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Serve up your best

Olympic service providers are already here checking out what’s on offer says Whistler Chamber speaker

By Clare Ogilvie

Businesses and workers should already be putting their best foot forward if they want to capitalize on opportunities from the 2010 Winter Games.

“You never know who you are dealing with today and the influence they will have on the business you get at Games time,” said Felicity Shankar, an Olympic Games specialist with Javelin Europe, a marketing consultant firm.

“You are now on your Olympic journey.”

Shankar, who is based in the UK, will be in Whistler April 17 as part of the Chamber of Commerce speaker series in partnership with the RBC 2010 Legacies Now. (events@whistlerchamber.com)

Her discussion will focus on her experience over the last 11 Olympic Games and will offer suggestions about creating local marketing plans, retail strategies, and making the most of the tourism opportunities.

Businesses often give little consideration, said Shankar, to the fact that the Games bring with it a whole community of service providers. They have already started arriving in Vancouver.

“Increasingly, almost everyday, I get an e-mail from people saying, ‘I am already in Vancouver,’” she said.

“As those people move in they obviously start to use the core facilities and the local resources. There are a number of these people you want to touch through your hospitality and agencies and other business.”

Shankar recalled an experience at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics where she organized hospitality for her sponsor clients every night at two restaurants she had been taken to on her very first trip to the city.

“I had such a great experience that I wanted every guest of ours that came from overseas to have the same experience, because it was truly (representative of) Greece,” said Shankar.

Already 2,200 camera operators, technicians and producers have landed in Vancouver as part of the Olympic Broadcasting Services organization. Over the coming months many more groups will begin to set up a base of operations for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

It’s important to realize this, said Shankar, because as the clock ticks down those involved with the operations of the Games will look more and more to those with connections to the event and they will draw on the experiences and contacts they have made in the years leading up to the Games.

“That whole Olympic family network is starting to thrive and breath today,” she said.

“As the heat goes up and there is more and more that needs to be done in the time-frame you become more and more reliant on other people’s experiences and the relationships that they have formed in the local area.”

At the forefront of any business’s plan to leverage opportunity from the Games, said Shankar, should be the understanding that it must fit in with the long term goals of the operation.

Business owners and operators should think about their core strengths and then plan how to use those to grow their operation for the Games.

“Think about how you could use the Olympics to do things you want to do anyway,” she said.

“I think planning for that now and taking the time to think about what those things might be is probably the most useful thing you could be doing three years out.”

Her points were reiterated by Betty MacLeod, senior manager Olympic business development for RBC.

“I have probably met with close to 200 companies over the past 18 months and it is critical that companies stick to their core strengths,” MacLeod said.

“2010 is not the destination. You need to ask where is it that you are trying to take your company, how does this fit in to your business plan — those are critical points for success.”

MacLeod will also speak at the chamber lunch, which is to be held at the Four Seasons starting at noon.

She pointed to VANOC and the 2010 Commerce Centre as two excellent sources of information for businesses, adding that anyone interested should also attend a procurement workshop hosted by the Whistler Chamber of Commerce.

Then, said MacLeod, she can help businesses execute their ideas.

“I will sit down with a business and understand their strengths, understand where they are trying to go, and where have they tried to go to date,” she said. “Then I will help them build out their plan.

“I just talked to a caterer recently who is looking to expand into the Whistler-Pemberton area and that is something she has been looking to do for a number of years and feels that this is the time to do it, to get ready to leverage the 2010 Games.”

Part of this planning process is getting information about how similar businesses did in previous Olympic venues. That transfer of knowledge is well underway.

“From all the work that we have seen so far we actually think that the communities we are seeing in Canada are better equipped with information than almost any community we have seen previously,” said Shankar.

“I think really we take our hats off. A lot of people have talked legacy for a long time, but actually the Canadian community is making a lot happen.”

And there is opportunity for everyone, said Shankar, using landscapers as an example.

“We love landscapers,” she said.

“On behalf of three different sponsors I planted 2,700 square metres of garden for the main press centre of the Athens Olympics. We brought in from the countryside 45-year-old olive trees for hospitality marquis to create whole walkways.

  “…We bought (80 Christmas trees) from a landscape gardener in Turin, and that was six weeks after Christmas.”