Starting & Running a Small Business For Canadians All-in-One For Dummies

Andrew Dagys, Margaret Kerr, JoAnn Kurtz

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119648390
• eBook ISBN: 9781119648413
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Tried-and-true advice, tools, and strategies to start and succeed in a small business

With more Canadians yearning to start a small business—along with benefitting tax rate incentives and interesting new business opportunities—there's never been a greater need for a detailed, comprehensive guide to operating a small business.

Comprising the most pertinent information from several bestselling For Dummies books on the subject, this all-encompassing guide gives you everything you need to know about successfully running a small business.

• Define your target market
• Create the perfect business plan
• Get to the bottom of financials
• Build a strong online presence and social media following

From soup to nuts, this book is your recipe for small business success.

Book 1

The Beginning of Your Business and Beyond

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Small Business Essentials
   1. Weighing the Pros and the Cons
   2. Choosing Your Business
   3. Determining Whether You Have the Small Business Personality
   4. Knowing If and When to Give Up Your Day Job
   5. Seeking Out General Business Information
   6. Getting Information Geared to Your Specific Business
   7. Obtaining Essential Business Skills
   8. Finding Professional and Other Help
2. Chapter 2: Getting Started
   1. Developing Your Product or Service with a Market in Mind
   2. Finding the Best Route to Your Target Market
   3. Pricing Your Product or Service
   4. Considering an Off-the-Shelf Business
   5. Deciding on a Price for a Business
   6. Considering a Franchise
   7. Deciding on a Place of Business
   8. Ownership Issues: Should You Go It Alone or Take on a Co-Pilot?
   9. Should You Incorporate?
   10. The Corporation: A Form of Business with a Life All Its Own
   11. Protecting Your Assets without Incorporating
3. Chapter 3: Operating Your Business
   1. Insuring against Your Risks
   2. Making the Sale
   3. Documenting Your Agreement
   4. Doing the Work
   5. Getting Paid
   6. Addressing Customer Privacy
   7. Dealing with Suppliers
4. Chapter 4: Looking to the Future of Your Business
   1. No Money, More Problems
   2. Handling Disputes
   3. Getting Bigger
   4. Financing Your Expansion
   5. Managing a Bigger Business

Chapter 1

Small Business Essentials

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing the upsides and downsides of small business ownership

Identifying a good idea and business opportunity

Assessing your true entrepreneurial spirit

Deciding whether to keep your day job

Seeking out business information and help

So you’re thinking of starting your own business! Every year, lots of Canadians of all ages and backgrounds get the entrepreneurial urge and take the leap to start businesses. Some of those businesses become very successful, and some of them fail.

Business success or failure isn’t the result of fate, or random chance. A business does well for good reasons — like providing a great product or service, having a solid marketing plan, and having an owner with good management skills.

Likewise, when a business goes under, you can often identify the reasons — lack of money to get properly started, poor timing or location for entering the market, or a wipeout on the customer service front. Whatever the reason for a business failure, it usually boils down to this: The business owner didn’t look carefully before leaping into a new business frontier.

This chapter helps you think about going into business before you hit the ignition button and blast off. Think of this chapter as “countdown.”

Weighing the Pros and the Cons

People start up their own businesses for different reasons. One of the best reasons is that they’ve found a business opportunity and idea that are just too attractive to pass up. A good reason is that they want to work for themselves rather than for someone else. A discouraging — but still valid — reason is that their other job options are poor (the number of small business start-ups always rises when the economy sinks or stinks).

Whatever your reason is for wanting to become an entrepreneur, you should know that life as an entrepreneur is a bit of a mixed bag. Running your own business has some great advantages, but it also has its share of disadvantages.

The pros

Here are some of the good things about going into business for yourself:

• You’re free! You’ll have the freedom to
  • Make your own decisions — you’re in charge now. Only investors, customers and clients (see Chapter 3), government regulators, and so on will tell you what to do.
  • Choose your own work hours — in theory, anyway. You may not be able to get away with sleeping in until noon or concentrating your productive hours around 3 a.m. But you’re more likely to be able to pick up the kids from school at 3 p.m., or exercise from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., or grocery shop during normal office hours.
  • Create your own work environment (see Chapter 2) — surround yourself with dirty coffee cups and empty candy wrappers if you feel like it.
• You can be creative! You can build your business from scratch following your own ideas rather than following someone else’s master plan.
• You’ll face new challenges! Every day. And twice as many on days that end in a y. You’ll never be able to say that work is always the same old boring routine.
• Your job will be secure … as long as you have a business! Your business may fail — but no one can fire you. You can ask yourself to resign, though. (See Chapter 4 for information about the depressing prospect of running out of money.)
• You’ll have increased financial opportunities! If your business is successful, you have the potential to make more than you could as an employee.
• You’ll have tax advantages! This is true whether your business is incorporated or not incorporated (a sole proprietorship or a partnership; see Chapter 2).

The cons

Do you think the exuberant section just before this one used enough exclamation marks? Bet it got you all enthused and excited about entrepreneurship. But calm down for a minute — being an entrepreneur has plenty of disadvantages, too. For some people, they outweigh the advantages. For example:

• You may not make a lot of money. You may make enough money to live on, but it may not come in regularly like an employment paycheque, so you’ll have cash flow predictability and budgeting problems. Or you may not make enough money to live on. You may not even make any money at all. You may go bankrupt, and if you’re not incorporated or have not mitigated your risk by removing your assets before you started your business you could risk losing not only your business but also your personal possessions.
• You lose easy and inexpensive access to employment benefits if you don’t hang on to employment elsewhere. These may be benefits that you have come to count on — extended health and dental benefits, disability insurance, life insurance, a pension plan, and so on.
• You’ll have to work really hard. That is, if you want to succeed — and you won’t just be working at the business your business is about. You’ll also have to do stuff you may not be trained to do, such as accounting, sales, and collection work.
• You may not have a lot of free time. You may see less of your friends, family, and pets (even if you’re working at home) and have less time for your favourite activities. Getting a business up and running takes more than hard work; it also takes your time and commitment. Don’t scoff that you won’t let that happen to you, at least not until you’ve put in hours filling out government paperwork (GST/HST for example) on a beautiful sunny day that would be perfect for, well, almost anything else. By the way, you don’t get paid for your sacrificed time, either.
• You may have to put a lot of your own money into starting up the business. And even if you can borrow the money, unless the lender is The Bank of Mom and Dad, you’ll have to give personal guarantees that the money will be repaid (with interest) within a certain time. The pressure is building! By the way, not to add to the pressure or anything, but you should know that you might lose your own money or not be able to repay borrowed money because of factors beyond your control. You could get sick (and now you probably don’t have disability insurance), be flattened by a competitor, squashed by a nose-diving economy, or whacked by a partner who pulls out on you. (See Chapter 4 for advice on how to deal with some of these problems.)
• You are the bottom line. No excuses — success is up to you, and failure is your fault. You’ll have to keep on top of changes in your field, the impact of new technology, economic fluctuations… .
• Your personal life can stick its nose into your business life in a major way. If you and your spouse split up, your spouse may be able to claim a share of your business under equalization provisions in the family law of some provinces. You might have to sell your home, your business, or your business assets (business property) to pay off your spouse.

Choosing Your Business

After you’re aware of the upside and the downside to running your own business, start considering how people choose a business to go into. Five ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: The Beginning of Your Business and Beyond
• Book 2: Intellectual Property
• Book 3: Business Planning
• Book 4: Bookkeeping and Accounting
• Book 5: Human Resources
• Book 6: Building Your Marketing Strategy
• Index
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement