Happy Valley-Goose Bay business owners map road to success in small, remote town

Even though there are less than 10,000 people in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, business is booming. 

It is, at least, for entrepreneurs who identified distinct gaps in the town’s services, and jumped at the opportunity to fill them. 

Business owners in the community will tell you that responding to specific needs and providing good quality work and service is enough to keep you going.   

Terry Whey is one of them. 

He took his shoe repair business to Happy Valley-Goose Bay in 1992 after learning the town was in need of one. 

Because he was moving from St. John’s to a rural area, he was able to get a hand setting up shop from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA). 

We don’t go looking for work. It just keeps coming in the door.– Terry Whey

The shoe repair shop was busy, but after a little while he learned customers were often looking for specific canvas products that weren’t locally available. 

That’s when Whey’s focus shifted into manufacturing canvas tents and knapsacks, and Terry’s Tents was born. 

“We don’t go looking for work. It just keeps coming in the door,” Whey said. 

“I think people have seen our products and they’re happy with them, and then they just tell their friends … and sometimes good products just sell themselves.”

Whey works six days a week and hasn’t spent a dime on marketing in the last 20 years.  

The work isn’t slowing down, but he is. After 32 years, Whey is preparing for retirement. 

He’s trying to find a buyer for Terry’s Tents, but if he doesn’t find one his booming business will have to close its doors, and people in Happy Valley-Goose Bay will have to look elsewhere. 

MÓR Meats is a specialty butcher shop in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Owner Niamh Roche said business is good, but could be better, so she’s decided to expand. (Mór Meats/Facebook)

Niamh Roche, meanwhile, only opened her butcher shop in 2022. But after 18 months in business, she’s ready to expand. 

“We feel that we’ve kind of maxed out what we can do in our current location,” Roche said. 

“I feel in order for the business to survive, it really does need to take this step. It’s a huge investment for us and it’s a huge risk, but we feel that we’ve built up a strong customer base.”

Roche believes a larger and more centralized storefront

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STEM Means Business: Clarkson University’s David D. Reh School of Business Prepares Students for Industry Success with STEM-Designated Programs

POTSDAM, NY, Jan. 26, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — At Clarkson University, STEM is the path forward. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are the backbone of a Clarkson education and across its academic spectrum, STEM is the catalyst for innovation and learning. 

At Clarkson, STEM means business. 

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The David D. Reh School of Business is integral to Clarkson’s proven STEM-focused education, research and innovation ecosystem. Recently, the School’s Bachelor of Science in Business Analytics degree became the newest of several business programs at Clarkson to be STEM-designated. 

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Clarkson’s Reh School of Business is among an elite cadre of higher education institutions that offer degrees recognized by the U.S. government as STEM-designated programs. This designation indicates an advantageous impact on both students and U.S. industry and an increased level of rigor and quantitative skill development in the curriculum.    

Other STEM-designated programs within the Reh School of Business include the Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Management, Master of Science in Healthcare Data Analytics, and MBA in Business Analytics.

“The future of Clarkson is STEM. I think it’s important that we recognize the “B” in “STEM” is silent. Our business programs are STEM. They are highly analytical, highly technical and a core piece of Clarkson,” said Clarkson University President Marc P. Christensen, Ph.D., P.E. “The recognition of this STEM designation is an affirmation of what we knew to be true all along. We are ensuring that we set our students on a path to success working in business with companies that will advance technology that serves humanity.”

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“I am thrilled to announce the STEM designation for our Business Analytics program, joining a prestigious lineup that includes the BS in Engineering and Management, MBA in Business Analytics, and MS in Healthcare Data Analytics,” said Bebonchu Atems, Interim Dean of the Reh School of Business. “The expansion of STEM designation across multiple programs underscores our dedication to excellence in education, ensuring our students are equipped with the essential skills for success in a technology-driven world.”

The STEM designation provides international students with the opportunity to gain additional real-world experience in the U.S. as well. Those with a student visa can apply to extend their 12 months of optional practical training for an additional 24 months post-graduation.

Clarkson’s business programs are designed with the same STEM mindset as the corporate partners who recruit Clarkson students for industry-relevant careers.

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Paul Goddard’s Recipe for Success Has a Dash of Flexibility

On November 17, Canadian Business hosted a virtual fireside chat with Paul Goddard, president and CEO of Pizza Pizza, and SJC’s group publisher Jason Maghanoy.

Under Goddard’s leadership, Pizza Pizza has won a Webby Award for its app, along with numerous franchising and marketing awards, including being named one of Canada’s Most Admired Cultures in 2022 and Strategy Magazine’s Brand of the Year in 2023.

With an academic background in IT and engineering, Goddard began his career working at major organizations including Imperial Oil (Esso) and Morgan Stanley in the UK before returning to Canada to take up senior leadership roles in Canada’s energy industry. In 2009, Goddard joined as Chief Information Officer to “help out the family business”–Goddard’s father-in-law, Michael Overs, founded Pizza Pizza in 1967.

Goddard described how his approach to the company’s established “hub and spoke model,” highly effective in the company’s earlier stages, focused on bridging entrenched silos and building relationships across different business units.

