By paNOW Staff

Consultants to help attract investors to city

Jun 18, 2011 | 7:18 AM

The City of Prince Albert and the North Central Enterprise Region are hoping some outside help can be used to attract more businesses into the community.

Over the next few weeks, the consulting company Rainmaker will be researching the area to find out what kind of investors would best suit the city and surrounding regions.

The research will take the form of interviews with businesses and other community members.

In a way, the research is the second phase of work already done by the NCER. Earlier, they had conducted a market study to find what the community needed in terms of services.

This phase, said NCER executive director John Ondrusek is about finding the right businesses to fill those gaps.

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“Now we’re ready to do the applied work, which is getting out there, generating leads and doing an outcall program to find who’s suitable for our region, bring them back here and get them to know our area and show them the opportunities here,” he said.

Ondrusek said not only was the next step needed to get results, but also that the community was ready to take the next step.

“The City of Prince Albert and the region are open to new investors,” he said. “It’s not ‘not-in-my-backyard,’ it’s yes, this will help our community out and help create jobs.”

According to Clarke Grue, president and CEO of Rainmaker, the time is right for Prince Albert to put itself out there for business development.

“When you see what’s happening in the resource sector, and a lot of the opportunities in the north, there’s tremendous opportunity,” he said.

“An interesting thing about Saskatchewan is that we’re not really well known. So a big part about this is getting the message out about what the opportunities are.”

Once the program is complete, the city and the region should have useful business development leads as well as best practices and how to move forward.

Money from the program is being provided for by the department of foreign affairs and international trade.

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