Award-winning entrepreneur Janét Aizenstros creating opportunities for youths
December 13, 2021
In her early teens, Janét Aizenstros and two younger brothers often accompanied their mother to her second job that required cleaning commercial businesses in southwest Ontario.
While they tidied, she had conversations with the lingering business executives who remained after business hours.
Those impromptu exchanges stimulated Aizenstros and prepared her to become one of the leading female serial entrepreneurs in Canada.
Last month, she was honoured with the Excellence prize at the 29th annual RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards presented by Women of Influence.
“Through timely innovation, strategic thinking and smart execution, she has built and managed successful businesses in the last decade,” said the event organizers. “With a proven track record of growth, profitability and industry leadership, this entrepreneur’s exploits have generated an uncommon degree of economic growth and she has demonstrated the drive, managerial acumen and leadership traits that others aspire to have.”
There were a record-breaking 10,458 nominations recognizing women entrepreneurs across Canada.
“With so many qualified applicants, I kept saying it was such an honour to be nominated,” said Aizenstros who has a PhD. in Metaphysical Science specializing in Conscious Business Ethics & Conscious Centred Living. “I never thought I would be the woman selected in my category. It’s not so much about me. It’s about the work I believe that I have been called to do on this earth and what is being done through me, and also being able to break down barriers. I hope this can signal to other Black women that they don’t have to be afraid to come out of their shadows or go into a place that seems unknown. If she can do it, I can do it.”
Humbled by the recognition, she was quick to recognize the role her Vincentian-born mother played in her growth and development.
“My mom instilled in me that if I work hard with a spirit of excellence, somewhere along the way you will be acknowledged,” said Aizenstros who last year made the Women’s Executive Network Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada list. “She taught me integrity and discipline which can’t work without each other because you have to be committed.”
In 2011, she founded the Ahava Group Global (AGG) that’s a signatory to the BlackNorth Initiative to end anti-Black racism.
The woman-led media parent company comprises Twenty One Consulting, LUXE House Publishing, XIIXXI Illustration, Ahava Entertainment and Ahava Digital Group (ADG).
The largest of the five, ADG is a digital consultancy providing ethical and verified consumer intelligence on American consumers, mainly African-American women and others from the Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) community.
Aizenstros and her dedicated team developed a proprietary technology called ‘The Data Concierge’ which is a virtual data centre that has a consumer mapping and canvassing tool that’s utilized by select global governments to gather consumer data.
“This technology is what really brought us to the forefront,” she said. “While we have been working with Fortune corporations, we have shifted to licensing the technology to global governments to start looking at how they can utilize the technology to leverage and stimulate economic growth to forging regions within underdeveloped countries.”
Last year, Canadian Business (CB) listed ADG, 12th in its annual ranking of the country’s fastest growing companies, with a five-year revenue growth of 8283 per cent. Also, CB crowned Aizenstros their 2020 Employer of the Year due to her focus on diversity, inclusion and equality.
Achieving the rank meant that Aizenstros became the first Black woman in Canada to have founded and scaled a nine-figure tech organization globally and the first Black Canadian to be awarded Employer of the Year.
As a conscious business leader, she has adapted a holistic understanding to build a successful business staffed by over 520 employees.
“I don’t just look at business from a bottom-line standpoint,” the business leader said. “Relying on a great network of people made me realize we have the potential to do something that’s better and different here than what has existed traditionally before. What hasn’t existed before is a real focus on developing programs within an organization that actually serves families and not just the bottom line. What I discovered as an employer was when you serve the family dynamic or a single person, a result is yielded as we saw a higher rate of productivity from our employees. Consciousness is looking at the overall ecosystem and all of the different variables that fit into it.”
Aizenstros is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact Network, an ambitious corporate sustainability initiative that supports companies globally in achieving sustainable and responsible business operations throughout their supply chains.
“Working with that program allows us to look at how we can align a lot of our programming with sustainability,” she pointed out.
Getting to the top hasn’t been easy for the wife and mother of two children who last year was the recipient of a Bronze Stevie Award for Women in Business in Canada.
Faced with professional and personal challenges, Aizenstros turned to her faith and early life lessons.
‘Sometimes, we don’t realize the importance of some of the things we are taught in our formative years,” she said. “We may ask what is the purpose of this and when are we going to use this. That showed up for me between 2004 and 2018 when I went through this period of just questioning everything. If I didn’t have that foundation, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see it through. There’s a lot of beautiful fruit that has come out of that adversity. It’s not just the success that people see. It’s about the person I have become.”
Janét Aizenstros (Photo contributed)
With financial freedom and a desire to see young people succeed, Aizenstros has created opportunities for Black students facing pecuniary challenges to pursue higher education.
Last year, she collaborated with the University of Waterloo to establish scholarships for female undergraduate students studying engineering.
They will be awarded annually to students from their second to fourth year with a cumulative course average of 80 per cent. Applicants are also required to write an essay ranging between 500 and 1,000 words describing how they have used their volunteerism to positively impact African, Caribbean or Black communities in Canada.
In addition, an annual Entrepreneurial Award will be presented to one or more full-time undergraduate students enrolled in the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship & Business Enterprise Co-op program. It’s the first engineering scholarship for female Conrad students created by a Black Canadian woman.
Conrad faculty members will make the selection(s) based on the rate of progress and venture development stage of the applicants’ business ideas.
“The University of Waterloo and I have been working on this for the last five years just to ensure that we came up with the right language and programming,” Aizenstros said. “I wanted something that creates impact and legacy. The idea came about after I did a talk for Microsoft about five years ago, emphasizing the importance of women in technology. It was reinforced after I walked through the University of Waterloo and saw just one young beautiful Black woman in the engineering program. While in conversation with the university about the paucity of Blacks in the program, they said the barrier is that it’s expensive to apply. I don’t believe that money should be a barrier for anyone wanting to pursue higher education.”
She also teamed up with the University of Guelph Gordon S. Lang School of Business & Economics to launch a scholarship to support students who have demonstrated social entrepreneurship and innovation through academic and community experience.
“With this scholarship, I want the next generation to know that their impact matters and that there are people who want to support and fuel the dreams of upcoming leaders,” Aizenstros said.
Through Ahava Holdings & Ventures, she and her team have developed a 100-years legacy initiative that’s the first impact fund in Canada led by a Black woman that focuses on women entrepreneurs creating social impact through technology.
