PROFIT BusinessCast

There’s a line of thinking in the business world today that the most crucial part of any organization is it’s ‘Why.’ And David Horsager agrees that purpose is important. “If you have a strong enough ‘Why,’ you don’t need the perfect strategy,” he says.

But Horsager, author of the recently-released The Daily Edge: Simple Strategies to Increase Efficiency and Make an Impact Every Day, believes there’s another important question that too many leaders and organizations don’t ask themselves enough: How. “People stop way too early on the ‘How,’” he says. For example, lots of bosses claim they want to appreciate their people more. “How’re you going to do that?” Horsager asks. “Until people say to me, ‘I’m going to write an appreciation note every day for the next 90 days,’ I don’t trust them.”

When it comes to objectives—personal, professional or organizational—having a clear path to reaching them is as important as coming up with them in the first place. Horsager uses the shorthand of identifying something that you can start doing today or tomorrow to achieve your goal. “When I’m actually clear about the how, that actually motivates [and] gives me hope,” he says.

Trust Edge, Horsager’s firm, pushes clients it consults for to come up with a clear, coherent “How,” even if that means asking the question over and over again. To illustrate the method, he cites the example of a major North American healthcare organization that had been going through a rough patch. In a meeting with the senior leadership, Horsager asked, “What do you think is the most important thing you could do to build more trust and move your organization forward?” Clarity, responded the team leader. “How are you going to do that?” Horsager asked. After some discussion, the individual responded that the organization would work to communicate more. Horsager responded with the same question. After deliberating with his team, the leader said that the there’d need to be more mutual accountability. Again, Horsager pressed him for a more direct answer. “Finally he got to something specific and actionable,” Horsager recalls.

The process may sound awkward, but it’s necessary. “We ask ‘How?’ until people are going to do something differently today or tomorrow, whether it’s personally or in their organization,” Horsager says. His book translates the back-and-forth into a 90-day Quick Plan Strategy, the same one Horsager says he used twice over to lose a total 50 lb. of weight, and which he claims readers have used to triple sales in the same amount of time.

Another mistake people make in pursuit of their own goals is failing to prioritize or actively neglecting key tasks. “People want to feel like they’re working, [to] feel valuable,” but they’re naturally inclined to avoid anything they think might be painful or difficult, Horsager says. Executives often say the first thing they do in the morning is to read a newspaper or look for leadership tips because they think keeping on top of those things is an essential part of leadership, he observes. “[But] that is not the most important thing that they could do,” he says. “If they did that most important thing that they’re avoiding, it could change everything today, but they avoid it [by] doing kind of faux work or faux important things.”

Knowing what that most important thing is starts with understanding your “How.” Without it, you and your organization will simply run out of drive before you cross the finish line. “The ‘How?’ is more critical than people think,” says Horsager. “They want to just talk about the ‘Why?’ and be inspired forever. But you actually have to get to a ‘How?’ because that gives hope.”

While high net-worth individuals and private equity firms have made plenty of money off smart early investments in high-growth startups, retail investors haven’t been able to do the same—until now. The new equity crowdfunding regime that took effect in five Canadian provinces in January lets private companies raise cash from the masses, and gives ordinary investors a chance to profit from their success.

The new rules—which I explained in a previous edition of the PROFIT BusinessCast—arose from a thorough process of consultation and review by securities regulators. While other jurisdictions like the U.K. and Israel have allowed equity crowdfunding for a few years now, Canada is still relatively ahead of the curve says Rebecca Kacaba, a partner at Aird & Berlis LLP. “I think this has been quite quick and we have come into force in advance of the United States,” she notes.

Here are five things investors need to understand before putting their money into equity crowdfunding.

1. The companies will be unproven

Every business follows some kind of commercialization trajectory from idea to viability (or proof of non-viability, for failed ones). Stages might include creating a founding team, coming up with an idea, developing a product or service based on that, looking for a market for the offering, then scaling the headcount and operations as it gains traction. “If you picture it visually [as] an arc, at each inflection point in that trajectory there’s an opportunity to go to investors for capital and [for] investors to get involved and take a piece of the action,” says Matt Goldstein, an associate at Aird & Berlis LLP.

