By Michelle Li
Local entrepreneurs were given information, advice and contacts from the who’s who of the local business community at last week’s t third annual Ottawa Small Business Forum.
“The forum is like a shopping mall,” says Tarek El-Hennawy, regional business officer and booth representative for the Canada-Ontario Business Service Centre. “Entrepreneurs can get everything they need in one place.”
The sold-out event, held at the Ottawa Congress Centre, gave 250 attendees the chance to soak up information in various seminars and ask questions of legal experts and veteran business leaders.
Marianne Wilkinson, Kanata North city councillor, says the business forum is a great place to start doing your homework.
“If you’re going to be an entrepreneur,” she says, “you have to do it right and use these opportunities to learn, so that there are fewer surprises.”
According to Statistics Canada approximately 2.5 million Canadian workers, or 15.5 per cent of the workforce, was self-employed in 2005.
Since 2001, self-employment rose by 2.4 per cent.
Most of growth can be attributed to the construction and real estate sectors, both of which traditionally have a high concentration of entrepreneurs, according to the study.
Ottawa has a particularly high rate of self employment with 42,230 self-employed workers according to 2001 Census Data.
Ottawa is a great city for entrepreneurs because of its close proximity to the government and its several high institutions of learning, says Wilkinson.
“Ottawa has people with talent,” she says. “It is a knowledge-based city.”
Entrepreneur Catherine Pirie, who attended the event last year, says she returned this year because she made many contacts at the last forum.
As the president and sole employee of her company, Catapult Design, Pirie says that this particular forum, which cost her about $85, is perfect for small businesses.
“It’s more bang for your buck,” she says. “A lot of these kinds of forums are usually priced more than what small businesses can afford.”
Pirie says wanted to seek advice on whether or not she should expand her business.
Steven Haddon, senior business advisor with the Ministry of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, says there are significant benefits to attending forums as opposed to doing your own research.
“The Internet is not very user-friendly and there’s nothing like speaking to someone face-to-face,” he says.
Former Ottawa Senators’ owner Rod Bryden, CEO of Plasco Energy Group Inc., and Dianne Buckner, host of CBC’s Venture program were the keynote speakers at the forum.
Bryden’s main piece of advice to those who attended was to “pay some attention to your competition, but pay more attention to your customer.”
Stephen Daze, forum organizer and the executive director of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, agrees.
“Sometimes, entrepreneurs develop a product and it’s not what the customer wants,” he says. “Customers should be brought into the conception process much sooner.”
Daze, who once ran his own consulting business, was responsible for organizing the content of this year’s forum and choosing the speakers.
Though he says he hopes that the forum will help business beginners learn from the slip-ups of others, making mistakes can also be positive.
“You learn just as much from your failures as your successes,” he says.