Anne-Marie: Hello and welcome to Accounting for the Future. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Henson, and today we have two incredible guests joining us. I have not one, but two winners of WXN's top 100 of Canada's most powerful women with Shilpa Mishra and Alyssa Barry.
So Shilpa is a managing director of BDO's Capital Advisory Services Practice, where she works in raising capital and debt advisory. She has more than 15 years of experience advising clients in Canada, the US, and Asia, on financing debt restructuring and financial and strategic reviews. Her career has been marked by a commitment to advancing gender diversity and advocating for marginalized groups, notably as the founder and the leader of BDO's Women Driving Growth Pillar, which we'll learn about more later on in this episode.
Alyssa is a seasoned expert in capital markets and communication, specializing in investor relations, shareholder engagement, and corporate governance. She co-founded IR Labs in 2021, which was acquired by Alliance Advisors in 2024, and where she now leads the global investor relations strategy. Previously, she was head of strategy at Artis REIT and VP of Capital Markets and communication at Sandpiper Group. Alyssa is vice chair of ALS Canada, advises women getting on board and women funding women, and she serves on Lift Impact Partners Board. So Shilpa and Alyssa, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to have you both.
Alyssa: My pleasure. Great to see you.
Anne-Marie: You too. So I just wanna start with a bit of a background into both your stories and, you know, your career path and how you made it to where you both are today. So I'll start with maybe you, Alyssa. So you co-founded IR Labs and now you lead the global investor relations strategy at Alliance Advisors, which acquired IR Labs. Can you maybe walk us through a bit of your career path and what motivated you to specialize in capital markets and investor relations?
Alyssa: Excellent, well, thanks again for having me here and it's a pleasure to be alongside Shilpa today. Really looking forward to this discussion. I guess it starts way back when I actually wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a writer and I started in high school hobby writing and working for the local paper.
And I was very fortunate at a very young age to have a mentor who pushed me towards communications more on the journalism front and that was at the beginning of the demise of mainstream media and said you've gotta be the one making the news, not the one writing about it. So I channeled my love for writing and eventually found myself in the capital markets.
Most people don't set out for a career in investor relations. Everyone's usually coming from very unique backgrounds, but it got me to an incredible company where I was fortunate to really grow up in the boardroom. I had an amazing CEO as a champion who had me by his side. He taught me about capital raising. He taught me the buy side, sell side, and the rest is kind of history from there.
There's a lot of different chapters in between my career, but I was really drawn to the love of transactions. I often say I know we're not saving lives, but I love saving companies and helping them navigate their strategies and futures. I also am very passionate about investors and making sure that the issuer or the company is doing all the right things to create value.
Very fortunate to have found an amazing business partner and we set out a couple years ago on a journey of disrupting the investor relations space and found ourselves acquired back in June by Alliance Advisors to become something bigger and better and really leveraging their global platform.
Anne-Marie: That's really incredible and congratulations by the way, because you founded the company in 2021 and were acquired only three years later. So it says a lot about what Alliance saw in you and saw in what you had built over a few years. So that's really fantastic. I can also confirm, I never dreamt of being an accountant, but here I am, you know, 20 years later, absolutely in love with my job, love what I do. So we all take very different paths and end up in sometimes unusual places.
Alyssa: I love that.
Anne-Marie: Shilpa maybe over to you. You know, can you share a little bit about your journey in capital advisory practice at BDO and what inspired you to pursue your career in this space?
Shilpa: So, hi Anne-Marie. First of all, thanks for having me on the show. I'm very excited to be here talking to you and especially alongside Alyssa. Truly, truly a pleasure and an honor.
So, as you said in your introduction, I'm a partner in M&E and Capital Markets at BDO Canada and I'm the national leader for capital markets, so what we call capital advisory. In my day-to-day job, I help clients to raise money, I also help clients to sell their businesses, sometimes buy businesses.
Just in terms of my journey, just like Alyssa, sort of, you know, different ways to get here, but I'm a CPA from another accounting firm and before my time at BDO, I spent a large part of my career at the banks, at the large Canadian banks, in strategy, treasury, corporate lending, and corporate finance. One thing I can say about myself, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be in corporate finance, even before I knew what that was. Even as a little girl, I knew I wanted to wear a suit and work on Bay Street. That's always what I wanted. I didn't know what that meant, but that's always what I wanted.
Through my education and my early career, I knew I enjoyed two things. I really like working with numbers, data models, but to what Alyssa said, I enjoy transactions. I love working with my clients, helping them through their challenges and getting through to the other side. So that's why I end up here today where, in corporate finance, the best part of the work is that the client is always at the center of the story.
