What the Tech Advisor Course Gave Me: A Way to Decide When to Stop

I finished the Tech Advisor Training Program on September 19, 2026, and I’d recommend it. It’s offered by the RBC Centre for Women in Business at Mount Saint Vincent University, for Canadian women tech founders and those supporting them. It’s online and self-paced: ten modules, about 45 minutes each, roughly seven to eight hours in all. I accessed it at no cost.

If you’re advising a company for the first time, it gives you a solid foundation in the core concepts: KPIs, exit strategy, feedback, reflection. If you’re a founder who wants to get a sense of things, you can work through it at your own pace and use it directly.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much the exit strategy module changed the way I think about my own business.

What surprised me

I expected the exit module to be a checklist: here’s how you get your ducks in a row, and here are the ways out. You could be bought, you could close, you could merge. What I didn’t expect was the idea that you should be thinking about your exit from the beginning, as a way of making decisions. When you’re deciding whether to add X or Y, you ask which one adds more value to where you want to end up.

I’ve been trying that on my own business. When I’m deciding whether to add a service or build a tool, I ask myself: will that actually help? If I’m just making something, that’s not necessarily helping my business. It could be fun. It might be educational. I might learn a lot. But that doesn’t mean it’s helping my business.

I’ve also realized that an exit, for me, doesn’t necessarily mean somebody buys it. It means deciding whether to keep trying something or to shut it down. At the end of the day, I want to be able to say to myself that I’ve done everything I can to be successful, and where I failed, I’ve learned from it.

The decision I made at two in the morning

Let’s be honest: failure happens.

I spent months building a tool. I thought I was ready to launch. I was so close. The privacy policy was written. The refund policy was drafted. The website copy was ready. Payments were set up. Email delivery was set up so people could get access. Then I ran a few more tests, and it kept failing. And failing. No matter what I did, even when I solved one problem, there was another one.

So there I was at two in the morning, on the verge of tears, in a room lit by computer screens and a couple of lights not as bright as I’d like. I used the decision structure from the exit strategy module. The tool wasn’t going to make my brand. It would have been entering a pretty full market. It had a couple of differentiators, but would they be enough to compete? No. I made the decision to stop.

I feel better for it. If I’d let it go to market, I’d have felt horrible taking anybody’s money when it failed for them. Selling that product would have done more damage to Northlight Advisory Services than it ever could have done to put money in the bank.

Why I’d want someone across the table

That night, what I was missing was someone across the table asking: what is the end goal? How do we work back from it? I’d have made the same decision, but I’d have made it with someone else.

The program talked about the value of mentors, of groups of people who hold you accountable, and of networking. From experience, I’d add this: it matters to have a cohort of people around you who understand where you are and where you’ve been.

I’m considering hosting a small, reasonably priced gathering for founders and fractional leaders over coffee. If there’s enough interest, I’ll do it. But I’d like your input first:

• What day of the week works best?
• What time of day?
• Does it need to be kid friendly?

If you’d like to be part of something like this, reach out. And if you’d rather start with a conversation, a coffee chat is a good place to begin.