Impact of Asian Heritage Month on a 4th Generation Chinese Entrepreneur
May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada, and this year it lands differently for me.
Not because the calendar says it should, but because of where I’m standing right now. Somewhere between the company I built and the company that it’s becoming.
I started Granted Consulting with a simple belief: that access to non-dilutive government funding shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for those who already know the system. Small business owners across Canada were leaving significant grant dollars on the table, not because they weren’t eligible, but because they didn’t know the funding existed or how to navigate it.
That knowledge gap felt personal to me. It still does.
As a fourth-generation Chinese Canadian entrepreneur, I grew up surrounded by people who built things quietly, without asking for much. My family didn’t talk about government resources. You worked, you saved, you reinvested. The idea of turning to a public program for business capital wasn’t part of the vocabulary. Not out of pride, exactly, but out of not knowing it was an option. That’s the gap I built this company to close.
The immigrant mentality is real, and it’s complicated.
There is a particular kind of grit that gets handed down through generations of immigrant families. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the willingness to start over, to pivot when the ground shifts, to build something without a blueprint. I’ve leaned on that inheritance more times than I can count over the last several years. Hiring through uncertainty, navigating a pandemic, abrupt changes in government, and the need to reposition a service model mid-stride.
But that same mentality can work against you. The default is to do more, sacrifice more, prove more. The instinct is to outwork the problem rather than innovate around it. Building a technology company from inside a consulting firm has forced me to recognize the difference.
You can’t grind your way through a platform rebuild. You have to think differently.
The pivot from consulting firm to AI tech company is not a rebrand. It’s a reckoning.
When I look back at how Granted started, I see a services business built on expertise. Our consultants knew grants, and clients paid for that knowledge. What we’re building with GetGranted is something different: an AI-enabled platform that makes that expertise available at scale, in real time, to any Canadian business that needs it.
That shift sounds clean when you describe it. Living it is not.
The past eighteen months of product development have been some of the hardest of my career. Building a development team while running client files. Designing an AI system while managing the operational realities of a consulting practice. Deciding what our platform should know, how it should respond, and where human judgment still needs to lead. There are a hundred small decisions a week, and many of them don’t have clean answers.
What I keep coming back to is a value that feels deeply cultural to me: usefulness. Not novelty for its own sake, not technology because it’s impressive, but tools that actually reduce friction for Canadian business owners trying to make funding decisions. The design philosophy behind GetGranted isn’t about speed or automation. It’s about clarity. Giving someone the right information, at the right moment, without overwhelming them.
This feels cultural to me, in a way I don’t always know how to articulate. There’s a preference for substance over show. For getting it right over getting it out fast. For building something with a long useful life rather than a loud launch. We’re getting close to that launch now. And I’m proud of it in a way that feels earned.
As an Asian Founder in this moment
Asian Heritage Month often invites reflection on visibility, on representation, and on what it means to hold space as an Asian woman in industries that have not always made room.
I’ll be direct: I don’t lead with my identity in most business contexts. What I will say is this: the values I carry from my family including discipline, long-term thinking, collective responsibility, and doing the quiet work, have shaped this company at every level. The way we approach client relationships. The values we’ve built our team on. The way we’re designing technology like GetGranted to serve not just sophisticated operators, but first-generation business owners who are exactly where I know we were.
That last part matters most to me. If a newcomer business owner in Surrey or Scarborough or Saskatoon can use GetGranted and walk away understanding what funding they’re eligible for, what they need to do next, and why it’s worth pursuing, then we’ve done something real.
That’s the full-circle moment I’m working toward.
To my Asian business community:
Your story belongs in this industry. Your instincts, the ones that came from watching your parents adapt, rebuild, and persist, are not a liability. They are a design philosophy and are ingrained in your work. Make the decision to not be left on the sidelines. If you haven’t looked at what government funding is available to your business, now is a good time to start. It was built for you too.
Stephanie Sang is the Founder and CEO of Granted Consulting and the creator of GetGranted, an AI-powered grant discovery platform launching this month. She writes and speaks on grant strategy, small business funding, and building in the Canadian entrepreneurship ecosystem.