The other piece that always draws me to this job and keeps me in this job, and Alyssa and Anne-Marie, sort of similar to probably what you do, no one day is the same, right? One day you're waking up helping a client close an M&A deal to grow their business, and the next day you're helping another client to raise financing through a restructuring. So it's an exciting job, a job that involves numbers and, you know, really the client is at the center of the story.
But I want to end my story on a bit of a different note. There's another part of my life that I'm very proud of. I took some time out of my career and stepped back to help my family in caregiving responsibilities for my niece. During those years, I worked part-time for many years so I could support my family. But of course, now I'm back full-time at BDO. So my career journey has had many twists and turns to get to where I am today.
Anne-Marie: Wow, that's amazing, Shilpa. Well, thanks for sharing and you're actually sharing things you and I speak on a regular basis, but I'm learning new things about you as well and it's great to hear about this journey. So appreciate it.
I do wanna ask you both about your experience in what I would consider is still quite a male-dominated industry, which is capital markets advisory. Alyssa, I'll start with you. You did mention that you really learned everything you had to learn directly in the boardroom, and you had a great ally who was male, which is fantastic. But I'd imagine that you were probably one of the only females in the room at that time. So talk to me a little about that and how you used that to your advantage or how you overcame those obstacles to get to where you are today.
Alyssa: Yeah, really great question, really. I've always approached my career with a mindset of I am who I am and I don't really see being a woman as something that defines my ability to succeed or limit what I can accomplish. But I'd say being authentic and true to myself has really helped me succeed and helped me in those situations when I've been the only woman in the room.
To share a bit of a story, throughout my entire career, I've always had a coach. It's at my desire, not my employer necessarily saying, you should go get a coach. I've always had one by my side. And if anyone listening who hasn't explored that, it's a really great way to have someone on your side that no one needs to know about that allows you to bounce around ideas.
The one woman I was working with, I basically said, I want you to make me a badass. I want you to make me tougher in the room. And we went through our various sessions together and I think it was by session three or four, she said, have you figured it out yet? And I said, no, I've tried, I only wear suits. I don't wear dresses anymore. I'm sitting at this side of the boardroom table and I'm trying, you know, this voice technique and whatever I could come up with. And she said, Alyssa, just be you.
It was the best piece of advice, most simple piece of advice and probably the most expensive piece of advice I've ever paid for. But it is really something that I think about every single day. I'm not gonna change who I am. I work really hard, I hustle hard, and I'm sure there's been situations in everyone's lives where, you know, maybe we haven't quite felt fairly treated or maybe overlooked, but I always rise stronger from those situations.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's funny you mentioned that. I had a conversation pretty recently with someone here who's a little bit more junior, who was asking about how to learn to be more assertive or, you know, to be able to communicate better what you're looking for and what you want. And she was referencing wanting to be what she called a likable badass, which I think is also a book that teaches some of those concepts.
But my rebuttal to her was like, what if you're not a badass? You know, like what if that's not who you are. So I really do love the authenticity piece of it. I think that it's so important for us to just be who we are and bring that to the table and recognize that as a strength or as a differentiator and not try to be something we think that others might need. Shilpa, what about you? You know, how has your experience been in this capital market space?
Shilpa: So, you know, keeping on the theme of being a badass, I'm gonna build on the WXN theme from last year, Alyssa, from the year, you know, that we were lucky enough to be on the list, or should I say, you know, just honored enough to be on the list, being bold, right? It's really all about being bold in your everyday life. And what that means to me is it's always keeping the goal in mind and navigating the day to day. Sometimes you might feel like a badass, sometimes not, just to get to the end of the journey.
The other piece that's been really key for myself and Anne-Marie, it's a very important part of our firm is all about allyship and sponsorship, right? So no one ever does it alone. To your point, we all have coaches, but I've always been lucky to work at firms like BDO Canada, especially BDO Canada, where we invest in our women leaders and have programs and policies in place to support the success of our women leaders into leadership. So to tell Alyssa's points, it's about finding those coaches, those allies, those sponsors.
But I would say the other key piece to, you know, navigating whatever industry that it may be, and it's been very important for me, has been networking and building relationships, right? Since the start of my career, I've always been really focused on networking and building a very large network. I still stayed in touch with almost every client manager or colleague that I've ever worked with. And this has really served me well because especially in the work that, you know, all three of us do, it's really about having that network that you're able to quickly leverage and bring everybody at the table to help my clients.
