When she was studying polymers at Queen’s, Hazel Lord couldn’t have imagined herself as a management consultant, but that’s exactly what she’s doing 31 years later.
Ms. Lord built her career at the crossroads of engineering and business, using her chemical engineering degree from Queen’s and a subsequent MBA from the University of Toronto to become a management consultant running Pearl Operational Design, Inc. (PoD) – a company that employs seven people full time and for which she won the Black Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2023 from CanadianSME Business Magazine.
Ms. Lord recalls a pivotal moment that put her on the path she’s following today. When she was starting her final undergraduate year at Queen’s, she planned to follow it up with a master’s degree specializing in polymers. However, an academic experience shifted this focus.
“Our thesis project included a commerce student,” she says. “We had to design a real-life project for a consulting company in Toronto. The commerce student was there to ask if it had value and marketability. That gave us the understanding that if your product won’t sell, it’s not perceived as something of value.”
Following the project, she made the decision to shift to a master’s in business administration (MBA), which she eventually did at the University of Toronto. Having been awarded a scholarship from her home country of Barbados to attend Queen’s, Ms. Lord first had to return home to work there for four years before she could continue her studies.
“I worked in what was considered one of the best places a chemical engineer could work, which is in the manufacture of sugar,” she says. She also worked briefly for the Ministry of Health and Wellness and then returned to Canada, but had trouble finding work because she didn’t have “Canadian work experience.”
Before long, she started working as an executive assistant to a vice-president at TD Canada Trust, who immediately saw that she was overqualified for the job. From there, she went to Alliance Data Systems, a software development company, and enrolled in her MBA program part time.
During that time, Ms. Lord reflected on what she had started to pick up on.
“I noticed [the software company] was always changing its strategy, and I wondered why,” she says. “I realized there was a gap between strategy and execution, and I decided that when I started my own company, that’s where I wanted to ‘play’ – because it was a good marriage of my degrees.”
After her MBA, she felt she needed more industry experience, so she worked in aviation as a consultant, for Loblaws as senior director of business process management, and then for Manulife as director of its business process management centre of excellence.
In September 2014, three months after leaving Manulife, she founded PoD. Named after her mother, Pearl is also an acronym that stands for Performance, Excellence, Achieving Results, and Leadership, and serves as a reminder to live her values.
“We design the space between strategy and execution, so that’s why we added operational,” she says.
PoD emphasizes the culture of an organization as a manifestation of its values. She and her staff, along with subcontractors, live by the need to have collaboration, integrity, innovation, education, excellence, leadership, respect, and trust.
“I use my chemical engineering degree because chemical engineering is about design,” she says, adding that the team has just designed an AI tool that has a patent pending.
The 2023 Black Entrepreneur of the Year award was a surprise to her because she was the only woman in the category with men who each appeared to own several businesses.
“It was a great experience,” she says, adding that she never expected to be chosen.
This past March, Ms. Lord was also chosen as one of 13 women from a pool of 180 to speak at a Vancouver TEDx.
“That was an honour,” she says. And the whole journey started out at Queen’s in the 1990s.
