The Boss of You

I’ll start by warn­ing you that this post is West­ern Canada-specific. But although I con­sid­ered that might make it too exclu­sive for an inter­net audi­ence, this is just too good a resource not to share with you.

West­ern Eco­nomic Diver­si­fi­ca­tion Canada (aka WED) funds an oper­a­tion here in BC called the Women’s Enter­prise Cen­tre. (There are sis­ter orga­ni­za­tions in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Man­i­toba.) They tend to be known pri­mar­ily as a lender — they offer loans to women look­ing to start and/or grow their busi­nesses. They also orga­nize events, which tend (in my opin­ion) to lean toward the stuffy and speechy. But they also pro­vide a ser­vice we have found invalu­able, which is their one-on-one busi­ness coun­selling. You sim­ply call them to set up an appoint­ment, and then you can have a per­sonal phone call with one of their res­i­dent experts who will help you out.

The best part is that it’s com­pletely free of charge. No kidding.

We took advan­tage of this ser­vice a cou­ple of years ago, when we were com­ing to the dif­fi­cult real­iza­tion that we prob­a­bly needed to expand our shop beyond just the two of us in order to con­tinue serv­ing our clients well. The WEC gave me some help­ful tips on how to fig­ure out the best path for­ward, by eval­u­at­ing fac­tors like our prof­itabil­ity, the per­cent­age of our time that was bill­able, and so on and so forth. It really helped us get to a point where we could see the path forward.

So: highly rec­om­mended for any of you liv­ing in West­ern Canada. Any­one care to share sim­i­lar resources for those lving elsewhere?