But really, ultimately it's about making sure as a transactions professional throughout my career, keeping the client at the center of the story and really being focused on their success. But I would like to think that on some days I am a badass, but, you know, sometimes maybe not, but yeah.
Anne-Marie: No, you're definitely a badass Shilpa.
Shilpa: Thank you, thank you.
Anne-Marie: So there's been, we'll say quite a bit of uncertainty these days around generally the economy. You know, at the time of us recording this podcast, we're dealing with potential tariffs from the US administration. We've recently released a podcast about navigating political uncertainty, the importance of financial modeling and incorporating these uncertainties in your forecasting. I'm sure it's created quite a bit of disruption in capital markets.
So I guess Alyssa, to you, you know, how are these uncertainties impacting your role as an advisor and, you know, how is it impacting investor relations in general?
Alyssa: Yeah, really heavy topic. So there's so much going on in the world right now. We've got AI that's gonna be 10 times what the intranet was amongst everything else that's happening politically in real time right now. I think for us, the advice that we're giving our clients is just to stay really focused and make sure that we spend a lot of time in the boardroom with our clients.
To the extent that we can encourage boards to be refreshing on strategy on a regular basis, I don't think boards are looking at three to five year strategies anymore. They're looking at them as a one year theme or one year strategy. I think that's something that is pretty persistent across a lot of our clients right now.
We also have the whole concept of globalization, because I think that ties into everything that we're discussing here. From an investor relations perspective, we're appreciating that investors are more interconnected and investor relations is becoming borderless. You used to know everybody on Bay Street or everybody on Wall Street, but now you need to have relationships in every pocket of the world.
And the fact that we also have the rise of retail investors and retail investors are individual investors and perhaps those that are making investment decisions that aren't with an intermediary or with a broker or an advisor. So really for us, it's about building relationships, building community, and building strategies around how do we tackle all of these different stakeholders in the investment community.
And then you've also got the disruption of, we've seen actually recently in Canada, some broker dealers that have closed down, or we've also seen some big name top tier broker dealers that have left certain markets. We're seeing less analyst coverage from the sell side, which means as investor relations professionals, we have a greater job and responsibility to educate on the company's story because there's less likelihood that they're gonna get coverage in the traditional ways that they have.
So we really, I'd say there's never been a greater time of challenge and disruption in the investor relations space, park just the technology side. Everything that we need to do to access and convey investors and convey the story has become a lot more difficult. I'm really proud to say that we're very creative and we've built an outstanding team with global reach that is at the forefront of this change. And that's what you need to do in this market. You really need to have a lot of foresight. You need to be bold and you need to get very creative.
Anne-Marie: Right, yeah, no, that's really great advice. And I guess on that note, you know, you referenced having a coach and that person being critical in your ability to be successful and to progress through your career. I'm sure you're probably acting as a bit of a coach as well to some of your clients through these uncertainties and what stories they need to convey to their stakeholders. So what advice could you share to help, you know, women leaders specifically succeed through all of this uncertainty?
Alyssa: I cannot emphasize enough agility. We built our business IR Labs, my business partner Caroline and I, in the worst capital markets we've ever seen in our 20 plus year careers in investor relations. Arguably, many who've seen other cycles have said this is also the worst they've ever seen in their history. But we were agile, we were resilient, we pivoted when we needed to. We had to make really quick decisions, we had to pull out of certain decisions that we made and just appreciate that this is not the way to go or pivot in other ways, being in the advisory space, other ways to incur revenue.
And I think the other thing that is really important to me is leading with empathy and clarity and being very transparent with the team. I've always, from day one, have let the team know where we're going, how we're gonna get there, and how we're progressing along the way. And if everybody is rowing in the same direction, it makes it a lot easier to succeed.
Anne-Marie: That's great, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate the comments you're providing. Shilpa, over to you for a bit. You know, you and I started working quite a bit over the past few years when you started the Women Driving Growth Pillar at BDO. So I wanna give you a little bit of space to tell us about how this came to life. Like you know, what were you looking, you know, what gap or what need in the market were you looking to fill with this initiative?
Shilpa: For sure, so Anne-Marie, I would like to say that we are living through exciting times, right? I think the three of us can agree that women are stepping into leadership and senior leadership roles at an unprecedented pace. And we've done quite a bit of research here at BDO Canada. And what we found is that women leaders and women business owners are a $200 billion market in Canada. And, you know, many women like the three of us have contributed to that. So let's give ourselves a bit of a round of applause.
