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Starting Business in Canada? Basic Tips to Follow

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleWhether you are a Canadian or a new immigrant you might want to start your own company and be your own boss.

Statistics Canada showed in 2010 that 5.3% of immigrants started a business after living in Canada for a few years. At the same time, only 4.8% of Canadian citizens owned a private company in 2010. So, everything is in your own hands and all you have to do is to keep in mind the following information.

There are a lot of important things to consider about how to start a business in Canada. In this article, you will find the basic tips from financing and marketing to business planning in Canada.

Build Your Credit Score

If you are new to Canada, you may not have a credit history that banks can rely on to lend you the money for your startup.

There are several fast ways to build up your credit score. One of them is to build up your borrowing potential by signing up for a credit card. Make sure you use it with responsibility and in six months your credit score will slowly start to develop. Later on, you will be able to use it in order to finance your startup.

Pay attention to your credit score even after you’ve been approved for a loan as this is when problems may happen if you fail to repay the loan on time and in full.

Some lenders may approve your application for Canada loans for bad credit customers but it is not guaranteed that you will get the required amount and terms. Such loans are typically issued as personal cash advances rather than business financing options. Although, it may be enough to cover some small current business expenses.

Understand Canadian Culture

If you want your business to be successful in any country, you have to embrace its culture and understand local customers, what they like to purchase and how.

The best way to get immersed in a new culture is to join volunteer organizations and get involved in business associations or any other place where you can easily mix with people who know this country better and have lived here for a longer time.

After you’ve successfully built your local network, you may develop your business and make connections elsewhere.

Make Your Personal and Business Banking Accounts Separate

This piece of advice may seem obvious, yet so many business owners make the same mistake and start their own company not just out of a basement or an old garage, but also out of their personal bank account. Set up a separate business bank account that won’t mix with your personal one.

Also, make sure you have enough money to cover your personal expenses for at least six months while your company is getting started.

It always takes some time before the business becomes profitable so it’s always beneficial to have a good baseline. Even if you don’t have that money at the moment, you can start saving or find a job.

The website of the Government of Canada performs a useful page called Preparing to Work, which provides with additional information on how to land a job in Canada, tips on how to improve your English/French or get your credentials assessed. More than that, familiarize yourself with laws you will be required to follow as an entrepreneur, maybe even consult a business attorney if necessary.

Give your startup a fighting chance by creating a solid foundation with these basic for starting a business in Canada.

How A Business Can Benefit From an Online Presence

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleThe internet allows companies of all sizes in all industries to reach new customers, connect with new suppliers, and increase recognition. So, even some more niche businesses could benefit greatly from online advertising.

It’s time for conventional companies to look beyond traditional marketing tactics, such as newspaper ads and flyers, and start focusing on online marketing campaigns. Here are three businesses that can benefit from moving online.

1. Recycling Company

Many businesses wanting to flourish and grow must start adopting modern technologies and marketing tactics. For example, there are new technologies on the market that are simplifying tasks, which can increase onsite productivity. This can apply to the recycling trade.

An online presence can, however, be beneficial to any business, as it allows them to reach a larger audience. It can also personalize a business, which can prove you provide a valuable service to the community. Professional blogs and web content can also add value to your produce, which will make people more likely to turn to your shipping business. Also, use the internet to improve your operations by researching into the most appropriate equipment, regardless of the goods you are recycling. For example, you could take your pick from reputable suppliers online, as you could buy high-quality, affordable cardboard baling wire from Baling Wire Direct.

2. Real Estate Agents

No longer are people looking through a real estate’s windows to find their dream property. Nowadays, house hunters or property sellers want to find or promote a listing online. This allows prospective buyers to easily browse through multiple properties, so they can make an informed decision and choose their new home at their own pace. If you want to compete with more forward-thinking real estate agents, you must develop a website and social media profiles, or you’ll be forced to watch potential customers turn to your competitors.

3. Retail

The rise of e-commerce has posed a serious threat to bricks and mortar stores. Unfortunately, even the most established stores are not safe without an online presence, as more and more people are choosing to shop online. If you’re a retailer without an online store, you may lose out on sales and can witness a drop in loyal custom, as consumers will choose to shop with a more flexible, helpful, and forward-thinking brand.

To survive in the modern marketplace, you could offer an e-commerce website with a fully-optimized checkout, and informative customer service and contact information. It will allow customers to shop at any time of the day, rather than being limited to opening hours at a physical store. So, an online presence could help you to generate money 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

Conclusion

There is absolutely no reason why traditional businesses should avoid moving online. By launching a website, creating social media profiles, developing content marketing strategies, and utilizing pay per click advertising (PPC), you can connect with people not only within your local community, but across the globe. It could help you to become a leader in your industry and generate a great return on your investment.

