Vineet Miglani and Nidhi Kamboj are the dynamic husband and wife duo behind High Beam Dreams, Best Immigrant Entrepreneur winner at the 2020 Small Business BC Awards. Their fascinating business transformed a long-standing church in Lower Gibsons into one of the Sunshine Coast’s premier entertainment venues.

As the pandemic gripped our province in spring of last year, Vineet and Nidhi took a proactive approach, outfitting the venue to continue playing an important (and safe) role in Gibsons life. We caught up with the pair to get their thoughts on taking part in last year’s awards.

What is it you do at High Beam Dreams, and Why?

When this project started, our vision was a community hub that would benefit everyone on the Sunshine Coast. This building was home to Gibsons United Church for many years, and we want that tradition as a gathering place to continue into the future.

For starters, a daycare forms an important part of the building. We own it, but we don’t run it. Early in the pandemic, as venues closed in the spring, the daycare was able to stay open and provide an essential service for local parents in those early days.

The other side of the project is where the name High Beam Dreams comes in. We have established this space as a premier music and wedding venue on the Sunshine Coast. We book artists from across North America for the space, bringing artists to our community that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to visit.

This venue exists to help our community, and we were the first on the Sunshine Coast to close voluntarily in March during COVID. We spent months upgrading and making the space safe. We even invited a rep from Vancouver Coastal Health to come in advance and review the changes we had made.

This allowed us to host our first socially distanced wedding in June. Since then, we’ve continued to slowly add community services back in. For example, we host a weekly affordable yoga class for the community, and we even resumed weekly concerts for a spell in the summer.

What was your journey like with the Small Business BC Awards?

We first learned about the Awards when we read that a local business here, The Gibsons Butcher, had won a Small Business BC Award the previous year. It never entered our minds we could actually win!

I guess it all started when a dear friend of ours sent us the link to the awards. We assumed she wanted us to nominate a business but instead she wanted to nominate us.  She did, and we soon got an email from SBBC to tell us we had been nominated and that’s where the fun started for us.

People in the community were excited to see we were nominated and wherever we would go people would tell us they had voted for us. Next thing we knew, we had made it to the Top 10. Knowing that we had our community behind us brought a recognition and awareness that we were helping our community and they were showing us their support in return.

Now, when we actually won the award it went to the next level. We got so much recognition from across the board and awareness of our work. The resources we’ve been able to lean on from Small Business BC have been really helpful for us in terms of adding to our knowledge base and filling in the blanks of understanding how to do business.

Getting to present our business to the judges was really exciting. This project is our passion and it remains our passion. The thing to keep in mind is we wanted to create a community hub, a happy place for our community to get together and do different things. We really wanted to nail that in our presentation, get that message across and if we didn’t, we’d regret it. Thankfully, the presentation went well and we were delighted with the reaction of the judges.

Do you think entering competitions like the SBBC Awards is worthwhile for business owners?

Of course! By participating you get to meet other businesses, past winners and industry professionals. Just the networking side of it is so worthwhile. The longer you stay in, the more you benefit. And, if you happen to win, it takes your business to a whole new level. For us, it was a truly enriching experience all round.

I also want to mention the added credibility. Now, when we send an email or speak to anyone professionally, we can mention that we are the winners of the Small Business BC Best Immigrant Entrepreneur Award. People know who SBBC are and they take it seriously. There’s a lot of added credibility attached to that and it has opened so many doors for us.

If a business owner was considering entering this year’s awards, what advice would you have for them?

Taking part in the Small Business BC Awards, the amount of exposure and networking opportunities you’ll receive are incomparable. It’s a platform that supports small businesses and it’s a platform where you can meet other business owners that you can learn from and build long lasting relationships with. I say just go for it, don’t think twice!