In an industry painted green with envy and competition, Stacey McKenzie decided young to cast off the typical cutthroat attitude that shadows modeling and to, instead, become a guide though that jungle.

As young as six years old, living in her home country of Jamaica, McKenzie made the decision to become a model when her sister showed her a magazine with Madonna gracing its cover.

"I didn’t know modeling could be an actual career," she laughs. "I thought it was something everyday, like you get dressed."

With inspiration and drive she moved to Toronto with her family in 2013 and hunted down an agency, but it didn’t turn out to be legit.

"A real modeling agency does not charge you to be in," she says.

It seemed she was catching a lucky break when an agent spotted her in a club in Toronto and asked her if she wanted to model.

She replied with her trademark confidence: "Of course. I am a model."

The agent was taking a group of girls to New York to show at a host of agencies. McKenzie leapt at the chance to join them and when she was told by an agent to pack her bags and come back, she was ecstatic. She quit school, left her friends and family behind and returned only to find out that the agency had lost interest.

"I cried my eyes out," she says. McKenzie was 16, alone, and bereft. But her resolute attitude didn’t allow her to stay down for long.

"Then I said to myself, you know what- I’m going to try one more time."

Her early-developed industry savvy meant that she had kept a comprehensive list of each agency the agent had taken the girls to visit. She went back to all of them until she found one that signed her.

"I was relentless in learning about the business," she says.

She discovered early that light on the ins and outs of the industry was not going to be shed by fellow models – not even the big named ones at the peeks of their careers would offer breaks to the young or up and coming.

"I didn’t have a good experience when I first started out as a model, and thought I was the only one," she describes. "But I found out there were hundreds of other models going through the same thing as I was."

"We have to learn the business ourselves," she says. "You are your own business."

"No one would help us. No one would give us any advice."

Though she began sharing her knowledge and coaching other models as soon as she launched her career, this advice giving eventually ‘grew into a venture’. In 2005 McKenzie formally developed the Walk this Way Workshops.

"I feel like this opportunity was give to me for a reason," she says. "What I’ve seen is that the girls and guys in my workshop are more aware of modeling as a business as opposed to treating it as this is fun or this is so cool."

McKenzie educates her pupils on all aspects of modeling; including managing finances, dealing with agencies, and how to conduct oneself at a casting.

"How to be on the next level," she calls it. "They walk away with more of a business sense – it’s like a whole other outlook and they treat it as such."

She ensures her workshop attendees leave knowing it’s the agencies that work for them because they are paying them their 20 per cent cut; not vice versa.

McKenzie recently conducted a Walk This Way workshop in Calgary at the Hotel Le Germain to whom she called some of her most enthusiastic and eager to learn students she’s had yet.

"It was pretty much the first class where practically everyone was taking notes," she describes. "They had a notepad and a pen – not just a computer."

" [Calgary] produces some serious talent," she praises. "I will definitely be back soon."

In addition to touring these workshops across Canada McKenzie offers charity seminars in her home country and around the Caribbean where, she says, there is a lot of potential but youth don’t yet know how to get out there.

"I go into certain communities and teach about the business," she says. "If I see potential in someone I don’t hesitate to give them connections and point them in the right direction."

McKenzie says it is really rare for someone of her stature to offer this business education. The model has worked with many of fashion’s elites and landed a team of major fashion campaigns including Harpers Bazaar, Interview, Verve-girl, Flare, Calvin Klein, Jean Paul Gaultier, MAC Cosmetics and Vogue (U.S., Italy, Britain, Korea, Spain). She was a judge for Canada’s Next Top Model, walked the runways at New York Fashion Week 2008 for Xuly Bet, and landed a small role in the film The Fifth Element.

She is a professional speaker and tackles the topics of low self-esteem and how to build confidence through self-acceptance. Her Walk this Way workshops are not just for potential models; everyone has something they could stand to learn under her direction.

"[The workshops] appeal to everybody and all sexualities," she says. Her directive is to give her pupils the confidence to "go out in the world and do whatever you want."

McKenzie hopes to see her workshops blossom into an actual school, and aims to increase the locales she reaches to include the U.S. and more of the Caribbean. She wants Walk This Way to evolve generation after generation.

"I’m ok with getting older," she says, "and passing on the torch."

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