As Director, Brand, Marketing and Communications, Lisa is responsible for all marketing, internal and external communications, brand and PR for Americas Growth Markets, the EY practice devoted to high-growth and mid-market companies and home of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® awards and Strategic Growth Forum™.
In this capacity, in 2008, Lisa devised EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women™, a national competition and executive education program to help second-stage women entrepreneurs scale their companies to full potential. She oversees program activities in North America, where it started, and also around the world in the 43 countries in which the program now supports women entrepreneurs.
More recently, Lisa was charged with formulating a new platform that unifies all of EY’s internal and external initiatives for women professionals into one global accelerator. Launched at the World Economic Forum 2015, EY Women. Fast forward employs EY’s collective knowledge, experiences and convening power to help accelerate the achievement of global gender parity.
Kerrie MacPherson is a senior principal in Ernst & Young LLP’s Financial Services Office (FSO), New York. As global coordinating partner, she is responsible for the firm’s overall relationship with several major financial institutions. Previously, she served as Americas Leader, Transaction Advisory Services (TAS). A seasoned professional with over twenty-eight years’ experience based in EY’s Toronto and New York offices, Kerrie has developed a strong global network to ensure EY clients have access to the best people and services wherever in the world they may do business.
Additionally, Kerrie serves as Executive Sponsor of EY’s North American Entrepreneurial Winning WomenTM program. Working with women business leaders, fueling their success and accelerating the growth of their companies is one of the most rewarding aspects of her role as a senior advisor, enabling her to apply the learnings from decades of experience with Fortune 500 companies to these exciting business ventures.
How have your life experiences made you the leaders you are today?
We’ve always looked up to women who are brave and bold and not afraid to break the mold. We’ve both had strong role models growing up, including mothers who encouraged us to accomplish whatever goals we set.
We also have a pioneering mentality. We’ve been the first and only many times throughout our lives. This experience has given us a passion to do what we can to open doors and extend a hand to help other women achieve their goals.
How has your previous employment experience aided your tenure with Entrepreneurial Winning Women?
We both bring an entrepreneurial spirit to our work, allowing us to focus on what’s possible, not on how hard it might be to accomplish. We are also very comfortable working collaboratively with others, which is critical to achieving anything big and new. EY’s mission is to build a better working world. That encourages us to think big and concern ourselves with doing good in the world, which is exactly how the Entrepreneurial Winning Women program came about. Our firm’s values of diversity and inclusiveness and efforts to advance women in the workplace, paired with EY’s three-decade history helping entrepreneurs grow their companies, came together in this program to address a major gap in the market. We also have complementary backgrounds that align with what Entrepreneurial Winning Women teaches:
Lisa: I started out as a journalist, where I learned the importance of asking questions, not being afraid to challenge the status quo and the skill to communicate my findings. Entrepreneurial Winning Women are naturally curious, and no business leader knows everything they need to start and scale a company. We help the women founders leverage that curiosity to “think bigger” about what they can achieve and to ask for advice from others on a similar path how they accomplished important milestones.
Kerrie: My background in client service helps me understand what it takes to help these women scale their businesses and “act bolder” to make it a reality. I spent a decade doing transaction work, which lends itself nicely to advising women on deal-making and financing for expansion.
What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure with Entrepreneurial Winning Women?
The opportunity to support individual entrepreneurs in realizing their bold goals is very rewarding. At the same time, seeing this group of entrepreneurs forge a powerful, closely knit community of like-minded peers tells us we have been successful filling a problematic vacuum. Our highlight every year is meeting the Entrepreneurial Winning Women after they’re selected and introducing them to more than 2,000 business leaders during the annual EY Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs.
The challenges, on the other hand, have been fewer than expected. From the start, we’ve had great internal and external support for this program. Our people understand what we are doing, why and are increasingly interested in joining forces. And now the program operates across 46 countries, making us proud our firm has invested across geographies and cultures, in both developed and emerging economies, to help women entrepreneurs scale their companies.
What advice can you offer to women who want a career in your industry?
Hone your communications skills. Written and verbal communication is essential – not only to women who work in marketing (like Lisa does), but to women in every industry who want to get their ideas across and gain backing and followers. Strong communication adds a layer of expertise and professionalism that is valuable in any setting.
