Andrew Dagys - Canadian Small Business Kit For Dummies

Canadian Small Business Kit For Dummies, 4th Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939298

ISBN 978-1-119-57589-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-57584-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-57587-0 (ebk)

1. Chapter 7
2. Chapter 9
3. Chapter 10
4. Chapter 17
5. Chapter 19

1. Chapter 17

Starting a business is an exciting and often frightening adventure. Who knows where you may end up? To keep from getting lost on your journey exploring business opportunities, you need help setting up your business choosing the right vehicle, charting the right course, and heading out with the right equipment. This book gives you a head start on your voyage.

According to Industry Canadas recent Key Small Business Statistics, the Canadian economy totalled 1.17 million businesses. Of these, 1.14 million (97.9 percent) were small businesses namely, enterprises with fewer than 100 employees. But for just about every one of the 100,000 new businesses created each year, there are others that no longer operate due to bankruptcy, insolvency, retirement, or other reasons. In fact, these statistics also show that about 85 percent of small businesses survive for three years, and 70 percent survive for five years. Thats a pretty high failure rate.

In addition to external circumstances beyond anyones control, exits from small businesses are commonly driven by the fact that many small business owners are poorly prepared to go into business. They dont know the things they need to know that will allow their businesses to succeed. This book isnt long enough to tell you everything you need to know about going into business for yourself, but it gives you a really good head start and addresses many of the root cause knowledge gaps often attributed to business failures.

Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If youre reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as its noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesnt exist. If youre reading this as an e-book, youve got it easy just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

We wrote this book for people who want to go into business for themselves. You have aspirations of being an entrepreneur, but thats all we know about you. We dont assume that you know where your business will be located, or even what it will be. We dont assume that you have any background knowledge about law or risk management or insurance or accounting or marketing or anything else for that matter. We do assume that you have a computer with Internet access, although we dont assume that youre a techno-nerd. We assume that you are intelligent and self-motivated. And we assume that youre aware that this book is just the start of a long journey that will entail a lot of work but will hopefully confer great rewards, too.

Scattered along the left-hand side of this book are little icons. Heres a guide to what they mean:

This icon draws your attention to important information youve probably already forgotten if weve told you about it before, or to information that we want you to remember in the future.

This icon suggests that were going to say something that will make your eyes glaze over. But we use it sparingly instead we try to make sure to cover technical points in understandable language, so you hardly know youve hit a technical bump at all.