Impact Story: Tia Upshaw
Femme Noir Business Consulting & BLK Women in Excellence
Halifax, NS
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Tia Upshaw is a successful business owner, though not by choice. At least not in the beginning.
“It wasn’t like I woke up one day and thought, ‘I want to be an entrepreneur,’” she says.
Instead, she was driven mainly by necessity. A Black woman in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a history of mental health challenges and conflict with the law, she says traditional job options were limited, and the prospect of a criminal record check deterred her further. But she also had three children to raise. So, in 2013, Tia decided to try turning a passion into profit.
“I’ve always loved cleaning,” she says. “I mean, I love, love, love it … So literally, I went to the dollar store and grabbed some supplies. At the time, I was delivering newspapers at night; then I’d knock on doors all day with my cleaning supplies.”
Slowly, she built her first business, Top Notch Cleaners. Fast forward 10 years, and Tia has transitioned ownership of that company – now with more than a dozen employees – to her 24-year-old daughter. She’s also built several other businesses in the meantime.
While Tia may not have become an entrepreneur on purpose, today, purpose drives her.
“I went from just trying to survive to making money, to really understanding entrepreneurship, to finding purpose and passion in working with women that look like me,” she says.
That’s the inspiration behind Blk Women in Excellence (BWIE), a registered non-profit Tia founded in 2020, dedicated to empowering and supporting Black women entrepreneurs. Recently, she’s extended that mandate to support a broader base of business owners through her newest enterprise, Femme Noir Business Consulting. A small for-profit firm, Femme Noir leverages the expertise of Black women professionals to support entrepreneurs of all stripes from marginalized communities.
Introduced to Rise in 2022, Tia says its mission to empower individuals with mental health and addiction challenges through entrepreneurship resonated immediately.
“When I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, no one cared. They didn’t even believe me. People would say I was just tired or being moody … I couldn’t be open about it.”
Tia contributes her depth of wisdom and experience to Rise as a volunteer mentor and a member of the Loan Review Committee (LRC), which adjudicates Rise loan applications. She says she can relate to many of the challenges applicants face and looks at each one as a whole person—not just a credit score.
In all her endeavours, Tia says she’s resolved to fix Canada’s “broken” entrepreneurial ecosystem, which doesn’t benefit women, women of colour, non-binary individuals, people with mental health and addiction challenges, or any marginalized communities.
“The system wasn’t built for us,” she says. “We need to dismantle it and rebuild it into something that will benefit us all.”
Currently pursuing an Executive MBA with the University of Fredericton, Tia also works with other universities’ entrepreneurship and business programs to help proactively cultivate a new kind of graduate—one for whom diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t reactive business policies but cultural imperatives integrated from the start.
It’s a grassroots approach—something she also appreciates about Rise.
“Rise is engaged in the community. It’s there. It shows up … It’s about giving second chances and believing in individuals when no one else does.”
That’s an apt description of Tia, too. For her commitment to Rise and profound contribution to entrepreneurship in Canada, she has received the 2023 Dave Richardson Champion Award.
“To be recognized as a leader in a community of individuals who may look like me, have a history like mine, have [made mistakes] like mine, but who still show up—it means a lot.”
Tia Upshaw was our 2023 Dave Richardson Champion Award recipient.
