March 8 is International Women's Day. In the week leading up to it, SaltWire Network is sharing stories, all written by women, focusing on this year’s theme: "A challenged world is an alert world, and from challenge comes change." Each day, we will tackle a different subject area as we celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness, and encourage our readers to take action towards equality.
Tia Upshaw is an early riser.
Every day, the African Nova Scotian entrepreneur and mother of three wakes up around 4:30 a.m. and runs through a daily checklist.
Unread work emails — replied to. Staff at her company Top Notch Cleaners — checked in on. Orders through her online plus-sized retail store Coco+ and online vegan cosmetics store Lips and Lashes — fulfilled. Potential bookings at her Airbnb properties — confirmed.
After working through her early-morning to-dos, Upshaw takes her youngest daughter to school at 8 a.m. Then it’s back to work once she’s home again.
She proceeds to check her emails and schedules meetings and coaching calls with Black women who are participating in her 16-week professional development workshops under the umbrella of her non-profit organization, Blk Women in Excellence.
By 3 p.m., she’s ready to pick up her daughter and then is on her way to check on her cleaners again. After that, she’ll hop onto some meetings or calls.
It’s not until 10 or 11 p.m. that Upshaw said she gets to “unwind and hit the sack.”
“Some days are really stressful, but when I do lay down at night, I know I’m doing this for a good reason. I enjoy my businesses, I enjoy the financial stability and I enjoy being self-sufficient, so that gives me a little bit more peace, to know this isn’t going to waste.”
Upshaw’s success in the business world didn’t come overnight.
In 2013, she got out of a relationship, became a single mother of three on social assistance and the financial aspect of her life “was in disarray,” she said. Juggling being a single mother and a part-time cleaner for a cleaning company proved to be difficult.
“I had to be done (work) at a certain time to get my kids from school. If my kids were sick, then I couldn’t go to work, so there were a lot of challenges,” Upshaw said.
Wanting more for herself and her kids, she decided to launch her own cleaning company.
However, due to her “bad credit at the time, coming from low income, traditional loans from banks were not an option, neither were the loans from organizations in Nova Scotia,” she said.
People also doubted her not only because of her gender, but because of her race, too.
“In the beginning, it wasn’t just because I was a woman, it was, I’m a Black woman coming from an environment and a community where we don’t see Black women come out and be successful, so it’s like, how dare you?” said Upshaw, who’s from Mulgrave Park.
On top of that, having grown up in a big family in which nobody had previously pursued entrepreneurship, Upshaw’s plans to launch her business were met with criticism.
“A lot of my older family members were kind of not pushing me to do it like, ‘Oh God, no. Go work for somebody, it’s safer, you get benefits, you don’t gotta worry about a, b, c and d. You can’t do this by yourself.’ So to them, it was scary,” she said.
As someone who’s “defined and goes against the grain,” Upshaw said she had “no choice but to keep doing what I was doing.” She picked up a job delivering newspapers at night and used the money from that gig to help launch Top Notch Cleaners.
She later launched her Airbnb business Lux Overnights in 2016, Coco+ in 2018, Blk Women in Excellence in June 2020 to help other budding Black women entrepreneurs and started up Lips and Lashes on Feb. 14.
Preaching time management, dedication and commitment along the way, she’s also inspired her two daughters to launch their own businesses.
“They need to see positivity come out of our community and to know that you can go through hell and back and be down at the bottom and you can climb your way out of that rut,” she said.
Even today, Upshaw admits she experiences self-doubt as a woman of colour in business in a historically male-dominated field. But, she ultimately wants to pave the path to success for other women, so they don’t have to jump through the same hoops she did.
“We are powerful, we run households, we are the matriarch of the family. And once we realize that and realize the power we have in society, we’re going to go a long way,” she said.
