Long before Dr. Fatima Ebrahim Jivraj became an orthodontist or an entrepreneur, she understood what it meant to build a life around family.
Her parents had done exactly that. They moved their family to Canada in search of greater opportunity for their children, a decision that required her mother, an optometrist trained in the United Kingdom, to leave behind the profession she had worked hard to enter when her credentials were not recognized here. Her father came from a family of entrepreneurs, and as Fatima and her brother grew up, they saw both sides of their parents’ experience: the security and purpose their mother had found in healthcare, and the possibility their father saw in building something of his own.
“My parents literally changed continents to bring us here for a better life,” Fatima says. “I think sacrifice is in my blood and in my DNA, and entrepreneurship is also in my blood and in my DNA.”
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Fatima and her brother would eventually find a way to bring those two worlds together. Both pursued dentistry and then orthodontics before becoming business partners and launching Family Braces in Calgary in 2016.
The name would prove fitting in more ways than one.
In the early days of their first clinic, Fatima began seeing families forced into decisions no parent should have to make. Orthodontic care was expensive, and the traditional financing model could put treatment beyond reach. Parents with more than one child sometimes had to decide who would receive braces first. Others would learn that their child genuinely needed treatment, but leave because they simply could not afford to begin.
“Our heart broke when we started to see parents having to choose which child to do treatment for or having to walk away altogether when their child was in genuine need in that moment,” she says.
Those conversations changed the business Fatima and her brother wanted to build. Rather than focus on the people who could already afford orthodontic treatment, they began asking what it would take to reach those who could not.
They lowered the down payment, eventually eliminating it altogether, introduced more flexible financing and direct billing, and expanded across Calgary as patients began asking for clinics closer to where they lived. Fatima describes that growth as organic, driven in large part by listening to the families they were treating and responding to what would make care easier for them to access.
There was risk involved in doing things differently, particularly in changing how treatment was financed, but Fatima believed deeply in the parents sitting across from her.
“These are people who will do anything for their children,” she says. “We took a bet on parents.”
Nearly a decade later, Family Braces has treated more than 30,000 patients in Calgary. For Fatima, however, the meaning behind the company’s name still reaches back to the family that made it possible.
She and her brother work closely together, something she credits to the trust that existed between them long before they became business partners. They share the same values and goals, she says, and know one another well enough to speak honestly, even when what needs to be said is difficult.
“I can be myself, without reservation or without hesitation,” she says. “This is someone who already knows me and understands me.”
Behind both of them are the parents who made sure their children had opportunities they themselves had not always been afforded.
“My mom and my dad sacrificed everything to never have to choose which of us got braces, to never have to choose which of us went to university, or which of us went to dental school, or which of us went to orthodontics,” Fatima says. “They put us first, and we wouldn’t be where we are.”
That history gives the name Family Braces a meaning that is both personal and purposeful. It is a family business, built by two siblings whose parents helped make their careers possible, but it is also a business designed around the needs of other families.
“It’s a family-owned company that exists to serve the families in this city,” she says.
Family has taken on another dimension for Fatima since becoming a mother herself. Her daughter is still young, and while motherhood has added another demand to an already full life, it has also changed how Fatima thinks about the way those different parts of her life fit together.
She has little interest in the idea of achieving balance.
“I don’t believe in balance. I believe in harmony,” she says.
The difference is more than semantics. Fatima doesn’t expect every part of her life to receive an equal share of her time on any given day. There are moments when the business requires more of her and others when her daughter, son, husband, parents, brother, or even Fatima herself need to come first. What matters is being able to recognize those moments and respond to them.
“There are some days when I work 10 or 11 or 12 hours because the business needs me, but when I’m with my daughter, whether we’re playing games, reading together, talking about her day or going through her bedtime routine, I’m fully present. That’s the harmony,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced.”
There is something about that philosophy that also reflects the way Fatima has approached entrepreneurship. She has learned not to wait for circumstances to be perfect, because in business, as in life, they rarely are.
“Don’t wait until you feel ready,” she says. “Most opportunities arrive before we feel fully prepared for them.”
Fatima spent 11 years in post-secondary education and was accustomed to environments where there was a right answer to find if she worked hard enough.
Entrepreneurship taught her something different. Sometimes there is no answer yet. Sometimes the only way to find it is to begin, make mistakes, ask for help, and adjust along the way.
“You might need to fail a thousand times. You might need to iterate a thousand times, and there’s never a ready moment. You just have to get started.”
Her parents had modelled their own version of that lesson years earlier, building a new life after arriving in Canada and finding a way forward when the path they expected was no longer available. Fatima has carried it into a business that was built by questioning what had always been done and asking whether there was a better way for families.
Winning the 2025 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Excellence Award gave her a rare opportunity to consider just how far that journey had taken her. Entrepreneurs, she says, are often so focused on what comes next that they forget to look at what they have already built.
“Sometimes you don’t stop to actually take a look at the scenery or to see how far you’ve travelled.”
For Fatima, looking back makes one thing especially clear. Family has never existed at the edges of her ambition. It has been the reason for it.
We named it Family Braces because we’re family-owned and family-operated, and we were founded by a family of orthodontists,” she says. “But the name also honours the exceptional Calgary families whose trust and support helped us get where we are today.”
Now, as she considers what the next decade might hold, Fatima hopes to take what they have built beyond Calgary and make the same kind of care available to families elsewhere.
“I hope we can have the same impact,” she says. “I hope that we can serve families in other cities as well.”
It would mark the beginning of something new for Family Braces, certainly. But for Fatima, it would also be a continuation of something that began long before Family Braces had a name: her belief that success is most meaningful when it allows you to make a difference in the community around you.