From Grocery Store Flyers to Tech Leadership: The Journey of MeetEdgar’s GM, Lacey Sheardown

From an entrepreneurial teenager crafting marketing flyers at her family’s grocery store to leading a social media automation business, Lacey Sheardown’s career path has been anything but ordinary.

Her journey, marked by pivotal moments and mentors, strategic career moves, and a relentless passion for marketing, has taken her through industries as diverse as tourism, publishing, plumbing wholesale, and tech. Now, as the General Manager of MeetEdgar, she brings a unique blend of leadership, innovation, and deep understanding of digital marketing to the table.

This article explores Sheardown’s career trajectory, the mentors who shaped her, her leadership philosophy, and the lessons she’s learned as a female leader in the tech world. It also delves into what sets MeetEdgar apart in the crowded social media automation space and how she envisions the future of AI-driven marketing. Through it all, one key theme stands out: the power of networking, mentorship, and creating opportunities—not just for Sheardown but for those around her.

Table of Contents: 

1. Sheardown's career path and pivotal moments
2. Inclusivity: The key to breaking through tech barriers as a female
3. Leadership style: It's about trust, support, and feedback
4. How MeetEdgar stands out in the social media scheduling tool world
5. The future of social media automation and MeetEdgar's role
6. Advice from one female tech leader to another: The importance of mentorship
7. The biggest challenge of leading MeetEdgar
8. Leaving a company and industry legacy

Sheardown's career path and pivotal moments

Sheardown was entrepreneurial from the young age of 13, when she began working in her family's grocery store. Immediately drawn to marketing, she even created flyers with recipes, staff stories, and coupons. "I was very industrious," she says. "I wanted my own money, and I didn't want to work at my parents' store forever." This experience and being raised by entrepreneurs instilled her desire to lead and create something bigger and innovative.

After attending college in Victoria, BC, she worked for a publisher, transitioning from sales to marketing. Her career then took her to Tourism Victoria for the next decade, where she moved from member services to marketing manager. There, a pivotal mentor expanded her perspective beyond tourism marketing. "She came from experiential marketing and didn't have a tourism background, and she broadened my horizons. I considered myself a tourism marketing professional, (but) she made me feel like a marketing professional with more to offer."

Next, Sheardown joined UsedEverywhere.com (which she later rebranded to Used.ca). There, she built the marketing team from the ground up and eventually became president. Leading a tech team within a traditional media company, she honed her leadership skills, drawing on lessons from her tourism days. "We didn’t have a huge budget, so I leaned on creativity and community partnerships—just like in tourism," she recalls. ‘With community coordinators spread across the country, it was also my first taste of managing a virtual team.”

When Facebook Marketplace took over a significant portion of the market, she left Used.ca and leveraged LinkedIn to explore new opportunities. "At first it was really scary…You start to have imposter syndrome—I'd been with one company for 10 years; does anyone see value in me?" They certainly did, as Sheardown had four job offers in the first two weeks and 44 invites to coffees or lunches in the first month alone. "I didn't even apply for these jobs. It was just people who knew me through various business interactions."

After a brief time as Andrew Sheret Limited's first director of marketing, she left for a better family fit. That's when she found alignment with SureSwift, recognizing its support for businesses through the Exceptional Operators Framework. She'd met CEO James DeGreef previously and reached out about MeetEdgar's General Manager role, which she began in October 2024. "Given my marketing background, it was such a great fit because it's a marketing tool, and I love what social media can do for small businesses."

The common theme in Sheardown's journey? Networking. This has consistently played a key role in her career progression. Notably, she's also consistently broken through barriers as one of the few female tech leaders.

Inclusivity: The key to breaking through tech barriers as a female

Sheardown tells the story of winning a father-son fishing tournament, something that helped shape her and remains core to who she is today: "In 1984, through my parents’ store, my dad was invited to the tournament, and my brother was too young to go. He immediately said he'd take me. He didn't hesitate. He just included me.

