Province puts $750K into entrepreneur support program

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This article was published 28/10/2020 (1422 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The provincial government is investing $750,000 towards a three-year project to uplift young entrepreneurs in Manitoba — estimating it will create at least 400 jobs through 150 new businesses.

Under the initiative, Futurpreneur Canada plans to provide loans of up to $50,000 to kickstart companies that are led by 18- to 39-year-olds, along with two years of tailored mentorship from leading business experts in the region. 

It’s “an integral part of our plan to restart and recover our economy, and to combat the effects of COVID-19,” said Ralph Eichler, Manitoba’s minister for economic development and training. 

“Our government is proud to take proactive action,” he said in a statement to the Free Press Wednesday. “We believe this will be an invaluable resource to the innovative and ambitious young people who will be critical to building Manitoba’s future economy.”

As a non-profit organization that’s been providing early-stage financing for Canadian startups for the last two decades, CEO Karen Greve Young said Futurpreneur has been constantly readjusting its efforts this past year to “best mitigate the brutal effects of the pandemic.”

She says startups across Canada are now entering a transformational environment, “which hasn’t made supporting them exactly easy.”

According to recent numbers from the Royal Bank of Canada, new businesses will be down by more than $500 billion in output until at least 2022. And figures from Statistics Canada show about two-thirds of the nearly million businesses that have closed this year are those that just started before the pandemic.

“It was so hard to see a dimming of the entrepreneurial spirit in the early days of COVID-19,” said Young Wednesday. “But I’ve been so happy to watch how resilient young business owners have been to cope with everything — by creating new companies where they could, pivoting themselves where possible, and trying their best to survive in an impossible economy.”

She said the most difficult time for a new business is when it’s starting out. “But that’s also where all the best and most creative ideas come from,” Young added. “And we know that supporting them is what will likely find us a way out of this economic crisis.”

After providing funding through a “blended” model (backed by government investments such as Manitoba’s), Futurpreneur will tag business owners with a mentor to nail down their entrepreneurial ideas through a viable plan of action. They will then be advised on local connections to create ideal market strategies so they can sustain their specific company over the coming years, and provide operational knowledge of how start-up costs and cash-flow can be managed.

“It’ll be a lot of hand-holding,” said Young. “But we want to watch them succeed and we want to see them flourish out of this difficult economy.”

 

Futurpreneur is also hoping to provide cash prizes of $10,000 to at least eight entrepreneurs through a separate program next June, with funding from the Royal Bank of Canada.

“Funding for this program is part of Manitoba’s #RestartMB plan to reopen the economy. Those interested can sign up online on Futurpreneur’s website.”

Twitter: @temurdur

Temur.Durrani@freepress.mb.ca