The executive director of Venture Kamloops says the organization worked with a record number of local businesses last year.

Jim Anderson says 240 businesses came to Venture Kamloops for assistance and business advice.

“It equates to more than one new client every day that we’re open for the entire year. That doesn’t include the 199 business that we met with in 2018 that we either started with in the previous year, or we gave advice to but didn’t enter a program, or we were collecting information from them. So our reach is becoming greater and greater.”

He says Venture Kamloops doesn’t have a measure though to determine how many jobs it created from that assistance.

“I use this analogy quite often, so so you build a house and you have a house-warming party. It’s not very often that you stand up at the house-warming party and thank the plumber who roughed in your piping. Our services are quite often involved so early in the process, we don’t get that feedback. There’s no duty to report to back to us, so we don’t have the hard numbers.”

Anderson says those 240 businesses represented more than 2,300 employees in the Tournament Capital.