Supplier Spotlight: Chantal Fraser & Empowered Path Inc.

IWSCC is a national community of entrepreneurs, each with their own unique lived experience. Today we’re sitting down with Chantal Fraser, a 28-year Veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces and neurodivergent entrepreneur, to learn about her journey toward business ownership.

I grew up in a military family, did 28 years in the military, and as I prepared to transition to becoming a Veteran, it was one of the very few times where I experienced anxiety, because I didn’t know what was coming up next. Through some reflection and some great questions that people who were close to me asked, I realized that to have the life I wanted–for the reasons I was leaving the military–the best fit was becoming an entrepreneur.

Now, did I know what I was going to do? Not at all. I was going to help influence change. I was going to help people reach economic security. But I didn’t know that when I started. I just knew that being an entrepreneur was the way to go.

The three biggest ones that I experienced were, one, asking for help, and I tell people to ask for help all the time, but I didn’t know how to ask for help as a new entrepreneur, right? So, it took me some time to figure that out.

The second one was being prepared to respond when people asked me how they could help me. I’d meet folks and they’d say, how can we help you and your business, Chantal? And for the first 2 years, I’d draw a blank. Figuring out how to answer that question was the key that helped me change my business and helped me succeed.

[Thirdly,] gaining clarity on what it was I was doing, because I had a defined benefit pension plan, and my husband has his own company which does well, so I didn’t need to succeed financially right away in my business right away. The first 8 years were more of an exploratory process, and figuring out how to build a company around my values and what I actually love to do best.

In the military you learn something called the operational planning process, which is basically a problem-solving exercise where you think about different courses of action. You think about who your friendly forces are, the people helping you, and you think about who the enemy forces are, the things that could stop you. It’s this methodology of looking at a problem, a systems-wide problem and figuring out the path ahead. So, it’s all the steps you need to plan a project, just with a different sort of lens to it.

So, the military taught me a whole vast array of things that helped me perfect my ability to speak in front of groups and to facilitate training. And I love it, right? I love facilitating conversations. I love helping people talk about difficult topics. I did that when I was in the military and I took that transferable skill, the ability to see a system and dive down to find out what the problem is, and then, with a team, find the way out.

When your children tell you that they think differently from everybody else, you don’t think they think differently from everybody else because they think like you. But then when psychoeducational assessments tell you that your kids are autistic, and autistic with ADHD… okay, not only do my children think differently from other people, so do I, right?

One of the autistic traits is doing deep dives into information to learn all about it. The way I approach problems and do things, yeah, I was influenced by the military, but on reflection it’s like, “oh yeah, that’s because I’m autistic.”

I really think the military is a good career for neurodivergent people. The military provides a structure, this is your job description, this is what we expect you to do. We’re going to give you checklists. We’re going to make you physically do the stuff after we’ve told you how to do it, and you’re going to learn how to do it 3 times. It’s structured to bring everybody in.

I think I’ve reached a stage where my business is mature. While it took me 8 years to figure out the common thread of what brought everything together, I have long-standing partnerships which helped me clarify that I was working with organizations who shared my values.

The most recent thing that I’m doing now, the growth part of my mature business, is really focusing in on Cultivating Safe Spaces. So it’s changed and matured, and it’s like, yes, that’s what I do: I help influence change at the organizational level. If you don’t have any change, then you might as well just stagnate and close your business, right? 14 years in, everything that ties my company together is about helping people reach economic security, and I’m doing it with that Cultivating Safe Spaces lens.

My vision for the future is to concentrate my efforts through influencing change across Canada. To help grow the Cultivating Safe Spaces community, to help more people realize that the Indigenous worldview can be applied in modern life. It can help more people feel a sense of belonging, and that sense of connection, and that sense of safety so that they choose to stay with their employers. Then it makes the employers more sustainable, because they’re not wasting money replacing people.

I don’t need to create it all by myself. I want to be a part of those creating the world of the future, where everybody has economic security, and the way I can best do that as a human resources professional; to help employers, whether they’re not-for-profit or government or for big-for-profit companies, learn how they can shape their workplaces so that everybody is leaning into their gifts and receiving support in the areas where we’re not good at.

And everybody’s earning at least a living wage, preferably higher than that, so that they’ve got economic security. When everybody’s got economic security, everything else gets easier. Everybody can find ways to thrive. Disabled and non-disabled, people of all skin tones, all religions, the 2SLGBTQI+ community. By everybody, I mean everybody. 

When we’re all in that space, we all win. That’s what I want.