This past weekend I had the privilege of attending the community awards — The Glassies.
I want to start by saluting all of the nominees and recipients of the Glassies, with a special shout out to those nominees in the Entrepreneur of the Year category: Kelly Forrest & Alex Fras of Bee U Organics; Kira Sanchez of Health First Massage Therapy and Holistics and Beth Alden of Kickstart Fitness.
An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways of combining resources.
Entrepreneurs take enormous personal risk to turn their innovative ideas into reality and they are fully responsible for the resulting outcome. Entrepreneurs are extremely hard working and innovative.
It is that innovation that is so beneficial to their businesses and our community at large. It is innovation that gives us new ideas, new ways of doing things and new products. Innovation in the space industry has given us an enormous array of beneficial products everything from Corelle dinnerware to robots and even the UPC barcode which identifies products with a quick scan came from the space program.
Entrepreneurship is about finding your passion and learning how to market it. It is like swimming in cold water. The first few seconds are cold, really cold and many people get out immediately. But for those who stay in, what is amazing that after about 30 seconds, your body starts to warm up and you start to feel fine.
We need more passionate, entrepreneurial experimenters in our region and we are currently preparing a marketing program to attract more entrepreneurs to come and enjoy living and creating in our communities, hopefully creating a few jobs along the way to the cold water aversive. Stay tuned for more details.
— Kim Burden is the executive director of the Parksville and District Chamber of Commerce. E-mail: Kim@parksvillechamber.com
