A push towards exporting.

Funding to provide small businesses access to exporting expertise

North Bay City officials say a $215,500 investment from the federal government will help fuel a three-year initiative to boost exporting among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the North Bay area.

The funding, announced Jan. 12 by Nipissing MP Bob Wood and Timiskaming-Cochrane MP Ben Serre, is being provided to the North Bay and District Chamber of Commerce to sponsor, an export development pilot project involving the five area chambers of commerce covering the Temagami, West Nipissing, Mattawa, Sudbury East and Almaguin areas.

North Bay economic development manager Rick Evans says the government funding will be used to promote the initiative and to offset the cost of hiring an export development officer who will provide expertise about exporting as a business option to SMEs arid business organizations in the Blue Sky (North Bay) Region.

"This (export development officer) will work with all of the small businesses in our region, and he or she will also liaise with the adjacent chambers as well -- including Mattawa, Sturgeon Falls and the South River area -- to help them work with their business communities," Evans says. "The person's responsibility is to help us get more of our small firms actively involved in exporting; he or she will do that through a number of different ways, one of which is one-on-one consultations just to make (business owners) aware of the process and how to go about it."

The program focuses on providing SMEs with the necessary education and training to assess, develop and implement their own export plans. Current export preparedness programs through the federal government have been available to larger, export-ready companies for some time, but Evans says few small-business owners are aware of them. Most haven't even considered the economic potential of exporting.

"There are already existing programs out there that we want to bring to the attention of the smaller firms and help them access by helping them fill out the applications, giving them one-on-one counselling and making the process much more user-friendly," he says. "That's a significant component" of the project.

Evans says the 30-month pilot project primarily targets small and micro businesses in the five named areas; they will be exposed to the program via referrals and an advertising campaign.

"There will be a number of different ways that the businesses will wind up getting involved in the business-to-business relationship," Evan says. "Some of it will be through referrals from the chamber offices, economic development offices, service clubs or banks. There will also be a good advertising campaign put in place to make small businesses aware of the service.

Evans says the push for small businesses to explore exporting opportunities comes as a result of larger companies succumbing to the consequences of limiting themselves to local markets.

"It will be a fairly extensive outreach program."

"Canada has always been a trading nation, but it was predominantly from commodities or large urban development centres," Evans says. "What we're seeing now is that resource sectors like mining supply companies have really learned that they had to go global or they weren't going to make it. The same thing applies to a lot of the smaller operations."

Thanks to technology, he says global marketing is now relatively inexpensive, and it allows business owners to reach markets where their products may be in demand.

"You can have products that may not be unique in our market, but certainly are in other markets, and those products could sell well in those markets. Internet marketing is a fairly inexpensive way to find that out."

Evans says the project encourages exporting of any kind, whether it is to another community or another country.

"From our perspective, in terms of our region, if (our businesses) end up all of a sudden attracting business from Thunder Bay or Winnipeg, as far as we're concerned that's an export order; it's an order they otherwise would not have had."