Companies looking to equity crowdfunding tend to come from the early part of that arc. That means a significant amount of risk, cautions Goldstein. “You don’t have the same opportunity to do due diligence, to meet the founders, to talk to some of the customers, that you would have at a later stage in the ecosystem,” he warns.

2. Equity crowdfunding doesn’t guarantee an exit opportunity…

At some point, you’re going to want your money back, preferably with a healthy margin added on. Goldstein emphasizes that the liquidity of your investment has less to do with whether or not you make it via equity crowdfunding, and more to do with the company itself.

“Is the company into which investors are making these investments going to undergo a liquidity event, such as a sale, a merger, an initial public offering?” he asks rhetorically. “The form of capital raising that is equity crowdfunding isn’t going to drive the answer to the question.”

Rather, the answer will be based on the company’s prospects—the industry it’s in, the track record of its founders, the M&A environment, and so on.

3. …but it doesn’t hurt either

A company that raises money via equity crowdfunding isn’t tainted when it re-enters the markets to seek more traditional financing says Kacaba, citing data other jurisdictions that already allow this kind of investment. “The statistics are showing that people seem to be able to actually raise later stages.”

4. Watch the portals

As with anything new, it’ll take a while for the equity crowdfunding space to shake out and formalize. Companies raising money will need to be careful about which portals and advisors they associate with, as will investors. “It’s not impossible to imagine that there’s some sort of exogenous shock or some sort of event that taints the association with some of these portals,” says Goldstein.

An instance of fraud by one of the companies who raise capital through equity crowdfunding might hurt the prospects of others. “We saw something not dissimilar with Bitcoin, which in a lot of circles lost a lot of esteem when one of the bigger exchanges went down,” notes Goldstein.

Since the days of the first Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding has grown from just another quirky form of Internet commerce to a well-established way to raise funds and generate buzz around a new product or company.

Need proof? At January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, more than half of the 478 companies with trade booths at the Eureka Park innovation showcase got their start through crowdfunding, says Craig Asano.

“I think it’s a stepping stone, or some people call it a ‘funding escalator,’” says Asano, the founder and executive director of the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA).

The pre-sales generated by a crowdfunding campaign serve as tangible proof of concept, generating some growth momentum for your business and attracting advisors and investors. “You’ve got a proven model, you have quite great strength in terms of product as well as customer feedback,” notes Asano. “It’s a much more plausible pitch to [investors].”

On March 3, Asano’s organization will host the second annual Canadian Crowdfunding Summit in Toronto. The event comes at a pivotal moment for the financing model, with five provinces having introduced new regulatory model for equity crowdfunding in January.

The new rules allow startups and other companies to raise up to $1.5 million per year from retail investors, subject to certain conditions. Businesses looking to raise capital will need to list with an online funding portal. (Think Kickstarter, but for equity).

But there’s a lot of prep work before you get to that stage, notes Asano. “You really need to have a better understanding [about] whether you’re ready to raise capital,” he says. “You’re going to want to learn about the cost to raise capital, and [to] connect with the people that can help you facilitate the actual process of raising capital.” One potential complication: managing the large number of stakeholders created by offering equity to the crowd.

As an entirely new industry, there’s plenty of opportunity for new businesses and new kinds of businesses: platforms, vendors, consultants and so on. “It’s early days-there’s a lot of innovation to [come] in this space,” says Asano. “But the idea is that we’ll have wider distribution, streamlined costs, and eventually entrepreneurs could focus on their business rather than spending so much time trying to raise capital.”

But it all starts with the portals, and quite a few are likely to crop up in the near future. Asano employs a well-known rule of thumb: the Canadian market is a tenth of the size of the U.S. “In the U.S. alone to my knowledge there’s around 178 real estate platforms,” Asano notes, using one popular vertical within the crowdfunding world. “I’m not saying there’s going to be 17 real estate platforms in Canada overnight, but that is the potential.”

Crowdfunding used to be a way for companies to generate some orders and build some buzz around their products pre-release. But thanks to regulatory changes that took effect in five provinces last month, businesses can now offer backers equity instead of T-shirts and tokens.

