Victoria Lennox’s voice was muffled as she spoke into her cellphone, but the message she was delivering came through loud and clear. After holding a week of town hall meetings with entrepreneurs across Nova Scotia, entrepreneurs and small-business owners were letting her know that they wanted less confusion in the programs that support them.

 “We learned quite a lot,” she says of her first week touring Canada as the executive director of Startup Canada. “We learned that there are a lot of services in the province, but what people want is to bring them all together to smooth the way.”

Startup Canada is a national non-profit organization whose mandate is to bring entrepreneurs together and determine what they need to encourage business development in Canada. Lennox, who won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion during a stint in Britain, is now leading a series of town hall meetings across Canada with the aim of producing a policy document in time for Global Entrepreneurship Week in November.

The industry-funded program, which has been in development for nine months, has created partnerships with more than 200 organizations, including in Innovacorp, the Black Business Initiative, Dalhousie University, and the Centre for Entrepreneurship Education and Development. Other partners include the PEI BioAlliance, the New Brunswick Business Council, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries.

After holding meetings in Halifax, Yarmouth, Antigonish, Truro, Dartmouth, and Sydney in March, Lennox has a feel for what entrepreneurs need. She has heard repeatedly that there are too many programs for entrepreneurs and that people waste too much time trying to find what they need. Startup Canada hopes to have the dashboard up and running this summer.

It’s a message the organization has heard since its inception, so it’s already acting to remedy the situation. Given the vast spaces between communities in Canada, Lennox says the solution will have to be online and accessible to all Canadians. So Startup Canada, whose work is largely carried out by about 250 volunteers, is designing an entrepreneurs’ dashboard, a website that will allow entrepreneurs to navigate the vast array of programs designed to help them and each other. Another reoccurring message is that entrepreneurs want mentorship from other entrepreneurs, those who have already gone through the trials they’re experiencing. To address this, Lennox would like to see groups of entrepreneurs working together within communities. There has also been a strong call for community advisory boards to help with advocacy.

The tour through Nova Scotia marked the beginning of cross-Canada consultations, but Lennox will be in the region again in the coming months. Startup Canada will arrive in Charlottetown in May and, later that month, visit Saint John, Fredericton, Bathurst, and Moncton, then head to Newfoundland and Labrador in July.

Startup Canada is encouraging all participants to raise concerns that are specific to their particular region. For example, in Sydney there was an interesting discussion about how the community could boost the wine industry as a complement to tourism.

As Lennox travelled across Nova Scotia, one enduring message was the need to change the collective mind-set among existing and potential entrepreneurs, especially among school-age children. As the blog on the Startup Canada website after the Halifax meeting stated: “We should get entrepreneurs talking in schools, sharing their stories of success in business with young students to inspire them to consider entrepreneurship as a path to future financial sustainability.”