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Loyal Employees are Your Most Valuable Asset

Last month I talked about how important it is to do your due diligence in recruiting, hiring, and training new employees. When you have hired the best, you want to keep them because good employees are challenging to find in this competitive labour market. Are you properly armed to win the employee retention battle? The…

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Do it Right or Do it Over

Gather together a group of business owners or managers today and the topic of conversation naturally turns to the difficulty of recruiting and retaining employees. The first of two articles on these challenges, this one will deal with recruitment issues. The cost to recruit and train an employee for an entry-level position is estimated to…

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Focus on What You Can Control

The brave souls who go into business for themselves are continuously faced with challenges to their success. Some of these will be outside their control. For example, businesses in this area have had to cope with downturns in the economy as well as competition from outside areas including big box and online sellers. We have…

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The Knock-out Punch of a Testimonial

This email from one of our members arrived in my inbox one day. The sender had copied it to five employees within his organization. It read: “Hi Denny I am writing to express my most sincere gratitude to the Saanich Peninsula Chamber of Commerce for the unbelievable support you have offered to EMCS Industries Ltd…

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Our Economy is Delivered by Truck

You likely have not given much thought to how the items you buy arrived at the store. Almost 90% of all consumer goods (by weight) in Canada are moved, for at least a portion of their journey, by truck. On Vancouver Island that number is much closer to 100% as we rely, almost exclusively, on…

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Transformative Disruption in the Workplace

Gather two or more employers together and discussion naturally turns to difficulties they are experiencing in hiring and retaining employees. Many Peninsula businesses have ‘Help Wanted’ signs in their windows. Finding staff with the appropriate skills and experience is the most commonly-expressed challenge. This situation has arisen due to a convergence of factors: one being…

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Building Bridges Between Institutions – Part 3

Employers report that new workers entering the workforce often do not have the skills required to fulfill the terms of their employment. In addition, much of the existing workforce requires retraining to update their skills so companies can continue to compete in the changing economy. Educational institutions and local employers would benefit from a closer…

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It Takes a Region to Raise an Economy – Part 2 of 3

Last month I discussed the strategy of growing the economy by attracting more people to live in an area and suggested the most desirable groups to target based on their ability and willingness to contribute to the overall health of a community are baby boomers, entrepreneurial immigrants and millennials. Now we will look at how…

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Economic Growth through Population Growth Part I in a series

There was a significant shift between the old and new economies that occurred between the 1990’s and 2000’s. The old economy is filled with success stories of companies whose road to prosperity began initially by identifying an inexpensive place to do business in a community with preferential zoning and taxation policies and ideally, an established…

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Shut Up and Listen!

Many years ago I had the privilege to work on a community economic development project with Ernesto Sirolli. Lessons from that project and from his book Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion Entrepreneurship and the Rebirth of Local Economies, have long resonated. His lifelong passion for empowering entrepreneurs is inspirational and instructional when considering how we…