“It’s a whole new regime, and it’s going to present a different avenue for issuers to raise capital,” says Graham Topa, an associate at Aird & Berlis LLP. The new crowdfunding rules apply across Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Topa and Aird & Berlis partner Rebecca Kacaba weighed in as part of the first in a short series on the new equity crowdfunding regime and its implications for companies looking to raise capital. Here are nine things you should know from the outset about this novel source of financing.

Which exemption should I use?

To raise money in exchange for equity, companies would normally have to produce extensive disclosure documentation (called a prospectus) and meet strict ongoing reporting obligations. But there are exemptions to these requirements. “Equity crowdfunding is an additional exemption that gives people the opportunity to raise capital in a different way,” explains Kacaba. Select the exemptions you plan to call on for your funding rounds with care, or you risk boxing yourself out of money, she cautions.

Equity crowdfunding is a tradeoff. It gives you access to a wider base of investors—the general public—but unlike previous exemptions, it does create certain reporting requirements. “If you’re dealing with somewhat sophisticated investors … it may be beneficial to rely on other exemptions, because there’s a cost-saving benefit,” Kacaba says.

When should I do it?

Some entrepreneurs don’t have access to the traditional source of startup capital, friends- and family-financing. “Before they can show revenues, it can be really tough,” Kacaba says. That’s a gap in the funding ecosystem that the new regime could help to fill. “The way we see the crowdfunding exemption being used is really at the early stages of a company’s life cycle,” says Kacaba.

Who can invest?

The new regime imposes different limits on accredited and non-accredited investors. The former category, which consists of individuals who hold a high level of assets or meet certain financial tests, can put up a maximum of $25,000 per investment up to a total of $50,000 per year when using the crowdfunding exemption. (They can also invest via the accredited investor exemption, but that doesn’t count towards this limit). Non-accredited investors are limited to $2,500 per issuer and $10,000 a year.

How much can I raise?

Just like investors, companies seeking financing through the new exemption are confined by annual limits. “An issuer can raise up to $1.5 million in any 12 month period relying on the crowdfunding exemption,” says Topa.

Where do I find investors?

An company looking to raise money via equity crowdfunding must register with a restricted dealer funding portal. These organizations act as gatekeepers between issuers and investors, conducting background checks and reviewing materials to ensure there’s no misrepresentation on the part of the company seeking funding. Pass, and you’ll be listed on the portal.

But don’t expect a plug from your dealer. “A crowdfunding portal is not giving you any kind of opinion on the investment,” Kacaba notes. “It’s just checking the boxes and making sure the issuer has met the compliance requirements, and that they don’t have any background of fraud.”

Can I advertise my listing?

Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns often employ flashy videos and social media advertising to draw in backers. But companies undertaking equity crowdfunding can use no such tactics says Topa. “They would have to basically just direct prospective purchasers [to] the crowdfunding portal, and all information and all materials relating to that offering have to go through the portal only,” he says.

Over two decades as an entrepreneur in the manufacturing industry, Kira Leskew saw what lapses in concentration could do to workers and companies. “If you trace back quality problems, a very high percentage of the time [it’s because] someone didn’t do something,” she explains. “They couldn’t concentrate, they weren’t concentrating, they got interrupted, or they had competing priorities and could only pay attention to one thing.”

Leskew is now a mindfulness coach and president of Kira Leskew Productions, her fifth business. Focusing on the task at hand is a big problem in the business world, she says, pointing to the 55 million Google searches annually for the phrase “I can’t concentrate.” And she believes the problem is worsening: five years ago studies showed that the average person was interrupted every 11 minutes; today’s reports put it at every 5.5 minutes.

To illustrate the seriousness of this issue for businesses, Leskew relays an anecdote. At her last business, a factory supervisor came to her with a concern. “We had the highest sales backlog that we’d ever had in the history of the company,” recalls Leskew. “And he said, ‘I need to send people home, I don’t have orders to process.’”

Neither Leskew’s business partner nor her sales team could explain the problem, so Leskew followed her training in quality control: go and watch. “What I realized was they weren’t focusing on their work,” she explains. Her sales staff were constantly being interrupted, by themselves and others. They simply couldn’t get their tasks done. “It was to the point that I was going to be sending staff home, while at the same time I had orders and [was] missing deadlines for customers.”

