Growing your business requires heavy capital investment and a lack of sufficient working capital can suffocate your business growth and prevent your business from acting on once-in-a-lifetime growth opportunities. Internal investment in your people, the equipment they use, and the technology they work with can substantially increase your business productivity, leading to returns that grow exponentially. External business investment through expanding to new markets can also create returns that multiply as you gain valuable new contacts and develop new products and services that diversify your business offerings. However, there’s an opportunity to elevate your business with up to $5 million in funding
What’s the offer?
In order to help boost Canadian businesses in the domestic and global markets, the federal government is making substantial investments in regional innovation through the introduction of a Business Scale-Up Program (BSP). BSP offers repayable, interest-free funding to businesses, with priority funding given to small and medium enterprises that are ready for business growth and expansion.
The funding from BSP is intended to drive productivity improvements, business expansion, and technology commercialization. BSP funding can be used to adopt leading-edge technology and processes to accelerate productivity in your organization.
Investing in Productivity Improvement at your Business
Process re-engineering can create dramatic results for your business by reducing operating costs and improving quality, service, and speed. This leads to higher customer satisfaction that creates greater customer loyalty and builds your brand. Examples of process re-engineering include: combining job responsibilities to better utilize existing capacity, reducing unnecessary steps in day-to-day operations that create a substantial amount of cumulative waste, and evening out the workload to prevent spikes and drags in work volumes.
Additionally, improving manufacturing capacity can give you a huge advantage against your competition. Customers will appreciate the timeliness of the delivery of their orders and value suppliers that reliably meet their most demanding quotas. Capacity can be significantly increased through employee training, reducing defective output, and optimizing your business operations.
Important Funding Details:
- You may request $200,000 – $5,000,000 in funding.
- Your project must demonstrate that at least 50% of the project funding is from non-government sources (this includes all levels of government; municipal, provincial, and federal)
- In year 2 after the project has completed, there will be a 5-year interest-free repayment period with 60 equal monthly payments.
Project Requirements:
- Duration: Maximum 3 years
- The earliest project start date is April 1st, 2019
- Strong applications will showcase projects that are designed to produce strong economic outcomes (such as the creation of high-quality domestic jobs, revenue, and export sales growth for your organization)
- Organizations may submit 1 project application per company. Organizations must be incorporated businesses with operations in Canada for at least 2 years.
Project Type: Projects must fall under one of the following categories (if your project applies to more than 1 stream, narrow it down to 1 stream to apply to):
- Clean Technology
- Clean Resources
- Digital Technologies
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Value-added Agriculture
- Life Sciences
4 key application tips for a winning application.
- In your application, describe the leadership team of your organization’s management background. It is important to include any previous experience they may have with scaling up businesses to inspire confidence in the likelihood of success for your proposed business expansion project.
- If your application is for a project that will create productivity improvements at your organization, it can help to provide a clear explanation as to how the productivity enhancements will enable your company to grow in the future.
- Explain the economic benefits of your projects with the rationale you used to create the projections. Demonstrate that your organization will be financially viable to maintain business operations and pay back the value of the loan after the project concludes.
- For projects that will promote business expansion, ensure that you have a comprehensive business plan that includes independent market research. This serves to provide evidence of existing unmet market demand.
Applications are due January 11, 2019, at 2:00 p.m. MST and may be submitted online.
For comprehensive details on how to submit an application, please visit the Western Economic Diversification Canada website’s Business Scale Up and Productivity (BSP) Application Guide.
For further questions you may also contact the Western Economic Diversification team at:
Interested in a consultation? Contact Us
If you want to learn how to instill a culture of Continuous Improvement within your organization contact us at Propel Solutions today. We specialize in creating high performing teams and have a proven track record of powerful results.
Propel Solutions
- 📍 789 W. Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada
- 📞 604-346-5185
