Penticton focus on helping business grow

Business owners learn early that keeping existing customers is easier and less costly than recruiting new ones.

For the City of Penticton, that translates to bolstering the existing business community, keeping them in town and creating an encouraging climate for expansion.

Retention and expansion, labour and business attraction, were two key areas that have come out of recent studies, including the business climate survey conducted earlier this year.

Related: City changes economic development direction

A new business portal — pentictonbiztoolkit.com —that launched this week is part of their solution to the problem, as well as attracting and supporting new businesses.

“A lot of economic development tools are focused on attraction, bringing new businesses into the community. It is very difficult in small communities to attract large employers into the community,” said Anthony Haddad, director of development services.

The question city hall is trying to answer is what can be done to help existing businesses to thrive.

Jennifer Vincent, from the city’s economic development team, said discussions with local businesses have turned up a number of different aspects to the issue.

“We’re trying to look at all these different aspects, because no one answer is going to resolve anything, certainly not for the variety of businesses we have in town,” said Vincent. “But we can start to hear a common thread. Labour is difficult, housing is hard to come by, it’s expensive. What is our Penticton brand, how can we make that stronger?

“There is a perception, externally, that Penticton survives solely on the tourism market. Is that really true?”

The new Penticton Business Toolkit is an answer to one of the threads they discovered with businesses.

“Constantly, they were saying local data, access to information, information to help business grow, streamlining and helping analyze data,” said Vincent. “The theme was recurrent. Having struggled myself to find that data, I was happy to find this tool.”

Built by Local Intel, a Calgary company, the new site is a customized template for Penticton, with hard data and statistics drawn from major databases, like Statistics Canada and B.C. Statistics.

“This was something that could roll out really quickly,” said Vincent. “We can update the local information that gives that local flavour.”

The data the city is providing is based on questions the city receives from questions the city gets asked, about business locations, zoning, population, trends and more.

Previously, you could search through different parts of the Penticton.ca website like building stats or other helpful planning information.

“But you really had to be aggressive and knowledgeable about what kind of stats were out there,” said Vincent.

The new online toolkit is the latest in a series of indicative and changes the city has been focusing on as part of economic development over the years.

Related: Working together on the economy

Haddad said the work appears to be paying off.

“The last two to three years, we’ve seen a lot of investment come into the community in terms of housing development,” said Haddad. Vincent added that, though there are no firm figures, what they are hearing is there is a lot more working-age young families moving to Penticton to take advantage of the lifestyle opportunities.

Haddad also said the number of business licences is rising. When he started working for the City of Penticton in 2009, the average was about 2,400 licences annually.

“Now we average between 2,800 and 3,000 business licences a year, for the last two to three years,” said Haddad.

The City of Penticton is also hosting a business conference, FutureBiz, this fall to help support and inform business owners.

Related: Penticton’s FutureBiz offers economic outlook