Here’s what Leskew says you can do to help your employees—and yourself—concentrate.

It starts at the top

Bosses are particularly susceptible to interruption thanks to a common management best-practice: the open-door policy. “I totally agree that we need to have great communication in our organizations and people have to feel like they can brings things forward,” Leskew allows. But she says the rise of the open-door manager actually helped the interruption problem in the first place. “People could have access to you at any time,” she notes. “It didn’t matter what you were working on, someone had permission to come in and get your attention.”

But leaders can’t recognize a concentration deficit among their workforce if they suffer from one themselves says Leskew. “The reason that I was able to solve that problem and my business partner wasn’t is because he was used to being interrupted all day long, and I wasn’t,” she explains.

Watch yourself

Between emails, phone calls, and co-workers with questions, there are plenty of distractions embedded in any day at the office. But you don’t need something else to break your concentration—you’re quite capable of doing that for yourself. “About three-quarters of the interruptions that people have in the workplace [are because] they interrupt themselves,” says Leskew.

People are so used to being interrupted that they’re constantly checking their environment for fresh distractions, she explains. “We literally can’t sit and do what’s in front of us, because we’re waiting to get interrupted again.” Or we seek out distraction. For example, someone working on a sales proposal might realize they need to refer to an email, then spend half an hour answering messages instead of completing his or her original task.

Start the clock

Unless you’ve got someone monitoring you the way Leskew did her sales team, it’s hard to know when you’re interrupting yourself. “You don’t actually know when you’ve gone off track and you’ve lost concentration,” she points out.

Leskew recommends using a timer to track the ebb and flow of your focus. “Start with 10 minutes. Turn the timer on, and go about doing whatever you’re doing,” she says.

Access matters, Dave Wilkins believes. “[It’s] a critical ingredient to entrepreneurial and career success,” he says. “If you don’t have access to the right type of person to bounce around ideas or get guidance, you will not be as successful as someone who does have access.”

But access isn’t available to anyone equally. That’s why Wilkin founded Ten Thousand Coffees, a platform that allows users to connect with leaders in a variety of fields. Ten Thousand Coffees now has far more users than its name suggests, and its platform is being used by more than 25 FORTUNE 500 companies, as well as not-for-profit organizations like the SIPO Foundation.

Here’s what Wilkin learned while building Ten Thousand Coffees.

Problems matter more than solutions

Product development can take on a logic all of its own, warns Wilkin. “You construct a solution that you think is really great, but you forget what the problem is,” he observes.

Ten Thousand Coffee’s big pivot came when the team realized it had to step away from automating mentorship to re-focus on what had motivated the platform in the first place: making access to people better. “Get obsessed with the problem and not the solution,” advises Wilkin.

Focus on more than money

Ten Thousand Coffees had plenty of opportunities to get paid, but Wilkin believed that it’s free-to-use model needed to be maintained. “We always would say ‘No’ because they didn’t actually build our value proposition,” he says.

Instead, the company was looking for a revenue model that actually added value for ordinary users. Wilkin chose to license the Ten Thousand Coffees platform to companies and organizations, allowing those institutions to engage their employees and members, and adding more people to the overall community.

“Make sure that the revenue model doesn’t cannibalize the value of your company to your users,” says Wilkin.

A question of timing

Facebook has made a habit of releasing products, then improving them in real time, and Wilkin says that “Zuckerberg principle” applies to any get-to-market strategy. “If you’ve launched it and it feels perfect, you’ve launched it too late,” Wilkin says.

Watching users actually interact with your product will teach you an incredible amount about what needs improving and where you need to be headed. “So often when people are innovating, they continuously over-architect the idea to be perfect,” observes Wilkin. “What’s more important is [to figure] out what the leanest potential solution is to a problem, and just get it out into the market.”

Build it and they will come

Ten Thousand Coffees is now the largest peer-to-peer mentoring program in the world, according to Wilkin, and it got there without spending a whole lot of time on publicity and marketing. “Our big focus has been on building a really great product, and if people have a really great experience with the product [then] they just naturally refer people,” he says.

