For the past three years, Rob Lewis and Sheena Daniels have been the welcoming face of eBC, Small Business BC’s ebusiness advisory service for small business. They have provided freely available, on-demand information and advice about ebusiness for entrepreneurs, built a leading “ebusiness for small business” portal, developed a comprehensive lunchbox seminar series and maintained an informative blog. That all came to an end last month, when Rob’s and Sheena’s contracts were abruptly terminated.
For Rob and Sheena it’s a question of lemons and lemonade. Some of the companies that looked to them for free advice while they were at eBC quickly retained them for more focused consulting services. They’ve also started a new ebusiness blog that began receiving media attention within weeks. No question that Rob and Sheena are on to bigger things.
Amid rumblings of political manoevering, the real quandry is what will become of eBC. Some of those rumblings were very publicly aired as reader comments on eBC’s own blog – but those have since been removed. Small Business BC’s silence on the subject has been deafening, leaving British Columbia entrepreneurs to speculate on the future of this valuable service. As of the time of writing this post, I have been unsuccessful in reaching senior officials within eBC for comment.
There have been only four posts to the blog since mid-May – one of which introduces the webmaster as the interim keeper of the store. Wish him luck – he has big shoes to fill.
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This afternoon, e-BC contacted me to provide some additional information about the future of this organization. According to media representative Devon Hanley, “[e-BC wants] to make sure the small business community throughout BC knows that eBusiness Connections is going strong, supporting and helping small businesses to thrive in the e-business environment.”
To that end, e-BC has recently launched a revamped e-business suppliers database at ebizpages.ca. This Canada-wide directory offers enhanced services, including Google rankings. Please note that even if you’ve already listed your company in the old e-BC directory, you’ll need to resubmit to ebizpages.ca. According to Hanley, there are changes in the information required for companies to be listed and our national and provincial privacy laws prevent them from simply porting the database over. Check out the new services and let us know what you think…