A new Coast-based website is aiming to unite the many successful home and basement businesses that make up a big piece of the Coast's economy and get them working together for the benefit of all.
Best Coast Initiatives (BCI), the Sunshine Coast's economic development organization, recently launched the Intelligence Services Cluster Network website.
Michael McLaughlin, BCI's economic development officer, said the benefits of clustering similar businesses, either physically or virtually, tend to compound on each other. And the Coast has a lot of those businesses.
"My guess is it's many, many hundreds, in the 600 or 700 range, and it could be as many as a thousand," McLaughlin said. "These are exporting businesses. They are exporting their services around the world, and by bringing them together as a cluster, they can increase their business reach because they can now look at an assignment for which they don't have the in-house capacity, but if they just had a graphic artist, if they just had a design person or editor, they are now able to take on assignments that they couldn't otherwise do."
The website offers businesses a chance to get to know and communicate with one another, better market themselves to each other and clients around the world and pool their abilities for joint ventures. The result, McLaughlin said, will be further success and growth of those businesses.
"This brings in more revenue to these businesses. The main part of economic development is strengthening what you already have. They make more money, which means they spend more money, which means some of them will hire more subcontractors or even employees," he said.
Beyond that, McLaughlin said, having this type of service available will make the Sunshine Coast a huge draw for other businesses to set up shop here.
"Once the cluster is up and going, we can now market the Sunshine Coast as not just a beautiful place to live with wonderful amenities, as many communities do - we can offer them an additional advantage. Bring your business here and you will be up and running faster because you will be immediately connected to a network of businesses you can use to do your work and find work and extend your competitive reach."
McLaughlin said the site was designed based on the survey responses of 60 intelligence services businesses on the Coast, and the result has been a sort of social network type site that is quickly winning fans from Coast business owners.
"The original 60 surveyed businesses are rapidly signing on. You can't believe how enthusiastic they are about this," McLaughlin said. "The trick now is reaching those businesses behind the trees, in homes and in basements and letting them know that this thing exists."
One such fan is Laurie McConnell, creator of the award-winning BigPacific.com. "The portal allows us to do a lot of outsourcing to each other for shared projects, and collaborative projects are going to be the massive way to develop anything now," McConnell said.
She said she has been trying for years to get more co-ordination between local technology businesses, but still meets people who have useful skills entirely by chance.
"A lot of us don't know who we all are and what we're doing. Having that all in one place allows Coastal businesses to use that network better. It allows us to leverage all our connections in the industry and it attracts more businesses like that to the Coast," she said. "This is exactly what we want to be doing in this kind of space."
McConnell said she has high hopes for the website to grow and draw more tech industry people to the Coast. Funding for the $6,000 site was provided by each of the Coast's local governments.
See more at www.coastisc.net.
