Off the Ground Blog
Happy BC Craft Beer Week!
We are excited for all craft brewing enthusiasts to come together and celebrate the strides that have been made in the brewing industry around British Columbia! For a list of events that are happening throughout the week, visit this site and enjoy invigorating conversation about your business venture over a delicious beer.
5 Important Factors in Measuring Social Enterprise Value
Assessment of the social value of your organization can be labor-intensive and costly. Usually the positive effects are felt outside of your organization and in the greater community, making it difficult to measure and outside of the usual assessment domain.
Industry Overview: Nonprofits
The non-profit industry is a diverse industry composed of entities focusing on technology, education, health, the arts and many other areas. There are several terms used to refer to non-profits, such as charities, not-for-profit and social enterprise, making it somewhat confusing to figure out how your non-profit idea should be categorized.
Industry Overview: Tourism Business
British Columbia is world renowned for its countless tourist treasures, and the tourism industry is designed to fulfill the vacationing, traveling, and sight-seeing needs of tourists to our province.
Resource Review – Statistics Canada’s Newsletter for Small and Medium Sized Business
Statistics Canada’s Newsletter for Small and Medium Sized Business is a great resource to stay current with trends and statistics in the Canadian market and consumer demographics. [UPDATE: see below]
Customer Retention: Four Ways to Fight Churn – Video Content Roundup
When startups invest in marketing, they usually devote most of their energy to finding new customers. This makes sense: after all, fresh sources of revenue allow a business to grow, so why not try to court as many customers as possible? However, true as this may be, it’s important to remember that acquisition is simply one side of the marketing coin—and the other is retention. It’s significantly more expensive to sign a new customer than it is to keep an old one, so it’s crucial to find ways to keep your rate of churn (i.e. the frequency of customers jumping ship) as low as possible.
2014 Funding Roadshow
The SBA program, together with Fundica, invites you to the 2014 Funding Roadshow, designed to educate and fund entrepreneurs.
Industry Overview: Florist Shop Business
A florist shop is a retail establishment that sells cut flowers and ornamental plants. The floral trade involves activities such as flower care, flower arranging, floral design, merchandising, and often flower delivery. Florist shops are an ever popular industry and one of the most searched guides on our website. As such, we want to provide you with a current industry overview, trends and challenges as well as provide some research resources for those interested in the florist shop business.
Co-founder Partnerships: Four Tips for Buddying Up – Video Content Roundup
There’s no getting around the fact that entrepreneurship is hard work. The rewards can be tremendous, but the time and effort that goes into building a company from the ground up is more than most people can handle—by themselves, anyway. To ease the burden of managing a startup, many entrepreneurs go into business with a co-founder. Splitting the responsibility takes some of the load off your back while also providing a second set of opinions and strategies that can steer your company in the right direction. However, co-founding a startup is a tricky endeavour in itself.