Ignore what they say they want

Mentors are hot right now—employees and entrepreneurs have been told they need one, and leaders that they need to be one. But Wilkin says when given the opportunity to form a mentorship relationship, most people don’t want it.

The problem, Wilkin says, is that people don’t want the fixed-term version of mentorship, in which mentor and mentee interact in a regular, prescribed way. “In real-time people wanted to go and ask somebody questions or go find a way to open a a door, but they didn’t want a mentor,” he says.

So Ten Thousand Coffees based its platform on what its users really wanted, not what they said they wanted. It reinvented the mentorship relationship as a single coffee meeting, rather than a six-month schedule of interactions. “We [needed] to change the expectation of what’s required of a relationship, and people will naturally make that more successful,” Wilkin says.

Kathleen McGinn is well acquainted with what it takes to run a sizeable organization. McGinn co-founded Beerbistro, a successful downtown Toronto eatery she operated for a decade. At its peak, the business had 58 staff and $4.5 million in annual revenues.

But even with that entrepreneurial track record, McGinn’s new venture has required her to learn a lot of new things. McGinn is now the founder and Executive Director of the EMPWR Foundation, a not-for-profit that supports advances in concussion recovery. “The nature of the businesses are very different,” she says.

Here are three things McGinn says anyone running an organization—for-profit or not—needs to do to make their endeavour successful.

Managing competing interests

Entrepreneurs must serve many masters—shareholders, employees, vendors, partners and customers all have their own needs and interests that must be acknowledged and integrated into the running of the business.

But McGinn says that the process is even tougher in the not-for-profit world. “It’s a much more dynamic environment or space in terms of all the different people who have a stake in the issue of concussions in sports,” she says, pointing out that coaches, athletes, medical researchers and sponsors all view the problem in different ways. Beerbistro didn’t present quite the same multiplicity of viewpoints. “Food service was a little bit more focused, more unilateral, and there just wasn’t as much nuance,” McGinn says.

In both cases, communication is the key to good stakeholder relations. “Be very specific about how you’re going to communicate to your audience,” McGinn counsels. “What are you actually trying to accomplish when you go out there and speak to people?”

Questions of identity

“Brand” isn’t just a buzzword thrown around by marketers who want to sell you their services. It’s a core part of how your potential customers (in the business world) or donors (in the not-for-profit world) see you. “Spend some time developing [your] brand identity,” McGinn says. “Have a really solid, clean, straightforward, [and] clear branding strategy that you’re able to communicate really well to what would potentially be your customer base or your audience.”

Stick to one thing

EMPWR focuses on concussion recovery, a relatively under-resourced part of this growing medical field. Adopting a narrow mandate magnifies the foundation’s impact rather than limiting it, according to McGinn. The same principle applies to for-profit businesses. “You can’t be everything to everyone,” McGinn points out. “You have to really just put your stake in the ground.”

McGinn says it’s also important to exclude certain things from your organization’s identity. EMPWR, for example, focuses on recovery and not prevention. “Decide what you are, and then be very clear about what you’re also not.”

Curtis Priest’s childhood bedroom had a large poster on one wall titled “All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Star Trek.” On it was a lesson he’d come to keenly appreciate in his later entrepreneurial career: don’t put all your ranking officers in one shuttlecraft.

Translated out of Trekkie speak, it’s the old aphorism about investing too heavily in any one thing. And it’s a mistake Priest, the founder and CEO of web design and development agency PixelCarve Inc, made at great professional cost some years ago. “We invested a ton of time, money, [and] resources into becoming a leader in this one particular technology platform that was quite ubiquitous,” he recalls.

For a long time, the strategy proved successful, and PixelCarve—which Priest started at after high school from his parents’ basement and later partnered with a cousin to grow—became well-known for that kind of work. But the company faced a sudden disruption, in the form of a well-known entrepreneur: Steve Jobs. “He basically decided, ‘This is not going to be a platform that I allow on my devices,’ because it competes with his app model,” explains Priest, a member of the Toronto chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. “It was going to completely deteriorate his concept of having apps on devices, when what we were doing would let you do that in a browser for free.”

