Office Interiors Confident About Greater Halifax's Future
It’s no surprise that Office Interiors is involved in the Greater Halifax Partnership’s SmartBusiness initiative. Founded in 1991, Office Interiors started as an office furnishings company and has evolved to add copiers and printers, interior modular construction, mailing systems and office supplies. Partnering with international leaders like Haworth and Ricoh has been key to its success, giving president and CEO Jim Mills a healthy appreciation for the power of cooperation. "We’re proud to have been involved in the Greater Halifax Partnership since its inception," he says. "It’s a terrific model."
That’s why SmartBusiness appealed immediately. SmartBusiness is the Greater Halifax Partnership’s innovative approach to business retention and expansion aimed at determining what issues are impeding business growth and then solving them. To do that, the Partnership is meeting with 700 businesses this year. "One of the key premises for the Greater Halifax Partnership is to retain and grow business," Mills explains. "SmartBusiness provides a great vehicle to share issues and concerns."
Some businesses face specific issues (a human-resources crunch, for instance) but others have more general concerns (such as government regulations). The value in SmartBusiness is that it shows all businesses that someone is listening. "This speaks to one of the reasons why Atlantic Canada is such a great place to live and work," Mills says. "You have prominent businesses and business people willing to invest resources and time to help each other." And this is no flash-in-the-pan program. "This isn’t some six-month thing," he emphasizes. "It’s a never-ending process. It’s a Total Quality Management type of program, where we’re always looking for ways to do things better."
That has concrete payoffs. "The biggest thing for us is to build confidence in the business community," he says. Statistics collected through the visits bear witness to that. The majority of businesses evaluate Halifax’s business climate as "good or excellent," and expect it to be even better by 2010. "Our business confidence was high to start with," he adds. "This provides specific measures."
And ultimately, that’s good for everybody--not just business. "It becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because SmartBusiness gives businesses the confidence to invest, expand, employ more people and grow," Mills says. "People tend to talk about the business like it’s something separate from the rest of the community but it’s really not: business is the community, the community is business."