In Conversation with Nancy Awwad
Over the past five years, people who have followed you online might be a little confused about who you are professionally. They have seen immigration, Penelope Made This, business, content creation, and now In Conversation. How did you move from there to here?
I think the confusion comes from assuming that every time I introduce something new, the thing before it must have failed.
That is not how my life happened.
One experience led me to the next.
And actually, if I had to identify the real turning point, I would probably go back much further.
Was there a moment when your professional identity really changed?
Yes. Around 2009, when I became self-employed.
Before that, my professional identity was simple.
It was tied to the company I worked for and the position that company gave me.
You did not really have to explain yourself.
You said where you worked and what your title was, and people immediately understood where to place you professionally.
The company name carried part of your identity for you.
Then I became self-employed, and everything changed.
Even when I was working as a financial advisor, I was self-employed. I had to build my own client relationships, my own reputation, my own credibility and, in many ways, my own professional identity.
Suddenly, nobody was giving me a title that explained who I was.
I had to explain it myself.
Who are you?
What do you do?
Why should someone trust you?
Why should they work with you?
What makes your experience relevant?
That was probably the real beginning of my entrepreneurial life.
Because from that point forward, I was never simply doing a job.
I was also constantly building the identity around the work I was doing.
So how did financial planning lead to immigration?
Long before I became an immigration consultant, I spent years working in financial planning between Canada and Dubai.
Whenever I returned to Dubai to meet clients and review their portfolios, our conversations rarely stayed only about investments.
People knew I had immigrated to Canada, and they started asking me much bigger questions.
They would ask things like:
“Should I keep saving for my child’s education, or would it actually make more sense to move somewhere where university education is more affordable?”
They worried about what would happen when they grew older.
Would their retirement savings really be enough if they remained in a country where healthcare could become one of their biggest expenses?
Would their life insurance and savings plans protect them adequately in retirement?
Would moving to Canada give their children — and eventually themselves — a different kind of security?
Those were not simply financial questions.
They were life-planning questions.
I realised people were not only asking me how much they should save.
They were asking me what they were saving for.
Education.
Healthcare.
Retirement.
Citizenship.
Stability.
Their children’s future.
Their own old age.
Eventually, I understood that if I was going to answer those questions professionally, I needed to be properly trained and regulated to do so.
That is part of what led me into Canadian immigration.
So I did not suddenly wake up one day and decide to become an immigration consultant.
It grew out of years of conversations with families trying to decide not only how to manage their money, but where they wanted their future to happen.
And then Penelope Made This came later?
Yes, but Penelope Made This is a very different story.
It was created in the same month I was told I had breast cancer.
My whole life suddenly took a turn I never expected.
I cried at night.
I stayed calm in front of my children.
I researched everything I could and followed the instructions of my medical team.
And right in the middle of that, my daughter, who was only ten years old, wanted to start a business.
I could have said, “I cannot do this now. I am fighting for my life.”
But all I could think was:
I need to teach my daughter how to follow her dreams now, because I don’t know if I will be there one day when she is older and needs my advice on how to build something of her own.
So I asked her:
“What do you want to do?”
And then I followed her lead.
And that decision ended up teaching me almost as much as I hoped to teach her.
What did Penelope Made This teach you?
That having a beautiful product, a website and a logo is nowhere near enough to build a business in the digital economy.
I hired professionals. I paid for media planning. I paid for digital solutions. I paid for advice that sounded impressive and sometimes produced very little.
That education was expensive.
But it taught me what I would never want another business owner to spend money on blindly.
What consistently worked better was showing up.
Showing the person behind the brand. Talking to customers. Explaining the product. Creating trust. Being visible. Doing it again and again.
That became one of the biggest lessons of my professional life.
Then you relaunched Awwad & Associates in a very different digital world. What happened?
That became another huge learning curve.
I was relaunching the business while living in Dubai, and the world had changed.
Post-COVID, business had become much more dependent on digital communication: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Reels, short-form video, personal branding, searchability.
Being qualified and experienced was no longer enough.
You had to be visible. You had to explain what you knew. You had to create content in the format people were actually consuming.
