Jodie Imam and Melissa Ashcroft first worked together at Leona Edmiston. In the years since, Jodie founded a number of businesses of her own before meeting her now business partner and co-founding Tractor Ventures.
Tractor provides debt funding to growing businesses across Australia and New Zealand - more than $150 million disbursed across 280-plus companies, from SMEs and ecommerce brands through to VC-backed startups. It sits deliberately between what a bank will do and what a VC will do.
In this episode of the P.O.W.E.R. Podcast, Jodie and Melissa talk about how she got there: seeing a gap in the market and deciding to build the solution herself, why debt is often a better path than equity for a business already generating revenue, and what she's learned about leadership along the way. They also get into backing female founders, how Tractor Ventures makes a four-day work week actually work, and where the opportunities sit over the next five years.
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