Port Coquitlam is a city of just over 67,000 people (up from 61,498 at the 2021 census) built on rail, industry, and a downtown that's trying to hold its own against bigger regional draws. It's home to a working rail yard run by Canadian Pacific Kansas City, food processors like Sofina Foods — whose local poultry plant employs more than 400 people — and industrial clusters in Broadway Business Park and the Dominion Triangle. That mix of anchor employers and independent operators is exactly who we build software for.
Downtown, along Shaughnessy Street, and in newer mixed-use developments like Fremont Village, retail spaces have sat vacant for years because rents are hard to justify against the foot traffic those blocks actually see. The Downtown Port Coquitlam Business Improvement Association has represented local businesses since 1994 and now counts more than 220 members, which tells you the appetite for a stronger downtown is there — it just needs to be matched with the customer acquisition and local marketing that make the rent work.
Out in Broadway Business Park and the Dominion Triangle — including the Riverwood and River's Edge business parks — metal fabrication shops, food processors, and other manufacturers are often still running scheduling, inventory, and order management on dated back-office systems. And across the city, a large share of construction and trades businesses operate with no fixed storefront at all, which means many still lack a real web presence, online booking, or automated quoting and invoicing that would help them close jobs faster.
Add in a rental vacancy rate that sat around 0.4% in 2022 — well below the 3-5% considered healthy — and it's easy to see why recruiting and retaining staff near anchor employers like the City of Port Coquitlam, School District 43 Coquitlam, and Sysco Canada has gotten harder, pushing up labour costs and turnover. Whether you're training your next hires through Sprott Shaw College's Port Coquitlam campus or networking through the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce, the businesses that get ahead here are the ones that put the operational and administrative basics on autopilot. That's the work we do.