So I relaunched an old YouTube channel. I visited studios. I hired a company to film and edit my videos. I wrote scripts. I created reels.
And the amount of work I put into that process felt like going back to university and sitting my final-year exams all over again.
Except this time, I was effectively the executive producer of my own identity.
I had to think about the script, the timing, the delivery, the filming, the editing, the supporting footage, the graphics, the visual references and even the videos the agency did not have and that needed to be researched and licensed.
I remember going back into my old accounting system and looking at what we had done when I produced my first corporate videos in Ottawa in 2014.
Even then, we had paid for photographs and footage we needed.
But today, one video is no longer one video.
It may need to become a YouTube video, then a Reel, then a TikTok, then a shorter vertical version, then a version with subtitles, then a version with a different opening hook.
That was an education in itself.
After we produced some of the videos, I was told they were really made for YouTube and not for Instagram or TikTok.
So we had to edit them again.
The team I worked with did an amazing job helping me get the agreed number of reels into a format that could work, but it still was not exactly what I had imagined.
And that taught me something very important.
Sometimes the problem is not that someone did bad work.
Sometimes the problem is that what you had in your head and what the other person understood were two completely different things.
That gap matters enormously in digital work.
And the websites taught you the same lesson?
Absolutely.
You do not want me to start on the websites.
I once hired someone to recreate a website and he pressed the wrong button and made the newly purchased and newly created website practically disappear off the face of the earth.
Penelope Made This had its own website journey too.
I hired different people and companies over the years, and again, many of the problems came down to communication.
What did I want? What did I think I was asking for? What did the developer understand? What was technically possible? What was included? What looked beautiful but did not actually help someone buy?
I owe so much to those mistakes and experiences.
And I think my previous education helped me enormously because whenever something went wrong, I did not only want to know that it was broken.
I wanted to understand why.
You have also said your digital footprint changed dramatically. Why does that matter so much to you?
Because in 2018 and 2019, before COVID, before TikTok became what it is today, and before Instagram became such an important business platform, I was relatively easy to find online.
You could Google my name. My professional history appeared. My work appeared. My LinkedIn profile was often the place people went to understand who I was.
After so many different careers and chapters, LinkedIn became harder for me to use as that single point of identity.
What title do you put at the top when you have done several things? Which chapter gets priority?
Today, if someone searches my name, there is much less there than there once was.
And that bothered me.
Because your digital footprint is now part of your professional identity.
If people cannot find you, understand you, hear from you or see evidence of what you have done, then a large part of your professional history disappears from public view.
That is one of the biggest reasons I am doing In Conversation.
So digital trails are really part of the reason behind In Conversation?
Yes.
I want to sit with people and document not only what they sell or what company they own, but how they got there.
What they learned. What they got wrong. What they would never pay for again. What nearly broke the business. What changed their mind. What made them stay. What made them start. What they wish someone had told them earlier.
And I want those conversations to live online.
Not disappear after an Instagram Story.
Not be reduced to one promotional Reel.
Not exist only inside someone’s memory.
I want people to leave behind something searchable, visible and meaningful.
A digital trail.
A record of who they were, what they built and what they learned while building it.
So when people ask you, “Who are you now?” what is the answer?
I do not think the answer is one title.
I did not move neatly from financial planning to immigration consultant to entrepreneur to marketer to content creator.
I accumulated those identities.
Financial planning taught me that money decisions are often life decisions.
Immigration taught me how to interview people and understand the motivations behind major life choices.
Penelope Made This taught me the realities of building and marketing a business in a digital economy.
Relaunching Awwad & Associates taught me how dramatically professional communication had changed.
Producing my own videos taught me that every platform has its own language.
Building and rebuilding websites taught me how important communication is between a business owner and the technical team creating their digital presence.
Cancer taught me not to assume there will always be a better time to begin.
Motherhood taught me that sometimes the most important thing you build is not the business itself, but what you teach someone while building it.
And now In Conversation gives me somewhere to bring all of those experiences together.
So I did not move from one life to another.
One experience led me to the next.
And I am still all of them.