It is easy to get sucked into the vortex of social media. It can be a fun distraction and depending on your interests, educational and inspiring. It is also a megaphone where often the most opiniated people hold the most weight. Someone with thousands of followers who confidently asserts a fact, is taken at their word. Unfortunately, thought, some of this information is erroneous or has been manipulated to support an argument and anyone trying to correct errors or present a counter argument is shut down or simply deleted.

As we are firmly into tax season, I thought it would be useful to delve into the endlessly exciting topic of sales tax. I have several blog posts and videos about sales tax which I will link to below, including an FAQ (which I have just updated). In this article, I will provide some context that might be useful.

Sales taxes in Canada in it’s original form was introduced during the Great Depression The federal government introduced a "manufacturer's sales tax" (MST) in 1920 to bolster their revenues during a challenging time. The tax was levied on the sale of goods by manufacturers and was primarily intended to be a hidden tax, that was indirectly paid by consumers.

Anyone who has glanced a non fiction bestseller list over the past few years has likely noticed a book called “Atomic Habits” . The thesis of the book is that small incremental changes to our habits (i.e. atomic units) can lead to significant changes in our lives, over time. He explains the behaviour that drives habits, provides strategies for forming good habits and helps to break bad ones.

I mention this as I was thinking about my goals recently (as one does in a new year) and realized that I had some work to do on defining and refining them. My starting point was an internet search on “how to set goals” which lead me to James Clear’s (author of “Atomic Habits” ) website and this post. He provides some great insight on how to set, attain and measure goals. However, the most interesting insight to me was that the systems (i.e. habits) are more important than the goals:

A few years ago I read a book called the The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. (which I highly recommend). The gist of the book is that too much time spent working in the business and not enough time spent working on the business is a big reason why 50% of new ventures fail within the first 5 years. In other words, many of us (I am certainly guilty of this) spend too much of our time on the technical or management of the business rather than growing it. The book focuses on the franchise model, which allowed McDonald’s (and everyone since) to expand (and create empires) relatively seamlessly by systematizing, documenting and automating processes.

As a business owner, I think a well crafted survey can provide you with a wealth of information about your customers. Creating a good survey, however ( as I have learnt), can take time and effort. It can’t be too long, shouldn’t have too many open ended questions and has to anticipate the needs of your audience. One of my goals is to get more general information on my readers and where there interest and more importantly, their challenges, lie.

As many of you know, the federal budget was released last week. They now give these budgets descriptive titles - this one is Making Life More Affordable and Supporting the Middle Class which is an interesting focus (I imagine they have a marketing department that comes up with these). Given that the biggest economic headline from the last year or so has been inflation, I suppose it is important that this budget is seen as an effort to help make life easier for Canadians. Unfortunately, the budget does not have much in the way of inflation targeting nor is there anything significant for small businesses. There are however (as always) some items of interest.

I would like to preface this by saying that as I was going down the rabbit hole of the digital economy, I realized that the term has almost become synonymous with business. The number of business that do not participate in some kind of online activity (whether it is your entire business or some part of it) is increasingly shrinking:

Hope everyone is having a lovely start to the new year! As a gift please find a mild rant below (please feel free to email me with your own opinions on this):

I’ve had various conversations with people on the subject of small business and personal finance which start with “my friend told me”. This can be compared to a game of broken telephone where the original knowledge is interpreted by the various recipients and often results in amalgam of truth and opinion, presented as fact.

As the start of the new year approaches, many of us are thinking about things we want to do differently. Of course the start of a new year is essentially a social construct. January 1st was chosen by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. to honour the god Janus (after which January is named) and as part of his efforts to align the calendar with the seasons. The Julian calendar forms the basis for our modern Gregorian calendar (which mostly just corrects for leap year which had not been taken into account). Other cultures celebrate the New Year at various times during the year and are often not a fixed date but depend on lunar cycles and may be celebrated over a number of days.

It is hard to believe that we are approaching the end of this year(I was just getting used to writing 2022). It is the time of year (between holiday preparations, Christmas shopping and trying not to overeat) that we tend to take stock of where we are, what we have done over the past year and what we want to do in the new year.

Many of us (often in spite of ourselves) are at least somewhat interested (and often excited) about Black Friday and Cyber Monday without, perhaps, even knowing why. I thought it would be interesting to (superficially) explore the psychology behind this phenomenon.

When you are in the earlier stages of being in business, you tend to be significantly less discerning with who you take on as a client (you have a business to build and you need to pay bills). Also, as an optimistic newbie, you don’t necessarily have the experience to identify clients who are going to be problematic.