The popularity of Apple’s devices turned apps into the dominant model for mobile content consumption, and PixelCarve’s major investment in a competing digital platform was rendered worthless. Here’s how Priest got his business back on track, and how he says other companies can avoid or survive the kind of disruption his faced.

Keep your ear to the ground

Disruption may seem to come out of nowhere, but there are often warning signs that the business landscape is about to change. Priest says PixelCarve should have paid more attention when people started asking questions like ‘Well why can’t you do things this way?’ or ‘Do you guys offer this service?’ or ‘I heard from your competition that this is a better way to do things and you guys are telling me different.’ “When those things would come up we’d gloss over them or we’d have some great excuses as to why we were right,” he recalls.

Beware your present success. “Our warning sign was that we got complacent,” Priest says. “We stopped taking advantage of certain opportunities because we felt that … we didn’t need to take the risks that were necessary to take for those new opportunities because we were doing well.”

The stages of grief

Before reinventing their company, Priest and his team had to take the time to grieve their losses. We’d invested so much time and money and resources in our lives,” he says. “If we’d just tried to pivot without accepting the loss of that, then I think we’d be stuck in the same conversation for a very long time.”

At the time, the PixelCarve team couldn’t have meeting or a client discussion without bringing up what had happened, and what they might have been able to do differently. “Eventually you get down to that bottom point [and] you really have two options: either you’re out, or you get back up,” Priest says.

Step by step

Process matters when you’re undertaking something as significant as completely reimagining your company. “For us, it started with a new vision,” Priest says. And PixelCarve wasn’t focusing not just on its own services and clients, but on the industry as a whole.

As trying as the process was for Priest, it was also exciting. “In many ways it was like a startup version of PixelCarve more than a decade into the company, which starts becoming a thrill again,” he recalls. The opportunity to evolve or start something new reinvigorated Priest. “And it’s even more fun when you have the resources and the experience that you have from building a company the first time.”

Being fired from a job is not a pleasant experience for anyone. So when it happened to Mike Brcic twice in short order, he decided it was time for a change. “I discovered that I was probably not a great employee, and that I might make a better entrepreneur and just create something myself from scratch,” recalls Brcic, an entrepreneur consultant and founder of Sacred Rides Mountain Bike Adventures.

Brcic started his company by taking tourists out on the mountain bike trails of Fernie, British Columbia, a town which at the time didn’t have the cachet of nearby Whistler. “I was really trying to create some brand awareness, not only of my own business but of Fernie the town,” he recalls. It clearly worked—Sacred Rides now offers tours in 17 destinations, and over the last half-decade has grown at an annual rate of some 40–50%.

Sacred Rides’ marketing efforts have played a big part in that growth. Brcic came to the field through necessity. “Back in [the] early days I was the head cook, the head guide—the head everything—and the head marketer,” he jokes. While he’s since shed many of those responsibilities, he’s focused heavily on targeted online marketing in recent years. “We get about 100,000 page-views a month on our blogs—it’s extremely busy and the main driver of revenue for Sacred Rides,” he explains.

Here’s how Brcic keeps a steady stream of traffic flowing to the Sacred Rides website and turns those visitors into leads.

It’s easier than you think

Though you wouldn’t know it from pop culture today (think HBO’s Silicon Valley or the 2010 film The Social Network), most entrepreneurs aren’t coders. But Brcic says you don’t need tech skills to get your business online.

Platforms like SquareSpace or WordPress offer templates and turnkey web solutions at low monthly rates. “You could have your own website up and running in the span of a day, with not a lot of tech-savviness,” Brcic says. Or failing that, platforms like Upwork allow you to contract freelancers who can do it for you quickly and at low cost. There are also easy-to-use tools available for lead capture and email marketing—Brcic recommends SumoMe and MailChimp respectively.

Start with who you have

Although there are best practices (more on those in a bit), there’s no one-size-fits all model for content generation and engagement in online marketing. Which platforms and methodologies you invest time and money in should be based on the audience you’re trying to attract.

