Canada’s Leading Economic Development Software
When businesses are looking to expand into a different country, they often look to government economic development agencies to provide them with information about potential locations. Unfortunately, many reports are incomplete and can take months to find accurate information about remote locations.
Davie Lee experienced this first hand when he was working for the Government of Ireland helping Irish companies expand to Canada. “Quickly finding reliable indicators such as labour force data or utility rates at the municipal level for expansion was painful,” he shares. “Because of this, municipalities were being overlooked on decisions relating to Foreign Direct Investment which is a big deal in economic development”.
He joined forces with Ryley Iverson and Craig Paul to develop Townfolio.ca, the online platform to find statistics and business opportunities in municipalities from around Canada and the United States.
“Townfolio is really about investment attraction for municipalities. They are struggling with investment attraction in a globalized economy and we want to help them get noticed. We have villages like Hazlet, SK (population 106) to Toronto and we’ve crowdsourced specific opportunities from experts in these communities that only locals would know exist states Iverson.
The team had a recent success with a large company looking for a place to set up a new production plant. The Townfolio website instantly shared the workforce demographics, housing, quality of life and land opportunities in a small community in Saskatchewan. While hundreds of large companies from around the world have used Townfolio’s marketplace, the focus will be on attracting small businesses, particularly newcomer entrepreneurs to discover opportunities in smaller municipalities they might be overlooking.
“The real success is the amount of money and time that we are saving municipalities, the taxpayers are saving money and our price point is accessible to small towns,” shares Iverson. “We’ve helped generate leads for communities that would have never been considered by a company in the past.”
Their clients agree. One writes, ““Townfolio is an absolute game changer in terms of providing a comprehensive economic profile that’s always up to date, yet affordable for all communities & regions. Townfolio has allowed us to promote our region and I highly recommend their software and service.”
Townfolio has captured the North American market with over 50,000 municipalities represented on their platform. They plan to keep expanding across North America and ramping up their inbound generation for economic developers but the team also recently travelled to Nigeria to explore how Townfolio could assist in developing nations and they are excited by the possibilities.
Founders: Ryley Iverson, Davie Lee, Craig Paul
Incorporation Date: December 2015
Employees: 7
Website: www.Townfolio.ca