“[In any corporate environment], there are a lot of personalities, so you have to find what works for the team you have by listening to them, but ultimately it’s the CEO that has to drive change,” said Goddard. “In my experience, an open, sharing-based, consensus-driven type of model–flat, non-hierarchical–worked very well.”

With the accelerated future of work ushering in a panoply of new office models, Goddard has advanced a hybrid working arrangement with a flexible, trust-based approach based on Pizza Pizza’s PIE –profitability, innovation and engagement–strategy. 

“We have high performance standards–we want you to get the job done, but we’re less concerned with where you get it done,” said Goddard. “You should realize that your creativity, team-building and impact are going to be limited if you’re completely remote, so we are nudging people to show us they can be productive while trusting in their capacity to achieve objectives.”

Goddard describes several areas where Pizza Pizza has prioritized innovation throughout the organization, from marketing to operations, including making their entire back office kitchen system paperless and providing live, last-mile order-tracking, to increase efficiency and profitability while better meeting its commitments to customers, like ‘40 minutes or its free’.

“It comes down to the visibility of our principals and values,” said Goddard. “If we treat our franchisees and employees well, we tell them what we want to achieve and we communicate a clear vision through goal-setting, then we can give them more latitude

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Paving the way for Indigenous business success

When Cowessess First Nation wanted to farm their own land in 2018, large non-Indigenous companies refused to extend them a line of credit, said former chief Cadmus Delorme.

It wasn’t that the land, about a 90-minute drive east of Regina, couldn’t be farmed. The First Nation had watched non-Indigenous farmers grow food on their land for years.

Instead, Delorme said, barriers laid out in the Indian Act stood in their way.

“The Indian Act is not business-friendly,” Delorme said.

When the act was created, Canada’s policy was to eliminate the Indigenous worldview, including the economies of Indigenous people, he said. Despite revisions, some sections of the act, such as Section 61, which references loans, still restrict First Nations’ sovereignty over their money, he added.

It took two years for credit companies to cave and realize partnering with the Cowessess First Nation wasn’t high risk, Delorme said. Now, the First Nation farms 7,000 acres of their land, creates jobs and turns a profit.

No longer chief, Delorme has created his own Indigenous-led consulting firm, OneHoop, to help First Nations bridge the gap between business and reconciliation. He is behind just one of many Indigenous-led consulting firms working to bring economic reconciliation to the forefront of the minds of corporate Canada. But they say more are needed to meet a growing demand.

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Corporate Canada simply doesn’t know how to work with Indigenous people, said Sxwpilemaát Siyám (Chief Leanne Joe).

A hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation, the Transformative Storyteller for Economic Reconciliation at Simon Fraser University and a consultant, Sxwpilemaát Siyám said she hears the phrase “I don’t know where to start” all too often.

Indigenous-led consulting firms are working to bring economic reconciliation to the forefront of the minds of corporate Canada. #Indigenous #EconomicGrowth #reconciliation

Sxwpilemaát Siyám’s advice is to pick one action, commit to it, be willing to fail and prepare to be uncomfortable.

“This is not easy work. This is going to challenge your worldview, it’s going to challenge so much of who you are as a human being. But if we don’t do it, then who will?” she said.

Cadmus Delorme is the founder of OneHoop, an Indigenous-led consulting firm that aims to bring reconciliation into business by working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients. Photo provided by Cadmus Delorme

This is where consultants like Delorme play

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The state of a business’s industry can determine long term success


What determines a businesses long-term success? Some researchers argue it comes down to industry timing.


Aside from market appetites, company productivity, marketing reach, or any other factors that weigh into a business’s impact and durability, a new study found that the longevity of a company depends on the state of the industry during its time of inception – and the general environment in which it grows.


According to D. Carrington Motley, an instructor in entrepreneurship at Carengie Mellon University, the founding conditions of a company could weigh more on its long-term trajectory than changes in the market.


“A venture’s performance following environmental change depends on its internal processes,” he said in a press release. “Environmental conditions at a business’s founding shape those processes, and they quickly become cemented and embedded in beliefs about how to operate.”


Although understanding industry norms and trends has long been held as a key to entrepreneurship success, Motley and fellow researchers found that social, economic, and technological changes make industry knowledge or prior experience increasingly less relevant. This is because teams need to adapt to developments that previously-stable industries were unprepared for.


Motley and other researchers examined the performance of more than 1,000 ventures, all of which were founded from 1960 to 2011. These businesses specialized in a wide range of industries – from energy and utilities to agriculture – and the research team assessed data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to measure how active and changing different industries were when each company started. On top of this, the researchers used alumni survey data to understand how long businesses lasted.


The research found that companies achieved the most success when changes in the market match the conditions they started in. But the study also found a stabilized industry environment can make a company less likely to succeed if the team is accustomed to perpetual change.


Wesley Koo, another co-author of the study, said “in more predictable environments, being more aggressive can produce better outcomes.”


This could come down to risk-aversion.


“The risk of untested assumptions is less, so continued use of risk averse processes produces fewer benefits and may detract from a venture’s ability to respond to opportunities.”


The study found that “slower decision-making” was a key factor in the long term success of a company.


When a business started in

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