Join Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre’s April 13 Coffee Talk with Barrie Mayor Jeff Lehman
April 9, 2020
Challenging times are ahead for area businesses and Georgian’s Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre (HBEC) is dedicated to helping businesses succeed and is aware of the challenges the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is creating for their clients.
HBEC has built a business hub with a variety of resources to assist local companies, in particular those with less than 500 employees that would be considered small and medium-sized businesses. They make up 80 per cent of companies in our region. HBEC is also aiming to provide specific resources for small companies (less than 20 employees) because they may be the hardest hit.
The goal of the hub is to make it easier for local companies to find quality information and resources. There’s a vast amount of information on the web right now. The college’s post-graduate researchers have taken on the task of combing through everything to find the most relevant information. The content is focused on doing three things:
- Share articles that help businesses forecast the coming months so they can better develop strategies to cope with short-, medium-, or longer-term shutdowns. These articles help to answer these questions: What will the next month look like? How long might the COVID-19 pandemic affect the economy and in what ways?
- Share best practices on how companies can adjust their operations. We’re collecting information on practical options for companies such as managing cash flow, accessing government funding when it becomes available, shifting to e-commerce, managing suppliers, and navigating challenges with import/export.
- Provide tips and best practices on how companies can maintain good communication with both their employees and customers.
“We realized that businesses in Central Ontario would need support now more than ever,” says Jamie Doran, Executive Director, Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Georgian. “We have a great team of experts and mentors who are all committed to helping and we wanted to use our collective knowledge and the resources of our extended network to bring important and timely information to companies in this region. The hub represents just a part of our strategy to help companies. We’re also running several online programs to reach companies in different ways, such as Coffee Talk every Monday morning, where companies can connect with our business mentors and each other live online.
More than 50 people have been tuning into the weekly hour-long Coffee Talks which start at 10 a.m. and include a Q&A with the featured mentor.
The April 13 Coffee Talk will feature Mayor Jeff Lehman, City of Barrie.
