The Small Business Doer

What many Canadian business owners don’t know is that receipts and bills that you collect when you purchase items and sales receipts and invoices that you issue to customers have to contain certain information according to the CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency).

These are the guidelines for for receipts to be considered legitimate for the GST/HST Input Tax Credit.

Yep, so August was a write-off. Not much to write home – or to the Internet – about.

I was in Japan for the first couple of weeks and then had out-of-town family visit for the last two.

This is a good time to mention that when you are self-employed – and you get paid by the hour – if you don’t work you don’t get money. This applies as much to vacation time as it does to when you simply don’t book work.

Suck at selling? Do you need some sales tips on how to be a good salesperson? Alex Sim, a business instructor talks about the 7 things you should have when selling yourself and when looking to hire a salesperson to sell for you.

Ooohhh, got myself into some expenses this July. All justified… of course.

I also thought that July would be worse than sales than it actually was, since I was to leave in the last week of the month.

After going through my first 6 months, and as mentioned in my half-year review, I am really itching to get on with my plan to make information products.

If you’re in the market for some photos for your business, you’re going to want to know what to look for in a photographer when you go about choosing and hiring one.

I interview Allan de la Plante, a professional photographer of many decades, to get his advice on how to choose a pro photographer.

While the monthly updates are good, you don’t get the chance to see the bigger picture when you’re focused on only one month at a time. I found it very beneficial to check out my numbers and business progress half way through the year. Taking this look has helped me figure out why things happened the way they did and help me to figure out what to expect and aim for in the future.

June, my biggest month in the past two years. The only reason, two self-produced contracts. That accounted for near half the revenues brought in.

Feel like a broken record, but again no work on growing the business.

Starting a website? Are you going to make your own website or hire a professional web developer?

You’ll learn some key things to consider when starting a website by yourself, such as domain names, web hosting, content, and SEO. You’ll also learn what to look for in a web developer if you decide to go that route.

May, another solid month!

Once again, so solid that no work was done on growing the business, only work on making sure the business was still running.

April was a smoking month for sales. 24% more sales than expected in fact!

The reason? I produced more of my own contracts. Three to be exact. I was busy, but not terribly more than March.