And just in terms of statistics, you know, women are making incredible strides, right? They're taking on CEO roles of the 523 C-suite leaders in Canada, 12% are women, and that's up from about 9% last year. So women driving growth, you know, we started it a couple of years ago to focus on this incredible and booming market and also to help all of these incredible women leaders, these successful women like Alyssa and others, you know, to be even more successful along their journey.
And I'm excited to say that BDO Canada is the only Canadian professional services firm offering this kind of a solution for women leaders. And we do this through a team of women led deal makers, trailblazers and financial professionals. Because what we understand and just in our research is that service delivery preferences differ among our clients. And we're really excited to offer this as an option.
And I wanna just end by giving some stats on our own success, toot our horn a little bit. Over the last couple of years we've had double digit growth, right? We started a little conference called the Accelerator in Toronto about, you know, I would say three years ago, and Anne-Marie, you know, last year we went nationwide, right? You hosted us in Montreal. And you know, across all the major cities in Canada, that conference was completely sold out. So it really demonstrates the buying power of women as a market. And we're right here with women driving growth, helping them out.
Anne-Marie: I love that. And yeah, I've witnessed the incredible growth and popularity of this initiative over the past few years. So I'm really excited to see where it goes. And I guess on that note, Shilpa, maybe you can share with us how you and the women driving growth leaders are envisioning the next few years. Is there anything changing in the strategy? How are we moving forward to make this even more successful?
Shilpa: Right, so we're obviously, as you said, Anne-Marie, and Alyssa, as you mentioned as well, we are living through exciting and, you know, unprecedented and some would say turbulent times, right? So as all of us on the Women Driving Growth leadership team looked at the strategy for 25 and 26, it really was about providing those forums to our women leaders to continue to share ideas.
And as we talk to our women clients, we're really stressing a few things, right? It's all about diversification, diversification, diversification. If I could say there was a theme for 2025, it's really that right along your supply chains, vendors, and suppliers. To Alyssa's point, you know, we're really focusing on AI as a tool to help our women clients succeed. Last year, BDO and TD held a joint leadership summit on AI where we talked about strategies that can be used by women leaders.
Another key phenomenon that we're going to be focused on in 2025, despite, you know, the volatility, is the great wealth transfer. It continues, and private equity continues to be rich with dry powder, right, 3.5 million. They're sitting on 3.5 million. So we're really staying focused on succession planning needs for our clients.
And I just wanna say that a key driver of our success for Women Driving Growth over the past couple of years has been the continued support from our amazing women partners at BDO and our male allies as well. So 25, 26 is all about making sure that, you know, we build a stronger presence in the market, continue to create opportunities for our women leaders to share insights and connect, and continue to build allyship in the various communities.
Anne-Marie: Awesome, thanks Shilpa. I'm really excited for the next few years, so thanks for sharing that. Alyssa, I wanna ask you about something in particular. It's top of mind for me pretty often, you know, Shilpa mentioned there has been an improvement in the number of women C-suite executives that we see. It's certainly yet at 12% not representative of the population. And I'd assume it's quite similar at the board level still, right? There are more women, there are more minorities that are sitting on boards.
But when you're looking at this, and it's not just a tick the box sort of DEI initiative. This is about representing your stakeholders better, your customers better, right? Having that more diverse view around the table to make strategic decisions. So could you talk a bit about what changes you've seen in the past couple of years and maybe what you expect to see in the next couple of years?
Alyssa: Yeah, absolutely, this is a really important topic. We're starting to see that movement away from tokenism and seeing that shift towards women in the boardroom playing critical roles in decision making, which is really great to see. At Alliance Advisors, we have a team that really focuses on ESG, but particularly on the governance side, where we're talking to institutional investors such as BlackRock and State Street, and they're still vocalizing the importance of gender diversity in the boardroom, which is critically important.
We're also starting to see, I think Shilpa you refer to this as well, more women as part of the deal-making process. So where I believe that we're actually gonna see an active change towards more women in the boardroom is women becoming investors. Those that see the opportunity to write the checks and be a part of the deal-making. I believe that that's gonna actively lead to more women in the boardrooms over time as well.
And I'm proud to say I have my first corporate board for a publicly traded company, which I'm very excited about. But it's come with over time, really getting more comfortable with being a part of the building of companies, getting involved at the ground level and not waiting for someone to knock on my door and getting out there, networking and really positioning myself and my value proposition in that process. And, you know, I was fortunate enough to find an opportunity where they saw value in my skill sets, but being able to build something right from the foundation and to be able to be an investor as well. So I think that's a trend that I hope we see continue.
