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News report: Strong turnout at Chamber's Business Readiness Expo

  • BCCEC
  • 2 hours ago
  • 2 min read

Published by Youri Kemp, The Nassau Guardian, January 13, 2026

The Business Readiness Expo, held last week at the Andre Rodgers Baseball Stadium, will become an annual event, as the turnout was better than expected, revealed BCCEC Chairman Don Williams.


Williams told Guardian Business during the event that over 150 businesses showed up to the expo by lunchtime, and he was expecting a great deal more that had registered, before the end of the day at 4 pm.


“It’s the first Business Readiness Expo that the BCCEC is putting on. It’s our way of bridging the gap to ensure that business owners and anyone that’s interested in getting into business can come down and have a one-stop shop where they can get serviced in real time. So there are no long lines. There is no waiting for a phone call or response to an email, whether it is Physical Planning, Department of Inland Revenue, or NIB [National Insurance Board], and various other agencies that are here.


Registration is open to the public. We’ve had a little bit over 150 people that have walked through, and they are being serviced pretty quickly, and generally it’s going quite smoothly.”


Williams continued: “The most important part of this Business Readiness Expo is ease of doing business. We speak about it a lot, various agencies do, but this is our action step towards improving the ease of doing business.”


The BCCEC had 12 agencies represented at the expo, such as the NIB, the Tourism Development Corporation, and the Water and Sewerage Corporation.


“We’ve already gotten feedback from a few of them that definitely want to be a part of it next year, so we’re looking for all the comments, suggestions, any feedback that we get, not only from the agencies themselves, but the general public and business community, to see how do we can expand this next year,” Williams added.


“People are getting business licenses today. They’re getting approvals for Town Planning. They’re getting their NIB registrations. They’re bringing their NIB current as well,” he added.


“I keep talking about compliance. We have various agencies here, whether it’s DIR [Department of Inland Revenue], whether it’s NIB, because not everyone came up for a business license, but because we have all of these agencies under one roof, they got their approvals for their physical planning here. Maybe they had an issue with WSC, but weren’t able to get the one-on-one attention that they needed. We have WSC here. We have Aliv Business here. We have BICA [Bahamas Institute of Chartered Accountants] here, which is able to assist you in understanding compliance and audit, the various requirements and certifications that are needed for the DIR. So we’re trying to make sure that we’re the one-stop shop for everything that they need in terms of business.”





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