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The Stratford Perth Centre for Business announced Monday that it’s launching a new version of its Starter Company Plus program specifically for applicants who are from the arts and culture industry.

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This new iteration of the program, which has run for the past eight years, provides mentorship and a grant of as much as $5,000 to qualified entrepreneurs from Stratford, St. Marys and Perth County. For this version of the program, the centre for business will consider applications from actors, writers, designers, carpenters, food creators, tourism-related venture and similar entrepreneurs from these communities.

“A large percentage of the intake that we had in the program in years prior, without a focus, has been in the arts and culture space, and kind of pairing that with a lot of the economic drivers that tend to exist here. I thought (we could) create a focused program where the content we can deliver has that creative entrepreneur in mind,” business adviser Holly Mortimer said.

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“What we’re looking for are entrepreneurs that are either doing this part time – so as a side hustle, but aren’t sure how to create this with traditional business foundations in order to grow – or somebody that was never taught (how to run a business).”

Funded by the provincial government, the Starter Company program will provide five weeks of training that will run every other week from Jan. 6 to March 3, as well as three separate  but non-mandatory – one-hour sessions. The training, which will focus on business planning, cash flow, operations and marketing, must be competed before participants receive their grant. The intent is to help entrepreneurs build their businesses in other ways beyond the grant, Mortimer said.

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“(It’s) let’s help you build a great business foundation for growth, and then you can get the grant, so the grant is an award at the end,” she said.

While artistic entrepreneurs face many of the same challenges that other new business owners encounter, they often have not been taught how to integrate their creative skills into a business, Mortimer said.

“So even if you are an actor, you are running your own business, or if you’re a visual artist, you are your own business, but at no point in time are you ever given any tools or resources or education on how to run that business. So I think they come at it from a deficit on two angles. One, there has been no education traditionally in their field, but two, the way their mind thinks, it’s not easy to kind of come to a traditional planning phase when asking for money which is required,” she said.

More information on the program, including the application form, can be found online at stratfordperthbusiness.ca.

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