We also advise women to be bold and advocate for themselves. Recognize that the career ahead of you is likely not one that you can even begin to map out today. Be prepared to take smart risks and stretch yourself. Take on assignments and opportunities that get you out of your standard skill sets and allow you to learn. We have been asked to step out and step up throughout our careers, and those experiences led to some of the most important growth moments and exciting opportunities we’ve encountered.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career to date?
We’ve learned not to set artificial limits on what’s possible, or to wait till every detail is mapped to take bold steps toward something new and valuable. Entrepreneurial Winning Women was a concept that came to Lisa during a meeting. She put together the program plan and ran it by many people inside and outside the firm for their input. Ten years later, we’re helping women entrepreneurs across 46 countries.
Going back to being bold, we’ve also learned the importance of listening to senior leaders. If a manager considers you for an opportunity, it’s probably worth pursuing. They likely see something in you that you may not have yet realized. Finally, the most important words a leader can say are “thank you.” It took a huge team comprised of many types of expertise to make Entrepreneurial Winning Women a success, and we’ve learned the importance of acknowledging and relying on that support to make this program stronger.
How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Kerrie: You only get one life, and that life includes family, work and community engagement. I use a single calendar so I can see what portion of my time is spent on each of those three buckets and correct my schedule if things get out of balance.
Lisa: I’m a big advocate of work-life integration. For women trying to model a way to be many different things to different people, work-life integration is one way to demonstrate what’s possible for the next generation versus keeping everything separate and in isolation. For instance, my 25 year-old daughter grew up with Entrepreneurial Winning Women. She was in high school when we launched and has been part of the progression, attending events with me as she got older. Meeting these inspiring women and learning how they grow their businesses has provided her with a sense of what’s possible in her own career. It’s also shown her how one idea can morph into a program with impact on many.
What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
The issue is confidence, not competence. Women continue to underestimate what they can accomplish. We see that both in the workplace and among entrepreneurs. With Entrepreneurial Winning Women, we talk about thinking bigger and acting bolder to get women into the mindset that there is no limit to what they can achieve. And this isn’t only about the way many women think. Unconscious bias is an external influence that reinforces self-limitation. Especially in the workplace, this behavior that minimizes contributions or what’s possible for everyone undermines women’s efforts to advance. To overcome that, women have to be mindful of any limitations they face, whether self-inflicted or external. And they have to have the courage to address them head on and pursue what’s important to them.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
Women are often over-mentored and under-sponsored. Having someone invest their time and influence in your development creates opportunities that mentoring traditionally doesn’t bring. Sponsorship has made a huge difference in our careers. We are fortunate to have been asked to undertake things we didn’t know were possible by people in positions to see farther and to then to give us a chance to demonstrate what we could do. Without this we would have missed some great opportunities.
Role-modeling is another term we like to use. Professionals are wise to look for behaviors they admire in others and to emulate as much of them as possible. It’s unlikely for all those behaviors to be packaged in one person, so we encourage women to seek out as many role models as they can and to emulate the individual behaviors or aptitudes they admire.
Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
Lisa: Just coming off of International Women’s Day 2017 with its global theme, #BeBoldForChange, I have to say the suffragists get my vote, so to speak. Individually they took big risks to pursue bold change and collectively they truly changed the world for the better.
Kerrie: Margaret Thatcher. She demonstrated an incredible will and strength of character by doing what was right in the presence of significant pushback. When I talk about women facing unconscious bias, she’s someone I look to for inspiration.
What do you want EWW to accomplish in the next year?
Our most important success factor has always been the success of the individual entrepreneurs in our program – helping them seize opportunities, scale their businesses, employ more workers and enrich the communities around them.
Since this is our 10th anniversary, we want everything about the program to embody bigger and bolder thinking. Entrepreneurial Winning Women is a global program, and we want to engage the entrepreneurial ecosystem around the world by showing support for women entrepreneurs, appreciating the businesses they’ve formed and recognizing the economic contributions these businesses make. The 10th anniversary of Entrepreneurial Winning Women is an opportunity to share the success stories of not only the 100+ alumnae in North America, but also the hundreds of women entrepreneurs building exciting companies in all industries across the world.