On the first Tuesday of every month, we’ll announce a new Female Founder, including a video interview of them sharing their business story. Want to be featured as a Female Founder? Contact Memberships for more details. The Female Founders Program would not be possible without our Title Sponsor, Scotiabank.
To learn a little more about the Scotiabank Women Initiative, and why they’ve chosen to sponsor this program, see the video below.
The next Female Founder we’re featuring is Dr. Linda Pajoel, CEO & Founder of Investornomy.
Dr. Linda Pajoel is a multi-award winning investment teacher, CEO & founder of Investornomy; an investment education firm that teaches you how to do stock investing by yourself. She created the first holistic stock investing program.
Dr. Linda recently authored a book called “Investment Strategy Guide”. She is a Philanthropist, Former Dentist, University of Waterloo Graduate Alumnus, and PhD dropout. Dr. Linda’s mission is to teach 1 million people holistic stock investing, within the next 5 years.
To learn more about Linda’s journey as a Female Founder, watch the interview below (or read the written format).
Tell us about your business.
So, we created the first holistic stock investing program and we’re focused on young professionals and we teach them how to do stock investing by themselves without losing money. That’s what we do.
Where did your business idea come from?
The idea of Investornomy came through a 15 years experience. I bought my first stock in 2008 and in 2009, the stock market went down and I lost half of my net worth. It’s interesting to know that I bought that stock through a wealth management company, so a stockbroker bought it for me. I did not know what I was doing.
So, even though they had bought me great stocks, I ended up selling all the shares and I lost half of my net worth, and I backed off from stock investing. Then, fast forward to 2017, I came to Canada as a student on a full scholarship.
That made a lot of people, especially from my home country, ask me, how did you get this full scholarship for international graduate students? Eventually, I started an online course because I am in Canada and the people that wanted the product are outside of Canada, so online was the only way. I started a course at a company that sold online training to teach people how to get a full scholarship. When that company took off in 2019, this is about two years after I came to Canada, and it became so successful, I started looking for where to put the extra money that was coming in.
That was how I went back to investing. I started checking out different types of investing. Either some had very low return, or they didn’t match my personality.
Eventually, I fell back to stock investing. But this time around, I didn’t want somebody to buy the stock for me because I know what happened the last time I did that. I ended up learning how to do the stock investing by myself. That is how I learned it. The moment I learned it, I saw that a lot of people are looking for this because it took me several books, several courses, even sometimes traveling outside of Canada to gather that training. I felt like with my knowledge of online courses, I can put this knowledge all together and train other people that want to learn how to invest by themselves.
That’s how the company came about.
What were you doing before you started Investornomy?
I was running my formal business that I mentioned that was successful and we had to look for where to invest some of the profits that were coming in. I was teaching prospective international graduate students how to get full scholarships. I have a lot of students that came through our program in Canada, US, and UK and all these high-income countries that came here on full scholarship.
That was what I was doing. Before then, I was studying at University of Waterloo, and I dropped out of PhD to start that company in 2019. That is what I was doing before Investornomy came around.
When did you start Dentistry?
Yes, I studied dentistry or dental surgery in Nigeria before I came to Canada to do my graduate studies which I came on full scholarship. That is the story.
How did you pivot away from Dentistry?
When I came to Canada, I came to study public health and health systems at University of Waterloo. That was because I am a social media kind of person. I love talking, interacting with people. I love that. Back home, even though I had studied dentistry, I was very much involved.
I came to study public health because I was always involved with community outreach even as a dentist.
When I came to Canada, the public health here is a bit different. Here, you are more of doing research, analyzing data. You are more with your laptop. There was a mismatch between the public health I was doing in Nigeria, which was community work, and the public health I was studying in Canada, which is running data and not necessarily interacting with people. This disconnect was what really championed my dropout plus the communion of the business.
What did you study for your PH.D?
I was studying aging, health, and well-being as a PhD in University of Waterloo.
What have been some of the highlights of your journey?
