BDC Small Business Week to Celebrate Entrepreneurs Next Month

According to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), small and medium-sized businesses make up 99.8 percent of all Canadian companies, while 86 percent of exporting businesses have fewer than 100 employees. Why not celebrate it then?

The BDC’s Small Business Week is coming to Canada October 20-26, and the federally-supported financial institute wants entrepreneurs to join in.

This year’s theme is “Success Ahead: Map your Future Growth,” and the week will feature speaking engagements by the BDC’s president Jean-René Halde and vice president Pierre Cléroux. Both speakers will “share new research findings and strategic insights that will enable businesses to effectively plan for future growth.”

Halde will give talks in both Toronto and Montreal, on October 23 and 24, and will discuss entrepreneurs’ biggest challenges, giving special attention to the importance of growth, as well as the role of the broader business community in helping create the conditions for prosperity.

Meanwhile, Cléroux will speak in Burnaby, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Quebec City that same week.

To conclude it all on October 25, Cléroux will take over BDC’s Twitter feed to answer questions on the five major trends that will have a lasting impact on Canadian consumers’ behaviours.

The Small Business Week website also features a map that shows several smaller, local events throughout Canada, and it will be updated regularly. Moreover, the site has already begun releasing a series of articles aimed at helping entrepreneurs, such as “E-commerce revolution”, “Financing business growth”, “Here’s how to improve your odds abroad” and “Working the web, and Boomers and your business”.

Small Business Week is a Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) trademark whose origins date back to 1979 when BDC business centres in British Columbia’s Lower Fraser Valley pooled their resources to organize a week of activities for entrepreneurs. That first event, as well as the one that followed in 1980 were so successful that BDC officially launched Small Business Week across Canada in 1981. In 2012, over 200 activities across Canada attracted close to 10,000 business people to Small Business Week. The BDC flagship event celebrates entrepreneurship at the local, provincial and national levels.