Brcic says many businesses don’t look much beyond basic demographic factors like age, location and income. “What are their wants, what are their needs, what do they fear?” he asks. Gathering that intelligence takes a more offline approach. Brcic recommends scheduling phone calls with existing customers to find out what’s driving and troubling them.

You can’t set it and forget it

One of the biggest misconceptions entrepreneurs have about online market according to Brcic is that prospective customers who engage with the content they post will naturally go on to buy from them. “There’s a whole journey they have to go on,” he says. That’s particularly true for big-ticket items like the $3,000–4,000 trips to New Zealand that Sacred Rides sells.

Marketing is “the process of getting your prospective customers to know, like and trust you,” says Brcic. “Engage in an ongoing conversation or relationship with them, build that like-ability [and] trust to the point where they are so attracted to your brand that they just have to buy from you.”

Build the journey

Once you’ve identified an audience, work your way backwards to the marketing strategy. For example, Brcic offers one-on-one consulting for entrepreneurs. “If somebody is going to commit to a $1,500 consulting package with me, probably they’re going to want to test me out first,” he says. “So I might offer a really low-cost introductory half-hour session.”

Paul Chato’s company has built over 2,000 small business websites, so he’s had a front-row seat to the web’s takeover of the business world. “Canadian businesses are brutally behind almost everybody in the world,” he says. “Even though we have some of the highest data speeds in our homes, Canadian businesses have just not wanted to invest in any kind of [online presence]. They’re not investing—I don’t know why.”

Chato took quite the circuitous route to his current job, via a Ryerson University degree (in Radio and Television Arts), graphic design, standup comedy (he helped found The Frantics), and the CBC (where he was Head of TV Comedy). Today he’s CEO of Your Web Department, which provides managed website services.

Here’s what Chato says Canadian firms need to understand in order to build a robust and sustainable web presence.

It starts with a brand

A website is only one piece of the marketing puzzle—albeit an important one. Chato says not enough people understand the importance of a brand. “I always thought it was hilarious in the 2000s when it was declared that bricks-and-mortar companies were going to be dead,” he recalls. “I laughed, even back then, because they were the only ones with the brand.” Web pundits believed simply being online was enough, but strong brands that consumers connected with helped digital laggards survive the digital revolution.

Every company has to start by finding a brand and a tone, Chato says. “If you are thinking of buying furniture from some place, do you remember a corner store with a nondescript logo and no personality, or do you remember Bad Boy and Mel Lastman?” he asks. Your website and online presence should follow from the tone you choose. “I can very easily create a verbal cloud that will conjure in people’s minds an idea of what that website should look like,” Chato claims. “[But] most business owners have no idea what that image cloud needs to be.”

Know your needs

“Build it and they will come” is not a maxim that applies to the online world anymore, but Chato says people who utilize free website-builder services haven’t realized that yet. “I think it’s great if you’re at the very, very beginning of building your website and you’re researching to find out whether your business is a viable business,” he allows. “But once you’ve found out that there’s some traction and some viability, I strongly suggest that you go out and spend the money on people who can help you put the pieces together.”

Meeting Google’s needs

The list of things you need to do to attract traffic to your website is long, and it starts with the Internet’s most powerful force: Google. The search engine has very specific requirements. Chato uses the example of the headline atop your website. “It can’t be pithy—it can’t be ‘We bring good things to life,’ because Google has no idea who ‘we’ is and they have no idea what you mean by ‘bringing to life,’” he explains. “They need ‘Joe Blow Garage, in the GTA, fixes Volkswagen diesel engines to make them emission-compliant,’ and that’s an ugly headline.” It may not be creative, but it tells the search engine who you are, where you do your business, and what your product is.

Not just for show

Once you’ve got people to your site, you need to do something with them. Chato says too many small businesses websites consist of just corporate histories and mission statements. “No one cares,” he says. “The home page has to be about solving the problems of the person who’s visiting.”

Your website should have clear, actionable calls to action, he says, and those call-outs should represent at least 80% of the business. Chato cautions against putting in what he calls “dream” functions, sections about things you’d like your business to do but that it doesn’t already. “Don’t put a button in that says, ‘You know, I’d really like to get into fly fishing. I think that would be really big,’” he warns.