Anne-Marie: That's amazing, congrats, by the way, that's a really great thing. So the theme for International Women's Day this year, I'm not sure if you're both aware, is accelerate action, which I absolutely love. I wanted to know, I'll start with Shilpa. What are your thoughts on, you know, the future of women in leadership roles? How do you envision women being able to take action to accelerate gender equality in your industry in particular?
Shilpa: So the future of women in leadership continues to be full of lots of great potential, right? But there is a stat that we all need to be aware of, which is that, you know, the issue really is around the leaky pipe, right? And the stat I was gonna share is that for every one woman that steps into a leadership position, two women leave, right? So it's really about accelerating progress. Accelerating requires intentional action from all of us.
As I said, women are continuing to break barriers across industries, and it's really about making sure there's a couple of key challenges that are addressed, right? First of all, we need to make sure there's funding for women-led businesses. Alyssa, you're absolutely right. Women are stepping up as investors. You know, I'm talking to angel investing funds, which are led by women to help, you know, get more capital into women-led startups, right? We need more representation in emerging fields like AI and technology.
And even just more than that, you know, I've been very, very lucky in the sense that, and I think we've all sort of said that it's a theme, Alyssa, you had said that as well. It's really that I've always had sponsorship and allyship from my male allies, both here at BDO and at the banks. And we just need to continue to ensure there's that allyship to continue to accelerate the progress and keep women in leadership.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, Shilpa, thanks for bringing that up by the way. It's one of the things I've been trying to be quite intentional about as well over the past few years. It's about that leaky pipe that you talk about. I've never used that expression. I will now, but I have a lot of fantastic women that I work with who are at points in their lives where maybe they're thinking of starting a family or they have parents who are getting older who need more care and they just do tend to be the ones out of their families that spend that time and are the ones that are caring for their parents and helping them out when they need it.
And it's leading unfortunately to a lot of these women deciding to take a different career path. And I think, you know, being like exactly what you said, the intentional action, right? It's about understanding that everyone has different needs, not one size fits all. And I think that, you know, we as women in positions of power who've, you know, achieved quite a bit can provide great examples and be great mentors to some of these women who are not necessarily sure where they fit in. Right, Alyssa, I maybe wanna ask the same question to you. When you think of accelerate action in your field with what you're doing, with what you'd like to achieve next, what do you envision yourself doing?
Alyssa: I think we all have a responsibility to be mentors to the next generation, regardless of gender. And, you know, I really think there's the added complexity and challenges of the working from home. I really, I feel every opportunity I had was because I showed up, I was in the boardroom, I was in the office, I was in the halls, I was next to the water cooler. I was the first to put my hand up.
So I think we have a responsibility to bring that next generation into the good, the bad and the ugly calls. I think sometimes we're all in the client services business here. Sometimes we may not want that junior to sit down on that really tough conversation where we need to have a conversation with a client. I think we need to bring them in and need to allow them to shadow and find unique ways to be a part of it.
And I also believe we need to be multi-hyphenates. So to the extent that you need to take a pivot or you need to take some time off for whatever reason, add to your skillsets, constantly, learn something new, be flexible enough that if you do need to work part-time to be able to care for family, maybe there's consulting work that you can take on on the side. So building that infrastructure for yourself, building that network and communities that you can leverage if and when you ever need it.
I'll use an analogy that might not be best the day after the Super Bowl, but the Taylor Swift, you know, you take Taylor Swift, she is a great role model, a multi-hyphenate where she's got all these unique talents, she's pivoted her career from an up-and-coming country artist to a global phenomenon. You know, I think you just have to be able to be flexible, be agile, understand what is needed in the moment. And if you are so passionate about something but there really isn't a market for it, you know, kind of revisiting how can you channel that passion and pivot based on your skill sets and where your energy's at. So that's the advice I've got.
Anne-Marie: That's super inspiring Alyssa, I'm really actually happy we're ending on that note. There's a lot of great things to take away. So thank you so much Alyssa and Shilpa for your valuable time and input today. I hope our audience appreciated this discussion. If you like the episode, please make sure you leave a review or comment and click the follow or subscribe button to stay tuned for new episodes. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in today and to all of our episodes. I'm Anne-Marie Henson and this has been BDO's Accounting for the Future. We'll see you next time.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to BDO Canada's Accounting for the Future. Past episodes and related insights are available at www.bdo.ca/accountingforthefuture, or you can go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts to subscribe. For more information on BDO Canada, visit bdo.ca.