Like the owners of many small businesses across Canada, many in the Sea to Sky region say they often face difficulty finding qualified employees to fill their vacant positions.
More than a quarter (27 per cent) recently indicated they had not hired all the employees they needed during the past 12 months, according to the recently released 2014 State of Small Business in the Sea to Sky Corridor survey conducted by Community Futures Howe Sound.
Of those who said they’d been unable to hire the workers they needed, almost half (45 per cent) cited difficulty in finding qualified employees as the main reason they had been unable to make the hire. Others cited concerns with economic certainty (30 per cent) and the seasonal nature of their businesses (25 per cent) as key reasons they were unable to find workers.
Those statistics about the state of affairs for small businesses in the Squamish-Whistler-Pemberton area were just some of the findings of the recent survey, which saw Community Futures Howe Sound receive a total of 91 responses — 44 by telephone and 47 web-based replies.
Of the respondents, 55 per cent were in Squamish, 23 per cent in Pemberton and 20 per cent in Whistler.
The first-of-its-kind report aims to serve as part of a database to identify trends and guide efforts to remedy challenges small business owners face in the region, Jeff Dawson, general manager of Community Futures Howe Sound, said in a statement issued on May 1.
“This survey establishes some benchmarks for future comparison,” he said. “We want to know more about some of the issues and challenges business owners are facing, and also what the opportunities are.”
Among the survey’s other findings:
• Sixty-four per cent of respondents said they were either optimistic or very optimistic about the future. Twenty-seven per cent said they were somewhat optimistic and just six per cent aid they were not very optimistic.
One business owner said his business could probably fare better in a larger community but chose to live in the Sea to Sky Corridor for the lifestyle.
“I moved the business here because it’s a nice place to live and raise a family,” the owner said. “We like the small-town feeling, and it’s close enough to the big city that we can go into Vancouver whenever we want to.”
• Ninety-one per cent of those surveyed said their businesses had some sort of presence on the Internet. Eighty-one per cent of those had a company website, 72 per cent were on Facebook, 42 per cent on LinkedIn and 38 per cent on Twitter.
• More than half (54 per cent) of those who had tried to access financing during the past six months said they had found the process of accessing financing either “very difficult” or “somewhat difficult.” The reasons for the difficulty ranged from a lack of knowledge about the process to the amount of paperwork involved. Asked about the biggest challenges, 34 per cent cited the state of the economy as the top concern while 23 per cent cited the difficulty in finding skilled workers. For survey results, visit www.cfhowesound.com.
