eSource Event Registration Ltd.

“Nova Scotians are innately friendly and helpful people,” says Jill Black, owner and president of eSource Event Registration Ltd. “When someone has a baby or loses a loved one, there’s always a basket of food on their doorstep, a vase of flowers on their kitchen table and a shoulder to lean on. That’s a quality you don’t find everywhere.”

According to Black, Nova Scotia’s reputation for friendliness and willingness to help is what makes her business stand out on the national front.

eSource Event offers online conferencing services (including registration, credit card processing, gala ticket sales and housing) to clients across Canada. Most of the company’s client base is made up of national associations.

“Nova Scotia’s hospitality industry is revered around the world,” says Black. “Our welcoming and friendly attitudes go a long way in my industry.

“What I’ve also seen in my line of work is that we as Nova Scotians don’t have the word ‘no’ in our vocabularies. We tend to find ways to work around even the most challenging issues; we go the extra mile.”

Black believes those Nova Scotian qualities are invaluable to her service-based business.

Clients use eSource Event to organize the many details of a conference. For the inexperienced, it could be a logistical challenge. But eSource is on top of everything. From guest list preparation, to invitations, to the registration process, to travel and accommodations and more….eSource manages it all.

eSource Event eases some of the details associated with planning and organizing an exceptional conference. This leaves clients with the opportunity to network and mingle while eSource takes care of the onsite details.

‘What’s unique about eSource Event is our housing service,” says Black. “When an organization books a conference at a hotel, they commit to a number of room reservations and a dollar value of revenue. If the event doesn’t meet that number, there are financial penalties.

“By working closely with our clients, their delegates and the hoteliers we are able to ensure all numbers are met and needs are fulfilled. Our attention to detail and ability to multi-task is the key to our business, says Black.

“It’s the unique, value-added component offered by eSource Event that sets us apart from similar businesses. Registration, table ticket sales, and housing are our niches and we do them very well.”

How, then, did she get into a business that’s so well disguised?

“I worked in retail travel for more than 23 years. In the later years I specialized in doing a lot of inbound travel to Halifax for meetings and conventions,” says Black. “The need simply presented itself from dealing with clients traveling for conferences and identifying their requirements.”

Black believes her position in Nova Scotia is ideal for planning national conferences.

“One of the great things about doing business in Halifax is the time zone. We couldn’t be positioned better. If a task is the last thing on a Calgarian’s desk on Monday evening, then it’s the first thing on my desk when I arrive to work on Tuesday morning.

“I really feel that, logistically, it wouldn’t be as easy to serve our clients from all across Canada if we were situated on the west coast,” she explains.

Black adds that because eSource Event deals with clients from all over the country, it’s important to have a bilingual office. Whether by phone or e-mail, eSource Event offers its services in English and French.

“Our staff fluctuates with the peaks and valleys of the business,” says Black. “In the run of a year, sometimes there are two of us, and sometimes there are more.

“One of the coolest aspects of the business is that we work online from a remote location or from the office. Our workplace can move with us.”

To Black that means she has a leg-up in her industry, because online is where the world is headed.

“Online business is here to stay,” she says. “We’re going to see more and more businesses that operate online and deal with remote clients.”

And that suits her just fine. She can do her job from right here in Nova Scotia, where she wants to be.

“In the online business community, you can have it all: quality of life in a modest city with access to all the opportunities of the larger, business-rich cities. We have the technology to accomplish it, and eSource Event Registration is taking advantage of that opportunity.”

The past year has been a whirl wind for eSource Event Registration. The company launched a new website, won some fruitful contracts, was nominated for regional and national awards and hired new staff.

Now, it’s moving forward with marketing and networking efforts, including key memberships in business associations, such as the Canadian Society of Association Executives and Meeting Planners International, to name a key example.

Although Black has been providing online conference services to national organizations for many years, she looks forward to showcasing her work here in Halifax and across the province in 2011 as part of a city-wide convention eSource Event is organizing for a long term client.

And she has no doubt that Nova Scotians will live up to the welcoming and friendly reputation on which she builds her business and about which she so proudly raves