The North Bay and District Chamber of Commerce has launched a new program with the goal of helping young entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
It’s called Fifty-Two Coffees and requires participants to meet weekly to talk about their business to other participants of the program.
The initiative is the idea of Bobby Ray, the General Manager of the North Bay Granite Club.
Ray has been toying with the concept for five years and decided to talk to the chamber about it in his capacity as chair of the organization’s Young Professionals Committee.
The chamber liked what it heard and on Thursday it launched the program with more than 50 participants at the Twiggs Coffee Roasters on McKeown.
Ray says the idea is for people under 40 to meet one-on-one on a weekly basis over coffee for the next 52 weeks and talk about elements of their business.
Ray says by telling other business people about aspects of your business, the intent is to have them talking to others or doing something that increases awareness about a business.
Ray said recently he was talking to the general manager at Homewood Suites and happened to mention that the curling at the Granite Club is open to the public every first Friday of the month.
Ray says the manager told him the Homewood has a staff calendar of events and she was planning to add his curling information to it.
He says by doing little things like this awareness of a business grows and it could result in more people taking up curling.
“In North Bay, you hear, it’s not what you know, but who you know that can get you ahead,” Ray said.
“That got us thinking that if you know just one more person every week, in a year that’s 52 people. That makes for a lot of connections and a lot of people who start looking out for you, your business or ideas they perpetuate within their own network.”
Ray says 84 young professionals have registered for the program and each time they finish the meeting, they’re to post the outcome of their meeting on social media.
“We’ll track their stories and see what reactions they get,” Ray said.
“Then we’ll be able to ask if they noticed an increase in their business directly related to this program. Did someone you meet help you in some specific way? That’s the kind of feedback we’ll be looking for.”
Ray says if the program is successful this year, chances are the chamber will repeat it in 2020.
He says the public can follow the program throughout the year by going to any social media platform and then type in the search bar #FiftyTwoCoffees and all the stories to date should pop up.