Todd Arth is a believer in Westlock.
Born into the retail business — Arth’s Fashion Centre just celebrated its 61st year in business and now counts four generations — Arth has always been a stanch supporter of business in town, specifically Westlock’s downtown.
So it should come as no surprise that Arth was the driving force behind ‘Downtown Westlock In Motion’ — a Thursday-morning photo op that saw a portion of downtown closed to allow for a bird’s-eye-view photo from atop the Westlock Terminals complex to showcase the men and women who do business daily in the core.
Although the timing of the event dovetailed nicely with Small Business Week nation-wide (Oct. 20-26), Arth’s motivation is far more local.
“The idea for the photo came up during the fair parade in August. I saw Wabash’s crew that took part in the parade that included all their staff and it just amazed me that there was that many people working in a business in Westlock,” Arth explained.
“There’s been a lot of talk about downtown revitalization and just because there’s a few empty businesses downtown does not mean that downtown isn’t vibrant. We have a lot of people who make their living downtown. We have a lot of services and businesses.
“So we just wanted to let the public know, through a picture, look at all these people ... all of these people make a living here.”
Arth admits that competition for customers is at an all-time high, but said local retailers are well positioned to keep their market share.
“What we can do as small business owners, with St. Albert getting closer and closer to us, is we all have to take a look at our own businesses and we’re all going to have to step it up a notch. We need to talk about customer service.
We need to take a look at our operations. I believe we have a huge potential here and many, many years of survival, and prosperity, for our downtown community,” Arth continued.
“We would like to be able to work with the town and have better communication. That said we want the business community to know that Westlock is a good place to do business.”
BDC Small Business Week is an annual celebration of entrepreneurship that the Business Development Bank of Canada has been organizing for 34 years.
In 1979, BDC business centres in British Columbia’s Lower Fraser Valley pooled their resources to organize a week of activities for entrepreneurs and two years later, BDC decided to launch Small Business Week across Canada.
As for the numbers, small and medium-sized businesses are the cornerstone of the Canadian economy - 98.1 per cent of businesses have fewer than 100 employees and contribute slightly more than 30 per cent to Canada’s GDP.
To help celebrate the event, the Westlock News offered half-price ads for all business owners — their ads, which start on Page 22 of this week’s edition, are marked with the Small Business Week logo displayed above.