The first highlight was starting the business because as a graduate student at University of Waterloo, what happened was one day I was studying at the library and I saw this advert that said, oh, if you want to start a business, blah, blah, blah. I took a short training, and I was able to really implement that training.
It was a major breakthrough and a highlight. Then starting that business, the highlight for me was having this impact where I am in Canada and the people I was training or the people that were benefiting from my program were majorly outside of Canada in different countries. We crossed the border very quickly. That was another highlight.
Starting Investornomy as well is a highlight because making a lot of money, looking for where to invest it, finally learning how to do it by myself, I felt like there were a lot of other people that had this challenge. Starting investor on me is another highlight for me.
What have been some of the challenges that you faced?
In 2023, after I started investing, started practicing all that I’ve learned about stock investing, I decided I was going to go to Omaha, Nebraska, United States. I do not know if that rings a bell, but Omaha is like the maker of stock investing because Warren Buffett lives there. That’s Warren Buffett’s hometown.
There was this Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings. I was like, I was going to go all in, just go and all of that. Well, two to three days after I arrived, specifically May 2nd, I slipped from the staircase while I was in the US. I fell and I broke my left ankle. Immediately taken to the hospital, had to fly back to Canada on wheelchair and had to do full surgery. I still have some implants right here on my left leg.
That set me back a bit in 2023. In the process of doing surgery and recovering, I also got pregnant. Then that extended the stay. A lot of this costed a lot of financial stress. Why is that? Because as a business owner, I didn’t have employment insurance. Having to stay so long out of work because of ankle surgery and pregnancy, it was longer than I planned for.
But my investments kept me going.
Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?
One is that I will get employment insurance.
That is something I will do differently because if you’re a business owner, most times if something happens to your business or if something happens to you, it’s almost always happening to your business as well, because you’re a key person of influence for your business most times. I’ll get employment insurance. The question is why didn’t I get it?
Before now in Canada, you couldn’t get employment insurance if you owned the business. It changed as of April 2022, I think. But before I got to know, I did not get to know immediately it changed. Before I got to know, it was too late for me to sign up and benefit from it.
What methods are you using to grow your business?
I read a lot. I read a lot. Most times I get books written by great businessmen and women.
That has been a source of knowledge, new knowledge. I also watch documentaries, listen to podcasts for CEOs. That is how I get new things.
Then, the second part of it is the speed of innovation, the speed of implementation of those things that you are learning because you can learn something today and it takes you one year or never to implement it. If I learn something today, sometimes I’m watching a documentary, and I see something and I pause the video and I go implement the thing and then I come back to continue the documentary. The speed of implementation is something I use to grow the business.
What are your thoughts on Cryptocurrency?
I have thoughts on that. First of all, for us as a company, we don’t focus on cryptocurrency. The reason is because earlier I had described what we do as how to invest in stocks without losing money. Very important. Because of that, we don’t invest in things that have to do with speculation at the moment. We actually focus on helping people identify strong profitable businesses that they can invest in their stocks, and they know that come rain, come sunshine, they’re going to make money year in, year out for a very long time.10 years, 20 years, and you’re still making money even from the same company if you have chosen it right.
I’m not here to badmouth cryptocurrency, by the way. I think it is a great innovation, but we have not gotten to that stage where I can tell somebody, go invest in it and you will not lose money.
What are some of the core values that you integrated into your business?
The core values I’ve integrated into my business include, continuous learning, which I mentioned in the other question, but continuous learning to keep improving myself so that how the business is today, I can promise you, is not how it’s going to be in one week time because something new will have been added. Something in our marketing, something in, you know, something. I cannot even predict what it is.
And then another core value for us is, you know, actually valuing the people that work with us. It’s like magic. It looks so small, but it’s very important because someone said something, said you can get people to do what you want them to do, but you can’t get them to do their best. Like you can’t force them to do their best. It must come from within.
So, when you take care of the people that work for you, it allows them to work from, you know, their zeal to come from within instead of just compliance.