How Your Smartphone Can Help Your Business Grow

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article
 
Just a few years ago – certainly within living memory for most people in business today – there were no smartphones. There were no tablets either, or any other kind of mobile device except, perhaps, for standard cell phones that did nothing except make and receive calls, and perhaps send and receive text messages. However, technology has advanced hugely, and now a smartphone or tablet can actually enhance our businesses in many positive ways, giving customers more choice and adding more profit to the bottom line of your company. Smartphones used to be just for fun, but today they are an essential business tool; here are some of the reasons why that is.

Keep Track Of Your Expenses

Running a business can cost a lot of money, and if you aren’t keeping track of your expenses, it can cost you even more than it should. If you have a smartphone or a tablet, you can download one of a number of apps that means you can keep all of your outgoings in one place. You may be able to upload images of receipts and organize them in a cloud-based system, for example. This makes getting your taxes done a lot quicker and easier than dropping into your accountant with a bag full of crumpled receipts.

These apps are also useful for budgeting as they will be able to tell you – once you have pre-determined the limits – when you are spending too much. This way you can re-assess your budget or your spending before it becomes a problem and you could potentially prevent a serious issue from occurring.

Present To Your Customers

Sometimes a business owner will need to make presentations. This could be to gain a big, new corporate client, or perhaps to explain a product to end users. Carrying a lot of equipment to your meeting and wondering how to set it all up can make your company look more amateur than it really is, but taking a tablet (or even a smartphone) that is easy to set up and, thanks to intuitive apps, easy to create presentations on can make a big difference. This can show your clients just how professional you really are.

If you have the right apps, you can even make a presentation on the move, so that if you find you are coming face to face with someone who needs to know more about your business, with a few taps you can create something not only informative but personalized too.

Spread Your Message

Our smartphones go everywhere with us, and many people feel lost if they happen to leave the house without their mobile device, even if they don’t intend to use it. Since our smartphones are going to be everywhere with us, it makes sense to use them as some advertising space too. Order a personalized iPhone case from new startup Indkly with your logo and website on the back, and every time you use your phone, you will be letting people know more about you.

Be Responsive

A responsive business is a successful one a lot of the time, which is why it pays to answer phone calls, emails, and reply to comments on social media as quickly as you can. You may not always be in the office in front of a computer, however, especially if your business is a mobile one. Therefore, you can use a smartphone or tablet to keep on top of customer questions and answer them much more quickly than if you had to wait to get back to the office. By that time, especially if you have a full day ahead of you, the customer who had the question may well have found another company who answered them more quickly and therefore secured the sale.

Take Orders

A mobile device can be used to take customer orders, and you may well have seen it happen already. It is becoming more and more standard to see waiting staff using mobile devices to take their customers’ orders and send it directly to the kitchen. This speeds up the entire process and gives customers a much better experience. Tapping the order into a smart device leaves less room for error than writing it down, or even simply remembering what was said, plus the servers can engage more with their customers which makes for a more pleasant experience all around.

Order taking devices don’t have to be limited to restaurants and bars. With the right equipment, they can be used in almost any sales situation. You can have an app designed for your business that means you can process orders there and then, rather than having to go back to the office or asking your clients to fill in long-winded paperwork. As a bonus, this means that less paper will be printed and used, which can benefit your business as well as the environment.

Accept Payment

What if, as well as taking orders from your clients, you could even process their payments should that be necessary? There are many apps that allow you to do this, and the money will appear in your bank account straight away. This means you can take credit and debit cards without the need for a special merchant machine, and that means you don’t have to turn away prospective buyers who don’t have cash on them – they can still pay you. If you give each of your salespeople a tablet that is designed to take payments, they can make more sales because they won’t have to go back later to process the payment.

Obtain Signatures

In some industries, particularly in sectors such as real estate, the signing of the contract can take a long time, delaying all the other parts of the transaction. However, with a tablet or smartphone, the contract can be signed immediately through the app, meaning that everything can be speeded up and become a lot more efficient. You will get paid more quickly, and your customer will have a better experience because their order will be processed speedily.

Top 5 Industries That Are Changing Due To AR

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleAugmented reality (AR) is on the crest of a wave these days. If you haven’t heard about it yet there are only two possibilities: you either have lived under a rock for the past two years or you are simply not interested in the latest tech trends (AT ALL). More and more industries and people are incredibly excited that their science fiction dreams born from iconic movies are finally becoming reality. That I can tell you!

But how is society going to change once we manage to implement augmented reality in every aspect of our lives? How is this going to impact our way of living? To one’s mind, used wisely, this new technology can certainly help us improve and ease the way we learn, work and even have fun. Here are five industries that are definitely changing due to AR.

