Entrepreneur Karen Olsson loved living in Squamish, she says, but to pursue her business dream, she left to go to Kelowna about six months ago.
“It was incredibly hard to leave,” she said from her new home.
“There’s deep roots into that community for our family, and to make the decision career was going to take precedence over other things was really, really difficult.”
Olsson is currently chief operating officer of Kelowna-based technology firm Community Sift.
When she lived here, Olsson was one of the commuters to Vancouver, “which was exhausting,” she said.
Being able to join Community Sift, an Okanagan startup, was a dream opportunity to expand her career and be part of an exciting new venture, she said.
“I am entrepreneurial enough that I could have started my own business in Squamish,” she said, “but there just wasn’t the infrastructure for tech.”
“I found it very hard to do business in Squamish. It is an eco-tourism or resource-based place…. There’s no startup ecosystem in Squamish, nothing that supports it.”
She said Kelowna has the not-for-profit Accelerate Okanagan organization that offers support and resources to burgeoning tech companies. It is supported municipally, provincially and federally and has allowed Olsson’s company access to mentors and funding, she said.
“The infrastructure here in Kelowna is great, and there’s a lot of attention being paid to what does business need to grow and not necessarily big business, but what does small business need to grow?”
A recent District of Squamish survey of local businesses found personal and lifestyle factors were the main draw of having a business in Squamish. Proximity to major markets and access to resources were secondary factors.
Major concerns facing current business owners include increasing difficulty recruiting skilled labour and competition from similar businesses, according to a recent district survey. Housing affordability and lack of available commercial and industrial land for businesses were also concerns.
District staff and council are currently developing a new and multi-faceted economic development strategy and action plan.
The ultimate goals of the strategy and plan are to strengthen and diversify the base of businesses in the district and manage the development of businesses in a way that the results reflect the community’s values, according to a draft phase one district Economic Development Strategy Report.
“I really want it to start to shine some light on where some of our real strengths and weaknesses are,” said Mayor Patricia Heintzman. “Try to take advantage of those things that fit our demographic, fit our geography, fit within our opportunities with regard to transportation.”
With Quest University and the proposed UBC clean energy campus slated for the waterfront, Squamish is becoming an education-based community, said Heintzman.
“Once you start creating that mindset, people want to be around it,” she said, pointing to communities like Silicon Valley in San Francisco Bay that has Stanford University and is a high-tech hotbed. “[It creates] those synergies of academia, innovative entrepreneurialism – that investment side of things – and then it cycles out to the social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, social innovation side of things and that starts generating new innovation and jobs with that.”
Part of the strategy will also be ensuring the businesses already here that are aiming for growth have someone advocating for them within the system, Heintzman said.
“It is all connections and networks.” Council has to decide whether it wants to either hire a development officer and continue with the past structure or to establish an arms-length entity, the district’s Gary Buxton said.
As of October 2015, 1,485 licensed businesses were operating in Squamish, according to the draft report.
A recent survey of Squamish Chamber of Commerce members found that economic development was one of the top five areas for which members wanted the chamber to advocate.
Bianca Peters of the Downtown Squamish Business Improvement Association said although the economic strategy is in preliminary stages, she’s pleased with the direction the district is headed in terms of the downtown.
“Squamish is going crazy, it is off the charts, so obviously we are looking forward to working with the district on the new economic development strategy,” she said.
Forestry may be a source of new jobs with value-added businesses, Heintzman said.
“We keep hearing that there’s value-added wood entities that want to come here, so we need to understand why they can’t get over the goal line. They are interested, but what is preventing them from saying, ‘Yup, we are going to make that investment here’?” she asked. “We keep hearing about possibilities, but what are the things that are holding us back from achieving that?”
Buxton added that forestry fits into the category of existing businesses that the plan will aim to invigorate.
“If we have got a strategic advantage, how do we leverage that?” he said. “What does that sector need to grow?”
In the 2016 budget, $152,500 is set aside for the plan, which includes $55,000 for an employee, according to district staff.
The Economic Development Strategy project is $35,000, funds carried over from the 2015 budget.
Economic development will be back on council’s agenda in the coming month.