I look back on that and really respect my parents as businesspeople. My dad treated me like there was no difference between a son and a daughter—it was no big deal to take a girl to this tournament."

Similarly, Sheardown recalls being the only female on the high school golf team, one of very few women in leadership at Used.ca, and the only female leader who wasn't family at her last job. What each of these situations had in common was supportive, inclusive people who made her feel comfortable. "It's increasing, but females in tech will inevitably, at times, be the minority at the table," she states.

Leadership style: It's about trust, support, and feedback

When asked how she'd describe her leadership style, Sheardown says she's very open and transparent. "I view my role as the team's biggest cheerleader. My job is to empower them to do the best job they can, offer support, and get them excited about whatever we're doing.

Sheardown recognizes her team members are experts in their roles—something she'll never try to be. "I trust them. I don't try to micromanage or do their jobs; I look to them for their expertise, and I hope what I'm doing is making everyone feel valued."

To do this, she gives constant, positive feedback. Sheardown recounts an early-career memory of a formal performance review that terrified her going in: "Early in my career, a manager’s ‘no news is good news’ approach during the review left me rattled and unmotivated. I vowed never to leave my team guessing." She also recognizes that not everyone needs constant reassurance, but finding out what makes people tick and what they like for feedback and encouragement is important since everyone's different.

At the end of the day, Sheardown believes people want to feel like they're contributing, something she says that's changed a lot from earlier in her leadership career. "(Then), I might have thought I needed to do it all and would hold onto too many tasks," she recalls. But now, she realizes her job is to support and work on the business. "There's a little bit of working in the business since we're a small team, but I never want to take someone else's role," she emphasizes.

How MeetEdgar stands out in the social media scheduling tool world

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling and automation platform that helps entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small marketing teams, and other types of businesses schedule their social media on various platforms from one place.

Sheardown notes there are many competitors in the space, but what differentiates MeetEdgar is what got her excited about it: "It's all about recycling evergreen content and building a content library. A bit of a mind shift from how other platforms work, where you're thinking, 'What are we posting next Tuesday at 3:00 pm? Let's write it.'"

She points out that many systems are based post-by-post, whereas MeetEdgar is about filling a library up within categories. "You indicate where you want the categories to go on a repeating cycle, and MeetEdgar automatically pulls and schedules that content. You plan ahead and sort content into buckets," she explains.

The benefit here is that users get more time freed up, "Not only for more creativity and flexibility, because some of the best social posts come up on the fly, but also for the engagement piece." It's this engagement that Sheardown believes is crucial since many people spend time worrying about content. "It's super important to get off the soapbox and engage with other like-minded accounts and people. It's meant to be a conversation. You can't converse if you're always creating pretty graphics and content and scheduling them one by one," she cautions.

To fill that gap, MeetEdgar allows users to pre-load content, freeing them to focus on the connection aspect of social media—something Sheardown thrives on. "That’s what drew me to the role," she says. "Knowing MeetEdgar was originally female-founded sealed the deal for me. It’s built a strong female audience, which really cemented my decision to join the team." MeetEdgar estimates females comprise over half of its subscribers.

She's proud that the team is helping small operators free up time to work on their businesses. "I'm someone who always needs a purpose and am really aligned with this one—it resonates with me and makes me excited to get up in the morning."

The future of social media automation and MeetEdgar's role

Sheardown sees artificial intelligence (AI) as a game-changer across industries, especially in social media automation, where it’s already making waves. MeetEdgar is harnessing AI-powered tools like caption generation to deliver smart, engaging content fast—think tailored captions that spark creativity in seconds.

Looking ahead, Sheardown's excited about pushing automation further, envisioning features like AI handling comment replies to free up even more time for users. "That kind of innovation feels right around the corner," she says, eager to deepen MeetEdgar’s impact.

