CanadianSME sat down with Desirée A Bombenon, CEO and Chief Disruption Officer at SureCall, to talk about what motivated her to take the entrepreneurial journey. She also shared with us about EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year Program in encouraging and empowering her career. We talked about her winning the RBC Momentum Award, what this win means to her, and how it impacted her entrepreneurship career. We also discussed how Hero Girls is educating girls of unrepresented communities and providing them with financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills. She also shared some of her biggest failures, how she learned from them, and the pros and cons of being a female entrepreneur. Together, we explore Desirée’s role in building resilience during the hardest of times.
Desirée A Bombenon is a serial entrepreneur and mentor. Born in Colombo Sri Lanka, she immigrated to Canada at a young age with a dream to work hard and give back to her community. Balanced by her Husband Marc and her two children Janine and Joel, Desirée is passionate about making a difference. Desirée is a health enthusiast, who enjoys wakeboarding, snowboarding, hiking, tennis, writing, painting, drawing, reading, scuba diving and martial arts. Desirée enjoys community giving, philanthropy, and volunteer work. Outside her many business endeavours and community work, Desirée is a published fictional author. Desirée’s life goal is to create value by mentoring those who wish to improve themselves through business and social responsibility for a better community and world. Her work at Harvard created Hero Girls – a humanitarian project of educating women in developing countries to raise the prosperity of the entire community.
The journey really started out with taking business courses and getting an undergraduate in business. I loved the fact that anyone could start a business and build it up and there was strategy and goals and a whole structure around it. When I had the chance to step up and show people what I could do, as well as share my thoughts and ideas, it helped me to get into roles that would support me later as an entrepreneur. I had to work through several roles, from the front line to almost every position in the corporation I worked for to prove I was able to take on a leadership role. Quite often I was passed over for a male employee, who had much less tenure than I had. One of the most important things a budding entrepreneur or business leader can do is take chances, and when an opportunity presents itself, you have to take it. That proactiveness will serve you later as a foundation for confidence, but also as a lever to the next big thing. After several professional roles, I started a wine importing business, as well I became co-founder, and CEO of SureCall a global purpose-driven BPO, that has grown tremendously since 2013. I pivoted to social entrepreneurship as I had always had the goal of utilizing business as a force for good since I was very young, and before it became the popular thing for businesses to do. Today my company spends 2% of our top-line revenue, giving back to the local community, assisting in national endeavours, and contributing to global humanitarian causes.
You’ve been involved in the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program, both as a winner in the Prairies Region for the category of Communication Technology, and also as a judge. How has recognition like this impacted your career and would you encourage other successful entrepreneurs to nominate themselves?
It’s been a pleasure and honour receiving the EY recognitions and judging these incredible companies vying for entrepreneur of the year. I think it has brought awareness to many things, not just to me but to my business, which does a lot of community work. EY has of course added tremendous value to both my personal brand and the brand image of my businesses. We have seen an increase in interest from both new customers as well as a talent who want to come and work for us. I would definitely encourage entrepreneurs to nominate themselves or others who they think can benefit from the program. Regardless of whether you win, there is significant value to the exercise of doing the submission. I realized our company had done so much and come so far, and I wasn’t really using any of that information to market the company. I could show my team the fantastic progress we were making. The EY program opened my eyes to how much we should be celebrating as a company for the efforts we have made and the success we have had.
In 2020, you were awarded as the winner of the RBC Momentum Award, a category of the RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards that honours an entrepreneur who has created a responsive business that can adapt to changing market environments and leverage opportunities for continued growth. What does winning this award mean to you?
This award is meaningful for many reasons, one is that the women who are nominated for the awarded work hard and have had to fight through different challenges and obstacles than their male counterparts. But more important to me is that it sends a message to all the young girls and women out there that they can do and become whoever they want. That they can follow their dreams and passions and believe in their ability to make things happen. This award is a symbol of that.
Desirée Bombenon – Revolutionized the Call Center Sector with Her Purpose-Oriented Strategy Share on XAccording to recent Salesforce data, it shows that 83% of Canadians want to support brands that prioritize values and profit equally. Can you share your thoughts on this with our readers?
This is evident in how many businesses are clearly shifting the way they do business and some of the corporate values that are changing in order to retain employees. My company is a certified B Corporation, meaning we are held to the highest standards of environmental, social, and ethical behaviours and processes. As more consumers want to ensure that their purchases are contributing to corporately responsible companies who value sustainable business practices you will see more and more companies change their own values and behaviours. This is wonderful of course, it means many things including how people are valued by the companies they work for, as well as thinking about community contributions, and sharing in environmental goals among other important humanitarian efforts.
You launched Hero Girls because of your passion to educate girls in underserved communities and provide them with financial literacy, entrepreneurial skills, etc. Please let us know about the challenges faced during this initiative and why you think it’s important to empower the underrepresented communities.
Let me start by saying when you empower girls in a community you raise the prosperity of the entire community. There are hundreds of research papers that speak to this, and it really doesn’t matter how, as much as it matters why. Women have so much to contribute, not only in their creative and collaborative methodology when it comes to solving challenging problems, but they are generally the caregivers and nurturers, especially in developing countries. How you treat the females in a society is directly related to how that society will survive and succeed. For me, the challenge, especially in developing worlds, is to get the local community to support the efforts to educate females. In many of these regions, girls are treated no better than farm animals, and are used to barter, or sold off to work as labourers or worse. We had to go in and establish a relationship with village influencers on the ground and build trust, and ensure they understood the value that the program would bring to the village in order to be accepted. We also had to work hard to show results in the first year to encourage further collaboration that would allow us to continue the program. In the end, we had a successful 3-year pilot, putting over 500 girls through the empowerment and entrepreneurial Hero Girls program, which included scholarships, and an innovation project. We were also able to provide bicycles for safe transportation to school and supported the mother’s group with microloans to start businesses in the village. We are now moving the program to include assistance for women and girls being exploited and trafficked in these countries.
What have you learned from your failures? Which of them are most meaningful?
I have learned that failures must happen if you want to reach your full potential. I have learned that titles don’t matter, and that leadership is about empowering and supporting others. I have learned that it’s important to make decisions even if it’s the wrong decision, the status quo is not an option, and hope is not a strategy. I have learned that barriers and limitations are figments of my imagination. And I have learned that the less you think about money and profit, the more money and profit you make. Every failure is meaningful; someone asked me if I could go back and have a re-do which failure would I pick, I simply would not. I embrace these as learning opportunities and believe me, I learned a lot!
Are there any pros and cons of being a woman entrepreneur? What specific advice do you have for young women who are aspiring to become entrepreneurs in future?
There are both pros and cons, to being a woman entrepreneur, especially today. It’s a highly regarded position to be a female entrepreneur, whether for the right or wrong reasons, the spotlight is on women today. There are still many challenges and underlying issues to deal with. Today if you are a woman in a leadership role you are under a microscope, and often seen as getting the role to make quota or as the “token” female on the board. It’s tough because we know female leaders and entrepreneurs are effective, and talented and deserve the right to be in the role. Other challenges are that female entrepreneur are still not looked at with the same degree of seriousness as male entrepreneurs, and in many cases are overlooked when it comes to funding opportunities or investment. I realize these things are changing, but not quickly enough. In the meantime, I encourage all entrepreneurs to never give up, it’s these challenges that will build resilience to get you through the hardest times and give you the energy to succeed more than you could ever imagine.
