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Sabrina Thind, a Canadian-born financial consultant is working to make starting a business a more equitable process for women and other minorities. Recent research shows that female entrepreneurs face a higher rate of business loan denials as well as increased interest rates in loan decisions. Sabrina has often seen that traditional lending banks consider women-led businesses to be a higher risk. This discriminative pattern is a constraint on both the individual entrepreneurs seeking loans and the national economy as a whole. Sabrina aims to offer valuable insights to those who are marginalized and those living in economically depressed regions.
In her former development bank career, Sabrina worked to embolden women and minority entrepreneurs and prioritized promoting individuals from those groups as well. “We saw that there needed to be a shift in the systemic beliefs and unconscious biases towards women within organizations – beliefs that women are less successful than men in business and leadership roles; better suited for clerical work or as caregivers”, Sabrina says. She has dedicated her career to providing coaching to aspiring entrepreneurs who are at a drawback to access the necessary financing such as women, Black, Latino, and Indigenous individuals.
There are various measures that can be taken to acquire financing for new businesses, but traditional bank lending has a history of dismissing certain minority populations under the guise of other factors. In terms of alternative options such as micro-loans or other non-traditional avenues for obtaining financing, a large portion of women and minorities are still at a disadvantage. This is because most micro lenders use traditional bank lending factors like strong credit and personal equity to determine loans, but a lot of women and minorities don’t meet this criterion. This in turn defeats the purpose of the loans being an “alternate” source of funding; they succumb to the same pitfalls as traditional banks and leave aspiring business owners right where they started.
This leaves a lot of minority entrepreneurs at a loss for moving forward, and Sabrina Thind works to close the start-up disparity for these groups by giving them pertinent knowledge regarding starting businesses as well as access to the necessary financing. “Most women wait for all their stars to be aligned before asking for a promotion or starting a new business. I want to help assist women in seeing that this is not necessary before they take that leap and just ensure they have a few tools in place to start working on their project.” This is her way of narrowing the gender gap in the business world.
Sabrina recently helped her husband to acquire a roofing business, and since then she has encountered many of the struggles that she has seen other minorities deal with such as little to no access to financing and cultural biases with suppliers and sub-contractors. Having spent 21 years in the banking world, she is well-positioned to understand the situation from both sides and see more creative means to narrowing this particular gap.
Equity is so important when it comes to starting a business, particularly when considering the potential consumers of such goods and services. Sabrina’s history working for a development bank taught her to look at the big picture rather than just the on-paper details. Not giving women and minority entrepreneurs loans can lead to missed opportunities for economic growth. “Women-led businesses have very strong social and economic impacts on the economy at large,” Sabrina notes. “This gap is actually an opportunity for male investors and lending institutions, as women are no longer a niche but now considered to be a growth market of increased significance.” Through her consulting work, Sabrina plans to continue empowering and educating minority entrepreneurs, giving them the tools they need for success despite the many challenges they might be facing.
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Photo provided by the author