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As the founding executive director of the G. Wallace F. McCain Institute for Business Leadership at the University of New Brunswick, Nancy Mathis argues that keeping entrepreneurs connected to one another is a key factor of long term business success in the region. To this end, she directs the energies of the institute she leads with the kind of up-close-and-personal gusto that once served her well as the owner of her own high-tech business. Contributing editor Alec Bruce had a chance to sit down with her recently. Here are excerpts from their conversation.
ALEC BRUCE: Atlantic Canada has been described as a region of entrepreneurs. What advances have they made in recent years?
NANCY MATHIS: We are making advances but probably not in the way that people are thinking. The advances have to do with the dramatically increasing degree of connectedness between and among the entrepreneurs. That’s the area I’ve been paying the most attention to over the past four years. Entrepreneurs and organizations are more tightly tied to one another than in the past. There’s more passing up the batons, as it were, as entrepreneurs grow from one stage to another. Another related development is the frankness with which entrepreneurs now express their challenges and talk about the resources they need.
What are these challenges?
There are still silos between the provinces. But there are also silos around individuals. Entrepreneurs often feel very alone. They feel they can’t talk about their challenges with their friends or their spouse. That makes them feel different or even unique. When you get entrepreneurs together, however, they are able to talk to one another and that sense of isolation begins to dissolve. That’s what I mean when I say the growing sense of connectedness is the big thing I am seeing.
But is there a unique flavour to the Atlantic Canada entrepreneurship challenge? Others from outside the region have observed, not always kindly, that ours is a particularly underdeveloped part of the country.
There may be a feeling among entrepreneurs who aren’t connected to other entrepreneurs that it’s tougher here. But there are challenges everywhere. We say the grass is always greener and the money always f lows in Silicon Valley. Innovation is always happening in Waterloo. Boo-hoo is us! If there is a challenge that’s particular to this region, it’s our low population density. You have to have a large catchment area in order to get the critical mass necessary to run certain things around here.
How does the Wallace McCain Institute further the sense of connectedness you talk about as crucial to entrepreneurial development?
Our overall mission is to help entrepreneurs in New Brunswick and the surrounding region have a better chance of success. Full stop. We’re all about turning off the noise and putting people together. There’s three pillars to what we do. One is developing the personal capacity 
of the entrepreneurial leader. Another is developing a company’s resources for success. And the third is working on what I call the business ecosystem. So, we have a CBC program called, “Made in New Brunswick.” We’ve run roundtables on leadership. It’s all about getting the word out that entrepreneurship is a viable choice. We work with the school program on revamping entrepreneurship teaching in Grade 11, and we bring entrepreneurs into the classroom.
As to the institute’s specific programs, we have 17 in all. Our focus is based on peer groups. We assemble gatherings, ranging in size from 10 to 15 individuals who have a common bond. They might be high-growth potential entrepreneurs. They might be sons and daughters of multi-generational companies. They might be the second-in-command to an entrepreneur founder who changes direction every day. But they all need a common forum to share and discuss and work through strategies and ideas.
The audience that we have is so broad. We have 108 members. The youngest is 23, the oldest is 58. We’ve had a high school dropout. We’ve had four PhDs and a medical doctor. We’ve had people with two employees and people with 1,000 employees. The range is enormous. We’ve had retail. We’ve had heavy industries. It’s all across the board. Sometimes people think the institute is all about the start-ups or the tech companies. But it’s not.
