Small businesses are struggling to find workers and the problem isn't going away any time soon

For the first three-and-a-half years of business at Avenue, staffing wasn’t much of an issue. The Vancouver-based company, which provides online marketing support to realtors, had 12 employees. Then the business took off — growing to a team of 85 employees in just 18 months. With size came the need for senior management, says Rebecca Troelstra, COO and founder. And there was the crunch: “It isn’t easy as a tech startup in a smaller community like Vancouver to find people with the experience we need, especially when we want to add senior level management and have to compete against larger companies like Amazon, Shopify and larger startups in town. It actually took us a year to find a chief technology officer.”