BC Business
Small business Canada | BCBusinessAccording to a recent CIBC study, around 500,000 Canadians started their own businesses in June 2012 alone.
Canada is becoming more entrepreneurial and B.C. is leading the charge. Nearly half of businesses in B.C. now are soloist, or self-employment, operations. Well, glory be. It seems Canada is finally becoming a country of entrepreneurs. This is according to a recent study from CIBC which discovered this summer that half a million Canadians said they had begun their own businesses in the month of June.
Well, glory be. It seems Canada is finally becoming a country of entrepreneurs.
This is according to a recent study from CIBC which discovered this summer that half a million Canadians said they had begun their own businesses in the month of June.
Apparently 15 per cent of Canada’s labour force now walks the BYOB path — Be Your Own Boss. And increasingly, the BYOB advocates are older. The over-50 crowd represents 30 per cent of all the new startups.
They’re also more likely to be Western. Of course, here in B.C., we’re not so shocked about this trend.
According to the B.C. government’s resource site, as of 2011, there were 84.2 small businesses per 1,000 people in the province. That works out to be the highest proportion of small businesses in the country.
Most of these small businesses — 82 per cent, or 316,600 — are micro businesses, meaning they have fewer than four employees, and 57 per cent of those are self-employed, or soloist, businesses.
So we have 180,462 people in this province whose core working belief is BYOB. That’s 46 per cent of all businesses.
Why are there so many here in B.C.?
I think it’s because we have relatively few big businesses to employ people. So when someone moves here from say, Toronto, they usually build a business around their skill.
After a while, they begin to like the life and don’t want a “job” any more — unless it’s interesting enough to lure them away from BYOB.