For two decades, Sarita Parmar sat on the lending side of the table in Prince George, British Columbia, reading financial statements and deciding whether a company could carry what it was asking for. She got good at spotting the strain a balance sheet shows you. What she could not see, until it happened inside her own life, was the strain that never makes it onto the page.

A Speaker Who Arrived by Way of Commercial Credit

Sarita Parmar is a speaker, facilitator and strategic advisor who runs Sarita Parmar Speaking & Coaching from Prince George, British Columbia. She spent twenty years in commercial banking and corporate finance before building a practice that ties culture, communication and employee wellbeing to how an organization actually performs. She is also a breast cancer survivor, which is not a footnote to that work but the reason for its shape.

Twenty Years of Learning What Holds a Company Up

She was still finishing her B.Comm in accounting and finance at the University of Northern British Columbia when she started as an analyst in commercial banking at TD Bank Group in 2000. She stayed seven years. Long enough to learn what a set of books can tell you and what it cannot.

From there the credentials stacked in a straight line. Account manager in commercial financial services at HSBC. Senior account manager at BDC, where the clients were the businesses other lenders found harder to read. Each role put her across from owners at the point where ambition met arithmetic, and each one sharpened the same instinct: the numbers describe a business, but people run it.

Then she crossed over. In 2013 she took a finance manager role at BID Group of Companies, moving from assessing operators to being one. A sales management post at Ramada Plaza Prince George added a revenue-side view of the same equation. By then she had seen the inside of banking, manufacturing and hospitality, which is an unusual amount of range for a career that never left one northern city.

Somewhere in that stretch came a diagnosis of breast cancer before she turned forty, and the categories she had worked inside stopped holding.

That is a quiet sentence with a hard edge on it. The version of resilience she had absorbed across twenty years of commercial finance was endurance, the ability to absorb pressure without visible cost. She came out the other side convinced the definition was wrong, and expensive.

In July 2020 she joined Community Futures Fraser Fort George to lead LEAP for Women, and the work she had been circling finally had a room to happen in.

The Room She Builds Now, and Who Is Standing in It

LEAP was where the theory got tested at scale. Over nearly three years, Sarita Parmar delivered workshops, built a business-owner mastermind, ran networking programming and an annual three-day conference that drew more than 250 attendees, and managed a $100,000 consulting grant program connecting women entrepreneurs with specialized professional support.

She is precise about why that combination mattered.

The distinction is the whole point. A single inspiring session is a line item. What she built was a structure women could keep returning to, with funded expert help attached to the end of it, which is a materially different thing to hand a business owner.

She launched her own practice in May 2023 and has since worked with roughly a dozen organizations and audiences across banking, construction, real estate, entrepreneurship and professional services, with an ongoing speaking presence through groups including Northern BC Women in Business. She deliberately built a mixed practice of speaking, facilitation, coaching and advisory work rather than living on keynotes alone, and she is equally deliberate about where she positions the subject matter.

Not wellness as a separate soft concern parked with HR. Wellness as an input to execution, sitting alongside revenue targets, competing priorities, risk and difficult decisions about people. That framing would be easy to dismiss coming from someone who had never carried a target. It is harder to dismiss from a former senior account manager who spent years judging whether other people’s plans would survive contact with reality.

Which is why the rooms she gets invited into are not the ones you would expect for this subject. Construction. Banking. Sectors where the word wellness has historically been met with a flat look. She does not soften the argument for those audiences. She sharpens it, and she says the uncomfortable part directly: boundaries are a leadership necessity, not a luxury.

What She Measures Now

For twenty years, Sarita Parmar’s job was to look at an organization and judge whether it could carry the weight of what it had taken on. The answer lived in coverage ratios and cash flow and the credibility of the person across the table. She still asks the question. She just no longer accepts that the financial statements contain the whole answer, because she has been the part of the equation that nothing on the page was tracking.

She spent two decades deciding whether a business could carry what it had taken on. She asks the same question now, about the people inside it.