How do you define success?
So, for me, business success means creating a product that does what it says it’s going to do. Yes, especially for us in the education, investment education industry. You know, there are lots of courses, for example, that when you take them, by the time you finish, you’re asking yourself, okay, what am I going to do now? You know, so creating a course that when we say, this is going to teach you how to do this, it’s very hands-on, you get to practice. And at the end, if that person finishes that program, they are sure that they’re going to be able to say, invest in stocks by themselves without losing money. So, for all that success, and the more people we can get to experience that success, the more successful we feel that we are.
What are some of the strategies that you use for building teams and recruiting talent?
When it comes to recruiting talent, we do a lot of cross-border hiring. Yeah, because unlike what you see with a lot of startups where you have to raise money from the beginning, we are using the bootstrap method, which means that we are sort of creating products that are profitable, and also really using the profit of the business to grow the business, right? And that also requires that we must be slim, like we have to use slim operation from beginning. So, we hire as much as we can from Canada, but then we look across the border, especially for tasks that can be performed by anybody around the globe.
What have been some of the benefits of establishing your business in Waterloo Region?
Establishing a business in Waterloo region has been amazing because of the number of founders that you get to meet, maybe even at networking events, from places like Communitech to places like Velocity Associated with University of Waterloo, to, I mean, even the Chamber of Commerce.
So, there are lots of founders around, and that ecosystem, you just learn one or two things. Or even get the energy from someone else as they are doing their best to build their own company. It can be very encouraging.
What is the format of your programs?
So first, we offer free mentorship, stock investing mentorship, right? And that is to give everyone that holistic, should I say holistic mentoring or holistic teaching on what exactly to do.
But then if you want more advanced training, you could apply for one of our paid programs.
What inspires you?
One of the things that inspire me, especially in this investment education industry, is that there are not a lot of women in the industry. Like when I talk about, say, Warren Buffett, or all the people you could consider the money masters of our time, none of them is a woman.
In fact, there’s this book, Money Masters of Our Time by John Train. You know, the book had about 15 to 20 names on great people in investing, right? So, I just quickly went through the names and I didn’t see a woman. There was one other name I saw, something Julian, Julian something. I was like, good, I finally found one. And it turns out that Julian is a man. I was like, oh, okay.
So, you know, and it’s very important for people to know that even as a woman or as female, they can thrive in investing industry, right? Because the absence of role model can make it hard for someone else to attempt.
I will give you an example. Let’s say there’s this story about Serena Williams’ dad watching a female player in her game, a female player who won something. And then because of that, he decided that he was going to train his daughters to be able to do that. I’m just trying to explain that it’s important for people to be able to see who looks like them. You know, in any industry, there are not a lot of money masters in investment that are female.
What advice would you give to other business owners?
If you’re a business owner out there, my advice for you would be hire early. A lot of people make the mistake of working alone, which means that your speed is going to be really slow, because there’s a lot of things to do when you are starting a new business, right? From, ah, I can’t even list them all. There’s a lot. So, hire early. When I say that, somebody may say, well, my business is not making money yet.
How am I going to hire early? You know, see how you could get even, you know, people that work part-time, even people that work based on demand. That is also something else to explore. So just hire early. And if something is not, if you don’t have a lot of strength in something, let’s say you’re not the person who knows how to build websites ourselves, instead of maybe, you know, taking several months to just go learn how to do websites, and you probably won’t even do it as fine as somebody who is very good with doing that.
What are some of your business goals?
For us, the big goal is to train one million young professionals before year 2030. And we are doing our best to see, because why is it a big goal? Because we don’t even know how we’re going to achieve it right now. But we are making that research every day to see how to expand the number of people that get impacted by our product.
Where can we find out more about your business?
The best way to connect with us would be through our handles. I’ll say five different places, but just one name. So Investornomy is our handle on Facebook, Instagram, on LinkedIn, and on YouTube. Also, our website is investornomy.com.
