Written by Jacqueline Sue
About the Author
Current Position: Director of Finance at Palette Skills; Co-Founder, Head of Finance and Operations at &Vision
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Waterloo (minor in Human Resources Management), Master’s degree in Accounting at the University of Waterloo, Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) Designation
ACE Consulting Group Involvement:
Associate (2014-2015)
Managing Director (2015-2016)
President (2016-2017)
Board of Directors (2017-2018)
What were the top three highlights of your student life at the University of Waterloo?
Aside from ACE…
Hack the North: I was the Director of Finance for 2 years (4B and MAcc). This was one of the very few moments where I had a chance to work with people outside of my faculty and immerse myself in thinking differently. Although I did learn a lot of finance-related tools and processes that are relevant to my work today, prior to this experience, I had never planned an event to this scale (2,000+ people) and with such international impact. This organization and its people taught me it was possible to “make it easy for anyone to dream big”, especially when you set aside the barrier of costs (we raised funding so that we can make the event free for students!). It also enabled me to get out of my comfort zone and work with cross functional teams such as logistics, marketing, front end, and back end.
UW Student Venture Fund: I was a part of the founding team of the Student Venture Fund in 2017. It was an incredible experience where we not only learned about the world of venture capital, but also challenged ourselves to build the foundation of an organization from scratch. This includes syllabus creation with our professors, logo design, and investment thesis formation. It really helped me in discovering my love for starting things from scratch and building a pretty kick-ass team to implement it.
What is your favourite ACE-related memory?
It’s a collection of moments, but overall it boiled down to celebrating wins and special days with each other. For instance, we would purchase a birthday cake and celebrate whose birthday was taking place in that month. As well, at the end of each in person meeting, we would each fill out a piece of paper to give a kudo out to a team member who did something great that week. For instance, “Kudos to Annu for securing a high profile client this week!” or “Kudos to Jenny for helping to organize the team social!”. Little did we know that all of these pieces of paper that had accumulated over the months were then organized by team members and sent to us personally around the Holiday season as part of our holiday “Thank You” card. There’s just something about receiving handwritten notes that made this such a memorable experience. Needless to say, the first time we received it as first year ACE students, lots of happy tears were shed and an important lesson in always recognizing efforts of those around you and celebrating wins even when times can get stressful was seen.
Would you be able to tell us more about Palette Skills and your current role? Can you describe the most rewarding and/or challenging parts of your role?
I am currently the Director of Finance of Palette Skills where I lead all things finance + people and culture. Palette Skills is a leader in developing employer-led upskilling programs that result in high demand jobs in growing industries.
Most rewarding part of my role: The most rewarding part of my role is being able to leverage my expertise in finance and HR to help make impactful decisions within the company. For instance, as we scaled from 10 to 50 people in 2 years, we had to make a decision on how we could attract, retain, and recruit top talent for our team. This involved doing an overhaul and restructuring of our compensation benefits. For instance, we asked ourselves questions like what is a competitive salary band, what do people value, and how did COVID-19 fundamentally impact how people viewed work from home. Given how this would impact finance, my team and I were able to come up with recommendations to our board that took into account the human element of compensation while balancing it with our financial constraints and budget.
Most challenging parts of my role: As the first finance and HR hire (back when our company was less than 10 people), the most challenging part of my role was to build two departments that had both a strong foundation and could be scalable. I entered into my role in Day 1 with a finance system that lacked process and controls and a non-existent HR department. Being the only designated and trained person in these two departments required a lot of creativity and rolling up of sleeves to help set the foundation. This required many hours, days, and weeks spent networking with professionals who’ve had success with scaling, attending conferences, and eventually hiring a team under both departments to support me. I am glad to say that after two years of trial and error, we were able to scale operations from $X,XXX,XXX to $XXX,XXX,XXX, build out a team from 10 to 50 individuals, and receive accreditation as a Great Place to Work.
What inspired you to start &Vision? What is some advice you would give to new entrepreneurs?
I grew up with a family of immigrant parents and am eternally grateful for the value and work ethic they had instilled in me at a young age. As a first generation Canadian, I realized early on that hard work and studying, while objectively can bring in some level of success, was not the only thing that mattered as we continued to enter into adolescence. There were, “rules of the road”, such as how to finance tuition, how to apply for a job, or navigating university applications that my parents simply could not support me on because they did not have any lived experiences. In doing more research with my co-founders, Annu and Jeff, we realized that this experience, particularly in the world of business, was prevalent not only from our eyes, but systemically as well. One high school business teacher we had spoken to in our early days had even shared that the Ontario high school business curriculum has not been updated since 2006. And guess what? Since 2006, we’ve seen at least two financial downturns, an emergence of tech, and the changing of how we conduct business internationally. But none of this is captured in the curriculum of our young people - heck, they are still learning what pagers are in their worn out textbooks.
Some advice I would give to entrepreneurs before launching a venture is to (1) Understand if there is a need in the market and (2) Whether you have product-market-fit and a unique value proposition.
For (1) Before launching &Vision, we had conducted a comprehensive survey where we solicited feedback from teachers, students (high school and post secondary), and graduates. We asked questions such as how confident they were to choose an education in business, what courses they were taking, and whether &Vision can help service any of their needs. Not shocking to us, we had overwhelming feedback on the need for accessible information as it came to business, education, how to apply for schools, etc which validated (2). We did round off with a pretty comprehensive competitor analysis on what initiatives or organizations catered to the need we identified and pitched it to several NPO executives. Needless to say, we found our fit and to this day have partnered with incredible organizations such as Shad Canada and Kiwanis to deliver on our accessible programming.