Headhunting and Succession Planning
Our Westman/Brandon entrepreneurs focused much of their attention on new ideas and solutions in the areas of immigration, high growth support, and succession planning. However, several traditional favourites like one-stop-shops for entrepreneurial support services and youth entrepreneurship networks were also championed, which continues to reinforce the importance and universal need to build these solutions into Canada’s entrepreneurial future. Let’s jump right into the top new ideas.
Job Immigration Bank (JIB) positioned the development of an online training school that would train new immigrants to apply their existing skill sets towards entrepreneurial endeavours. The JIB team noted that a critical component to the online training tool would be the recruitment of top quality instructors who would be able to teach new immigrants the critical skills they would need to start their own business, while simultaneously providing advice and guidance on how to best apply their existing skill sets to the startup domain. The group also noted that the online training school could become a platform to connect talented and trained immigrants with new startups looking to acquire a critical skill set from the schools graduate pool.
Immigration Welcome Package further built on the ideas of the Job Immigration Bank and positioned the development of a complete entrepreneurial support package that would provide all of the critical resources, tools, training, and guidance that an immigrant would need to startup their own business and succeed. The Immigration Welcome Package team indicated that they would work very closely with all of their local stakeholders from the enterprise support, mentorship, economic development, and academic communities – plus existing and successful immigrant entrepreneurs – to collectively develop the key tools and resources of the package. The group also noted that they would aim to translate all core materials, and make sure that all package resources would be accessible across language and cultural barriers, which would require working closely with local immigrant communities.
Succession to Success positioned a new, for-profit, professional service network that would help entrepreneurs smoothly transition their business to other entrepreneurs within or outside their family or organization. The Succession to Success group noted that they would take a contingency fee based on the total value of the transition of the business. Succession to Success would be staffed with (or would contract with) top local experts from legal, accounting, conflict resolutions, estate planning, financial planning, risk management, etc. backgrounds and would provide a focused package of high quality, professional advice and services to firms and entrepreneurs looking to plan for the future of their business’s operations under new leadership and governance structures.
Moving Forward Inc. positioned the development of a clearing house for talent specifically targeted at helping firms to achieve and sustain high growth status. The first step in the development of Moving Forward Inc. would be to work with local enterprise support groups, professional service firms, new startups, and existing high growth firms to identify the critical talent requirements that are essential to reaching and sustaining high growth status. Once these critical talent requirements are collectively identified, Moving Forward Inc. would then aim to create a local database or roster of all of the options available to local firms to secure credible, reliable, and high quality talent in each of the core areas, and would connect firms in need to this local talent pool. Firms aiming to achieve high growth results would pay a matchmaking fee to Moving Forward, who would operate much like a headhunter and find the right talented resources to respond to the targeted high growth challenges of its clients.
The Westman/Brandon Town Hall developed many new and insightful ideas to address Canada’s entrepreneurial challenges. We were thrilled to see innovative new solutions in the areas of immigration, succession planning, and targeted support for high growth firms emerge, and look forward to tracking the implementation of these new concepts within the Westman/Brandon community.
