brien, founder of The Handpie Company, has chosen measured growth for her business, which has allowed it to reflect her values, including paying long-time employees a competitive wage and keeping local suppliers.Supplied
Since opening a business in 2014 that would later evolve into The Handpie Company, Sarah Bennetto-O’Brien has been focused on growth – but not in a growth-at-all-costs way, where employee experience and product quality aren’t top of mind.
“It would be easier if you didn’t have a conscience, if you were just worried about finances and the bottom line” says Ms. Bennetto-O’Brien, whose company in Borden-Carleton, P.E.I. sells personal-sized savoury pies throughout Atlantic Canada. Instead, “we have benefits here, paid uniforms, and everything I wanted in a workplace and didn’t get.”
The company has also had the same core team through its evolution from making 16 pies a day to 1,600, and uses the same suppliers of local beef, dairy, flour and P.E.I. potatoes that they have since they started.
Those purposeful decisions have ensured the company continues to reflect Ms. Bennetto-O’Brien’s values as it grows. That wouldn’t necessarily be possible if she had investors or partners pushing for an ever-bigger bottom line, she says.
“Being a woman in the food industry, no one has been willing to lend me money anyway,” says Ms. Bennetto-O’Brien, who employs 13 people year-round on an island where tourist-driven seasonal work flourishes. “Slow, mindful growth has helped me maintain quality, maintain the team and maintain the vibe.”
“I come up against walls of people who don’t understand it,” she adds.
Entrepreneurs face constant pressure, both internal and external, to grow their businesses quickly. However, some founders are choosing a slower-growth trajectory that allows them to maintain more control of their business, its work environment and product quality.
It’s an approach that appeals to women entrepreneurs who have other commitments beyond work, or who are driven to create the type of workplace culture that they would have desired as an employee.
But experts say women entrepreneurs who do have a growth mindset can also find themselves in a slower-growth pattern due to challenges obtaining funding, childcare or even a lack of self-confidence.
“Due to gender biases, women often encounter more skepticism from investors than men and tend to receive smaller bank loans,” states a report called “Breaking Barriers and Building Futures: Women Entrepreneurs as Catalysts for Sustainable Growth,” by the Information and Communications Technology Council, a Canadian non-profit think-tank.
“Women entrepreneurs also often struggle with low self-confidence and imposter syndrome and tend to under-evaluate the quality of their own skills, products and services, particularly in industries dominated by men,” the report states. “These tendencies can significantly impact business decisions and interactions with business stakeholders, such as investors and clients.”
As co-founder of NumberCrunch, which acts as a finance team for other businesses, and a mentor for SheBoot, a bootcamp that helps women-led businesses prepare for investment, Susan Richards sees this regularly. She says women sometimes choose slower growth because they mistakenly believe they don’t have the skills to manage a fast-moving company.
“I spend a lot of time telling them they’re smarter than they think,” says Ms. Richards, who lives in Ottawa. A certified professional accountant by trade, she sees sustainable growth as getting to a place where revenue exceeds expenses, then deciding what the ideal trajectory looks like from there.
“The pressures of growth are often being driven by the funding ecosystem,” she adds. “External investors, angel investors for example, are seeking a 10-times return within five to seven years. That just drives tremendous pressure for growth. If a business owner is not interested in that type of growth, they have to be mindful of the source of their investment.”
Susan Richards, a co-founder of NumberCrunch, says some women founders choose slower growth because they mistakenly believe they don't have the skills to handle a quickly expanding company.Supplied
Ms. Richards says growth is important, but that “there is a natural cadence,” and exceeding it can cause problems.
“You rarely see a company on [a ‘fastest-growing company’ list] multiple years in a row,” she says. “I concluded that was a kiss of death, not a category to aspire to, because it can also elucidate uncontrolled or unmanaged growth.”
“Lots of company structures can implode if they grow too fast,” she adds, noting burnout is another risk of moving too quickly.
Sara Roach Lewis, who calls herself a “feminist business strategist,” based in Cable Head, P.E.I., says women with children and those with chronic illnesses are among those who might be inclined to grow their businesses more slowly.
She says women-owned businesses tend to be slow to scale, pointing to the 2024 State of Women’s Entrepreneurship in Canada report, which shows 72 per cent of women entrepreneurs in Canada earn less than $100,000 a year.
“Women end up being stuck in the hardest stage of business,” she says, noting that’s not typically enough income to hire much help. “When you’re making less than $100,000, you are really required to do all the things.”
She says many women find they can make a good living as a solo practitioner and choose to maintain room for other commitments.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow slowly,” said Ms. Roach Lewis, founder of consultancy SRL Solutions. “Women who want to grow their businesses more slowly are more likely thinking about the fulsome scope of what their life looks like.”