I recently was looking at a business plan for a new venture that came across my desk. The two individuals involved are trying to raise money for a bar in South America that they will manage. It’s one of those businesses that most people dream about – a foreign country with lots of sunshine, lots of friendly travellers, and evenings spent sipping beer on a patio. Sign me up! As part of their business plan, they needed to come up with a value for what this new business would likely be worth once it was off the ground. The reason you need to have a value is that when you are trying to solicit investments ...

One of the hardest aspects of being a business owner is being able to come up with a metric, even an internal one, for what it means for that business to be successful. For some people, that goal is completely monetary – i.e., if they can sell the business for 1 million dollars within 10 years, then that represents success for them. Making Your Business Work For You As an example, one of my good friends recently sold his business. While it was always his dream to build a popular retail business, at some point he realized that the excitement, and the dream, mostly involved building a business, ...

Inside my suitcase upstairs is a huge manilla envelope that has the majority of receipts in it for my trip to South America. Since some of them represent expenses that I can write-off on the business side, it was important to keep them for Revenue Canada in the odd event of an audit down the road. Unfortunately for me though, it meant that I had to collect all my receipts while traveling around the world. It’s one thing when you have an apartment in Canada and everything can be sorted into file folders once a week or so, but when you’re traveling with a backpack and trying not to accumulate anything ...