KAMLOOPS-For the first time, Interior entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to attend a seminar close to home geared to helping them find capital for their innovations and budding enterprises.
“How to Raise Early Stage Capital,” a two-day seminar offered by the Advanced Technology Centre (ATC), Western Economic Diversification, and the Interior Science Innovation Council (ISIC), with support from Venture Kamloops, the National Research Council, and Community Futures offices from Salmon Arm, Quesnel, Williams Lake, Ashcroft and Merritt, will help developing businesses looking for financing to develop the tools they need to find potential investors and pitch their products.
“Raising external risk capital to grow their business is consistently rated by company founders and CEOs as their greatest challenge,” said Paul Johansen, director of ATC, the liaison office between industry and community groups with The University College of the Cariboo (UCC), which becomes Thompson Rivers University in April, 2005. “This conference will deal with the business-building activity rated most difficult by central-Interior CEOs engaged in manufacturing, technology, resource-based, and other growing companies.”
The seminar answers a strategic recommendation under the “Promoting Innovation and Commercialization in Rural BC” study undertaken by the government of BC and the federal Western Economic Diversification office last year, to “Increase access to financing, particularly at the early stages of business development, by the creative application of venture capital and debt financing options.”
Entrepreneurs in areas outside the lower mainland of BC have been experiencing difficulties related to finding investors to share the initial financial risks of new product development and launches, partly because of a lack of knowledge, an issue the seminar is geared to address.
Leading the workshop is Roger Killen of Waterford Executive Services, an expert in investor relations, the sales and marketing of financial products to retail investors, and the positioning and structuring of small businesses, who has already helped growth-oriented small businesses raise over $9 million in private early-stage equity over a 15-year period.
His “Investor-Ready” seminars have been highly successful in helping entrepreneurs seeking seed and expansion equity capital to understand the motivations and expectations of investors.
Shari McDowell of Kelowna-based Actus Communications attended one of Killen’s seminars in 2003.
“As someone who has been through the fundraising treadmill in the past, it would have been useful to have this seminar three years ago, before I made many of the costly and time-wasting mistakes that were addressed in the seminar,” she said. “I received a lot of excellent information on attracting angel and venture capital funds that just isn’t readily available anywhere else.”
The seminar, created specially for rural/interior entrepreneurs, will be held at UCC in Kamloops January 12th and 13th. It is comprised of seven modules, each focused on a separate area of pitching proposals to investors, including business image, documentation, inspiring investor confidence, a ten-step financing approach, grantsmanship, media relations, follow-up, and other strategies for finding, securing, and retaining capital.
The cost to each participant is $149 plus gst. Registration forms are available by calling 250-828-1713 or by emailing jfernie@isic.ca. For information about the seminar, the presenter, or the initiative, call Paul Johansen at 250-828-5147 or email: pjohansen@tru.ca