1. Education

It’s no secret that children love technology. Some of them use a smartphone before learning how to speak or walk and that points out something rather important about our relationship with technology.

Probably the best example in this particular case is Mondly, the app that allows users to learn languages in augmented reality. Just imagine how cool can it be to have your own virtual teacher that brings animals and other objects to life in your living room. Learning that “elephant” is “elefante” in Spanish because an actual size elephant is roaming around in my house!? Yes, sir! I’d very much like that!

2. Healthcare

Healthcare is definitely the first industry we should try to perfect when a new kind of technology emerges. It’s needless to say that we have come a long way since early centuries when doctors would experiment on human beings to discover new cures and procedures, but this is just the beginning.

Augmented reality, the newest and coolest kid in the yard, now allows doctors and nurses to locate patients’ veins more accurately for injections. Other AR apps on the market let physicians show their exact plans for surgeries or visualize detailed bone structures and organ systems. How awesome is that?

3. Architecture and construction

At this the point you can’t be surprised anymore. Yes, AR will also influence the way we build our houses! The market already offers a lot of apps that help constructors visualize and interact with architectural three-dimensional models. Based on the same principle as the language learning app mentioned in the first bullet point, these apps allow users to superimpose virtual buildings, models or projects wherever they want in their environment.

Material selection, real-time shadow analysis, structural layers observation and scaling are also sci-fi features possible with just a simple touch and scroll.

4. Marketing and sales

This one is downright inevitable. When given the chance, brands will use new tech to increase brand awareness, loyalty and, unavoidably, sales! Sales could go through the roof with the right strategy.

Ikea and Amazon give the best example yet. Using augmented reality, these two giants give customers the possibility to visualize exactly how a product would look in their home. This new feature eliminates the drudgery of buying a sofa and discovering it simply doesn’t fit in your living room. At the same time, it increases the quality of your daydreaming by showing how that home cinema you’ve always wanted looks like in your bedroom.

5. Gaming

Saved the obvious for the last. The gaming industry always keeps up with tech trends and integrating AR in the game is no surprise! People chased pokémons in augmented reality before it was this cool.

Nowadays however, gamers can bring small battlefields into their living rooms, look for portals around the city (if they don’t like chasing pokémons anymore), destroy strongholds or investigate crime scenes at home – nothing too special (yet) if you take in consideration the examples from the other four industries mentioned above. Nevertheless, there is one example that might get you super excited. Ready? How does “exploring the wizarding world of Harry Potter” sound? In AR! Because apparently someone is working to release this bad boy. Can’t wait!

3 Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleGrowing a business is a complicated matter because it takes a lot of time, determination and sometimes even a bit of investment. Besides finding a profitable idea, defining a target audience and providing them with either a valuable product or service, one has to figure out the best marketing strategies for their company. Whether they are selling products, services or sharing information with their customers, it is important to note that the business world has become hard to access. That is why it is vital to find the right marketing strategies. Otherwise, making a profit or staying afloat is a complicated matter.

Nonetheless, finding the right marketing strategy is a struggle itself. You need to find a way to get your message to the right audience, boost visibility, increase sales and many more. To do that, you can check out the following strategies.

Create Video Tutorials

Creating video tutorials is probably the best and most effective way of getting the word out. It is simple and quite quick. Moreover, thanks to your expertise and valuable knowledge, prospects can easily turn into regular customers or at least frequent visitors of your page. Video tutorials are a very good way to start. The better those videos are, the more value you provide to your audience. As a result, you are able to boost your visibility and ultimately, increase your sales. Most people use video platforms in order to learn something quick. This could be the future of marketing, especially since people don’t have a lot of time on their hands.

Start Blogging

Every business company should have a blog. However, it is not absolutely necessary to have a blog on your own. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who find this task mundane because they don’t get that much visibility. Therefore, they start authority blogging. If you’re new to the blogging world, this is a great way to gain exposure. There are quite a few platforms out there that allow you to post valuable content. The only difference between your blog and those platforms is that they have massive audiences, a factor that gives you instant reach. Though, if you consider starting a blog, you should definitely learn more about SEO techniques. Get online and learn how powerful SEO Techniques can boost you and lead to business growth.

Build a Great Lead Magnet

Another great and effective marketing strategy is creating a lead magnet. A lot of professionals believe that the right lead magnet presented to the right candidates can have incredible results. There are many types of lead magnets that one can build from e-books, to cheat sheets to videos and checklists. Though, before doing that is it important to identify pain points so that you know how to offer solutions. Of course, the lead market plays a small part in this equation, but it is important to create the right one. If you want to reach your audience, you need to make it as effective as possible.

There are many great strategies that entrepreneurs can use to grow their business. While most of them are effective, they all require a bit of effort.