There has never been more information available to business leaders.
Ask an AI platform how to improve sales, automate a process, raise capital or restructure your leadership team and, within seconds, you can have frameworks, examples and things to try.
But as a company scales, information is rarely the hardest thing to find. Experience is.
Over the summer, I spent time speaking with this year’s ScaleUP Award Finalists about the challenges they are navigating as their companies grow. What struck me was how often founders and senior leaders want to learn from someone who has already confronted the problem sitting in front of them.
Kate Allen at Calgary’s FRANK Architecture described how growing businesses repeatedly encounter challenges for the first time. Her suggestion was simple: give leaders practical tools and playbooks for real-world business challenges, informed by people who have actually navigated them.
Megan Leslie, CEO of Calgary-based NanoTess, made another important observation. The leaders with the most useful experience don’t always come from the same industry. A health care company might discover it can learn a lot from a manufacturer or consumer-products business confronting the same operational challenge. This perspective broadens the range of potential mentorship opportunities.
The problem keeping you occupied may feel unique. Chances are, another business leader has already wrestled with it.
That is becoming increasingly important as the challenges of scaling move beyond the founder alone. Growth requires leadership teams capable of building systems, developing people, deploying technology, accessing capital and making increasingly complex decisions.
Derek Rucki of Calgary’s Inspired Go captured why bringing those leaders together matters. Much of the educational content business leaders need can now be found online. What is harder to replicate is being in a room with the right people. Connections he made through ScaleUP have already developed into potential partnerships, new commercial opportunities and support for the company’s U.S. expansion.
We heard something similar from Edmonton’s Mitsoh. Exposure to leaders from technology, AI and other industries opened up a much broader entrepreneurial community and revealed that businesses that look very different from the outside are often wrestling with remarkably similar challenges on the inside.
Those conversations are shaping what we do next.
This fall, we’re creating smaller, more intentional opportunities for leaders to learn from one another, including private entrepreneur dinners across Western Canada.
On Tuesday, November 24, ScaleUP will host its first Growth Forum in Calgary, bringing CEOs, founders and C-suite executives from the ScaleUP Award Finalist community together to work on three issues shaping their 2027 growth agendas: AI-powered productivity, governance and leadership, and capital and strategic growth.
We’ll then open the doors wider for our year-end ScaleUP Social, inviting founders, executives and senior leaders from across Alberta’s scaling business community to join the conversation. Sign up at ScaleUPCommunity.ca to be notified when tickets launch.
Because when you’re scaling a business, the answer you need may not emerge from another online search. It may come from a conversation with someone you have yet to meet.
Catalyze what’s next.