NS, NL Entries Battling In BDC Race
June 16th, 2015
A titanic struggle has been playing out on a federal Crown corporation’s website, and the combatants are a pair of thirtysomething entrepreneurs from Atlantic Canada.
For the past two weeks, the federal development bank BDC has been asking the public to vote on who should win the 2015 BDC Young Entrepreneur competition. There are 10 competitors, one from each province. Until today, the competition website showed the rankings, and the top two were from Atlantic Canada.
Christopher Cowper-Smith of Halifax’s Spring Loaded Technology has been in the lead for most of the two weeks, but Melissa Butler of the Real Food Market in St. John’s has been challenging him. Over the weekend, Butler moved into the lead, though Spring Loaded regained top spot on Monday.
BDC is no longer showing the rankings as the voting is now in the home stretch.
“Like a pancake, we’re flipping over and over between 1st and 2nd! Every single vote counts now until June 17 1pm,” Cowper-Smith tweeted on Monday.
On June 3, BDC announced the finalists for the competition that seeks to find the country’s leading entrepreneur aged between 18 and 35. The other Atlantic Canadian finalists are Phillip Curley of Fredericton-based HotSpot Parking and Martin O’Brien of the Cascumpec Bay Oyster Company in Prince Edward Island. The winner, who will win $100,000, and runner-up, who will receive $25,000 in consulting services, will be announced on June 22.
BDC lets people vote for their favourite candidate as often as once a day here. The public vote will account for half the consideration when choosing the winners, with the other half coming from a panel of judges.
Though the rankings of the provincial candidates are no longer visible, people can still vote until tomorrow.