Living in Guelph and looking to start a business? Need help growing your existing small business? This post is meant to provide you with a quick glance at key organizations and service available within the City of Guelph aimed at entrepreneurs and business owners.
Business Centre Guelph-Wellington
The Business Centre is your one-stop shop for everything your business needs to get started, grow and tap into. They have recently (January 2022) to Guelph City Hall and offer a number of virtual workshops ranging from digital marketing to preparing for taxes. The great thing about the Business Centre is that they offer a number of programs to help business owners at various stages of their entrepreneurship journey – from basic registration documentation to scaling growth!
Website: https://www.guelphbusiness.com/
Boundless Accelerator (formerly Innovation Guelph)
Similar to the Business Centre, Boundless Accelerator offers a wide variety of programs to help business scale their growth. While the Business Centre has a bigger focus on the starting journey, Boundless Accelerator offers acceleration and innovation programs aimed at small and even medium sized business looking to scale their growth rapidly (Quantum Drive program). In addition to programs and resources they also offer mentorship opportunities with a breadth of experts across various fields and specialties.
They built partnerships with key resources to help their clients get discounts and offer on key business services such as influencer marketing platforms (Embold), marketing agencies, and business funding services – just to name a few.
Website: https://boundlessaccelerator.ca//
Guelph Chambre of Commerce
Similar to all other Chambres of Commerce, by joining your business can get access to a number of perks and discounts on health and dental benefit providers, events and member to member discounts in the local area! They do quite a bit of advocacy on behalf of small businesses (particularly during COVID19 restrictions) and media relations to help advance the local economy. Chambre hosts a number of different events focused on a variety of topics both general and locally specific. For example, they offer annual ‘State of the City Address’ where the mayor outlines the city’s vision for the year to come and what that means for the local economy. Memberships depend on type of and size of organization, annual fees range anywhere from $122 for young enterpreneurs to $2,700 for organizations with over 2,000 employees.
Website: https://www.guelphchamber.com/
Grow Guelph
Growth Guelph dubs itself as the ‘Business Retention and Expansion Program (BR+E)’ for the city of Guelph. It is lead up by 12 partner organizations within the region (including all the organizations listed in this blog post). This resource is basically a directory of all the organizations providing support within city of Guelph – really a joint effort from various Guelph organizations to have a central hub for local businesses.
Website: https://growguelph.ca/
Guelph Economic Development
This is direct support, information and resources lead up by the City of Guelph. Your organization can find various updates, online business services and planning and development happenings within the city. They put in an effort to spotlight local businesses and provide easy access to licenses and permits needed for specific requests (business licence, Guelph Fire Department Business licence, etc). As the Business Centre is backed by government funding – the recommendation here for any business support is directed back to the Business Centre. My favourite part is all the local shop listings by category and online shopping platforms that help locally owned organizations!
Website: https://guelph.ca/business/
Downtown Guelph Business Association
As the name suggest, this is a resource for businesses in the downtown core. It is made up of about 500 businesses within the area (you can see here the geographic breakdown of what is considered the downtown core). The purpose is mainly to promote downtown organizations and help bring vibrancy the city’s core. The neat setup here is that the Boards of Directors and other members are made up of businesses within the area, along with municipal staff who truly understand the local economy. The website itself acts as a niche directory of businesses by service, things to do, parking locations and upcoming events.
Website: https://downtownguelph.com/
The Hub Incubator Program
While this is exclusive to University of Guelph students and alumni, I thought it was worthwhile mentioning. I believe this was created as a result of the overwhelming success of entrepreneurship resources in neighbouring tech mecca of Canada; UWaterloo’s Velocity Incubator and WLU’s Lazaridis ScaleUp Program. While not on the same global stage as those examples, UofG’s The Hub Incubator Program offers funding, office space and mentorship through experience entrepreneurs in order to get their business idea’s off the ground. It is truly focused on startups and new ideas that come from current and past students.