Aumbience Yoga & Wellness
Working with my local representative at CEED to apply for the Impact loan was so easy. The business adviser helped me refine and truly define what my business plan was, helped me to really nail down the nuts and bolts to clearly reflect what it is that the business is going to need in order to be successful. It is nice to have a familiar face to connect to repeatedly instead of somebody different each the time. He took me around the space introduced me to all the staff that he could and really made me feel like I was a part of the part of the program, a part of the team. The business adviser that I worked with was very friendly, very genuine. He truly helped me feel like I was being taken care of throughout the entire process, whether it was by phone or by promptly responding to emails, and walking me through it all.
The Impact loan helped to create the infrastructure for the business. The loan helped with some renovations costs for the yoga studio. Another good chunk of the loan paid for the props and tools for the yoga practice. Those things aren’t cheap, and we don’t have a local supplier so they have to be shipped in across Canada. And when you compound that with just buying the product itself, costs can skyrocket. So having the funding with the Impact loan really made a difference.
After receiving the Impact loan I was fortunate enough to participate in a two day training through CEED with respect to social media marketing. Social media is huge and having a presence in some way, shape, or form is pretty much a requirement these days for any business. You can quite easily be lost in the shuffle of where to focus your time and your energy on social media platforms. So that training really helped me to define what my business posts should look like, even the frequency, time of day, so on and so forth, and create some clarity so that I don’t have to work so hard at making those impacts in the digital world.