This forward-thinking mindset extends beyond AI to the ever-shifting social media landscape. Sheardown's team keeps a close watch on emerging platforms and trends, like TikTok’s paused ban, Meta’s Threads, or the rise of Bluesky. She believes the space will keep evolving, shaped by new platforms and AI’s growing role in enhancing them. "For MeetEdgar, it’s about staying agile, adapting to those changes, and refining the tool to be even more intuitive and powerful for our community."

Advice from one female tech leader to another: The importance of mentorship

Seeking out mentorship and finding support networks is incredibly important for female tech leaders, Sheardown stresses, noting it's helpful if they're female but not necessary. At SureSwift, she immediately found this through counterparts and colleagues to lean on, regardless of location. But it wasn't always this way, she recalls.

"When I fully took over as president for Used.ca, I didn't have any counterparts or mentors, so I purposely looked for people and groups. I quickly joined Acetech, a Vancouver-based nonprofit created to support tech leaders, after a friend made the recommendation.

I was part of a small roundtable—me and five guys, very male-dominated at the time. I had a confidential sounding board that could help me with big decisions, staffing, and things I couldn't discuss with others," Sheardown explains. She also found a small, informal group of female tech leaders in Victoria who met monthly.

All of these mentors have done wonders for her confidence.

Learning from others throughout her career has taught Sheardown it's okay to be vulnerable and be herself. "It helps me connect and form stronger bonds with people. They see that and think, 'She's human and relatable.'"

The biggest challenge of leading MeetEdgar

Sheardown sees her biggest challenge as narrowing down where to focus MeetEdgar’s efforts to drive subscription growth, as taking on too many projects at once risks overwhelming the team and spreading resources too thin. "We have no shortage of ideas, many inspired by our MeetEdgar community," she says. "We’re excited about adding new features and integrations, improving the UI, optimizing landing pages, enhancing analytics, growing our affiliate program, and more—but we can’t do it all at once. Prioritizing our strategy has been key."

That focus on prioritization is one factor shaping how she leads her distributed team, especially in a fully remote environment. While she appreciates the flexibility of remote work, building team culture without in-person interaction initially felt daunting. To tackle this, she adapted a daily 2-3 minute standup meeting via Slack, where the team posts two notable things from yesterday, two for today, and a piece of good news. "You get to find out the neatest things about people and better connect," she says, noting it also keeps the team aligned on priorities and celebrating wins.

Leaving a company and industry legacy

Sheardown talks about an ambitious team goal for the year: "We want to be one of the most improved growth teams at SureSwift." While it's a bold thing to say, they truly believe in MeetEdgar, which was more product-focused before she joined. Now, with her marketing background, Sheardown hopes to drive growth and get the tool out to even more people who can benefit from it.

So far, she's on the right track: The team continues to improve its subscriber churn rate, and initial strategies have increased new trials by 85%. If the conversion rate remains steady, Sheardown expects to grow MeetEdgar's subscriber base by over 5% in 2025.

On a personal level, Sheardown loves leading, helping people grow, and making them feel seen, valued, and important. She's big on working with folks starting out in their careers and loves watching those she's worked with move on and do something empowering.

Throughout her career, Sheardown's mentors have inspired her to do for others what they did for her. One in particular imprinted a moment she'll never forget: "When I told the Tourism Victoria marketing director I was thinking of leaving for Used.ca, her first reaction was, 'Let's make sure this is worth your time and it's good enough for you.' Instead of thinking, 'Oh no! You're leaving,' she believed I should go on and do bigger things. She wasn't going anywhere, so I had no career path there," Sheardown recalls.

She's taken that lesson and done the same for others. "If there's no opportunity for someone to grow, I want to see them grow elsewhere. People actually stay longer because they have that kind of encouragement and feel welcome and valued."

It's this people-first, rather than product- or company-first philosophy that Sheardown feels fits very well with SureSwift's core values. "Value alignment was one of the things I wanted in my next position," she says, noting that "win together" resonates the most for her, a mindset she tirelessly brings to her team and the company each day.

Learn more about MeetEdgar and SureSwift's portfolio.

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