I'm going to start by saying, pre-mission, all of the women have to apply and compete to get on our trade missions, because we cover their expenses to go on the trade mission. It's a Canada-wide competition to apply for. We set up a jury to select the companies that we think will align with the commercial demands of the destination economy.

These women will get together. We select them several months before we leave. We provide them pre-mission training. We created a template, because we heard from those 300 women, during our round tables, about the needs and how to convince them to go abroad and export. We provide pre-mission training, market access training, market intelligence training, and business and cultural protocols. We will do some research and provide their competitors in-market, for example.

All of these things that we do in preparation are partly to get them studying too, because the onus is also on them to better prepare themselves; unless you're market-ready, you're not going to do anything when you get over there.

We bring in the diplomats and the trade commissioner service. We work very closely with the trade commissioner service in Canada, as well as in the missions abroad, to give them briefings on what to expect, and then we hire B2B service providers to interview the women and find out exactly what it is that they want to do in the market. Then they go on and do their Rolodex calls to make sure that the B2Bs are going to amount to something or that they have good potential.

The training is absolutely necessary, and for when they come back, we've set up a Slack network of all these women. They chatter on it and train each other on regulatory problems: “Somebody has faced this,” or “Don't get into this trouble, because we ran into this problem.” We have a network on Slack, on which all of the women whom we've taken abroad communicate with and train each other, so that camaraderie is also invaluable to what has come out. It's not just the business partners in-market; it's among themselves, because they would never have met each other unless they had gone on the trade mission and spent a week together studying each other and learning about each other's businesses and ways to help each other.

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