NANAIMO – I’m sure you’ve heard politicians, business leaders and small business operators recite the storyline in our title before, and probably several times. That’s because it is absolutely true.
In Nanaimo, around 90 per cent of our business licenses are held by micro and small businesses. They are the ones investing risk capital to start up and grow new businesses, to employ our Vancouver Island University graduates, intake entry-level employees and contract with more established experts in their field. We’ve noticed it at the Chamber of Commerce with over half of our new members this year involved in some kind of entrepreneurial practice from one-man service companies, to high tech start-ups.
The entrepreneurial spirit demonstrated by these small businesses spills over to the rest of the community lending a sense of inventiveness and adventure to the local economy. Nanaimo was recently ranked on an ‘entrepreneurial’ scale as having risen from number 77 in Canada last year to number 39 this year. That’s an impressive single year jump in the ranks!
Measurement criteria included ‘Entrepreneurial Presence, Perspective and Policy’. Presence refers to the number of business establishments that can be called entrepreneurial. Perspective refers to places where business owners are most upbeat and Policy refers to centres where local governments support entrepreneurship and business owners rate their governments most highly. To land at #39 on the scale, a city must be placed in a moderate to good rating. To rank where Nanaimo did last year, its scores would have been in the ‘modest’ to ‘weak’ categories.
So what has changed? Certainly, there hasn’t been much movement in the area of ‘policy’ where we understandably scored in the modest range with little change in the past year from local government. ‘Perspective’ was rated in the moderate range which means that more business operators have an optimistic outlook about their future in this community. And ‘presence’ ranked strong meaning that entrepreneurs are becoming more recognizable and are contributing more to the economy than they have in the past.
We also learned last week from the 2015 State of the Island Economic Report release during the Economic Summit that new business formations and incorporations rose by over 15 per cent in Nanaimo, while inching up only 1 per cent in the CRD.
The impact of these positive ratings means that we will likely to continue to attract entrepreneurs because we are a great place for businesses to start. Our cost of living is not high, our quality of life is very high, and local resources like VIU, the Chamber of Commerce and the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation are in place to support entrepreneurialism. To take action and implement local government policy that further supports this economic model will help us continue to grow as a successful city. (Data Source: CFIB)
– Kim Smythe is CEO of the Greater Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at ceo@nanaimochamber.bc.ca.