Patience Badze is a female entrepreneur, recent immigrant, creator, and problem-solver. She’s been a marketing professional for over 10 years with a focus on strategy and operations management. Patience is the co-founder of edgeBD Inc. where she drives growth and business development strategies for the branding agency. Throughout her career, Patience has worked with both startups and large global organizations while being responsible for directly account managing high value clients and their projects.

During the episode, we discuss Patience’s journey from South Africa to Canada - how she landed in Toronto alone with a child, what programs she participated in to get herself set up initially, and her approach to bringing an existing business from another country in Canada. One of the programs that Patience mentions helped her get set up as a newcomer entrepreneur in Canada is called Access Employment.

Towards the end, we also cover Patience’s newest endeavor - a startup called LocalOn. LocalOn is a company dedicated to creating tech solutions for small businesses. One of these solutions is a product they just recently finished developing and launched - a mobile app called where.a.bouts.

where.a.bouts is a mobile-first window shopping app for small businesses with brick and mortar stores, pop-up stores and (seasonal) markets stands to increase foot traffic and in-store purchasing. The app enables shop owners to create digital store fronts to display their products making it easy for shoppers to find products from small businesses in their community.

P.S. Interested in networking with fellow immigrant professionals? Check out the VisaWire Community: https://community.visawireapp.com/