IRAP R&D Program Runs Out of Money

Posted on | April 16, 2010 | 4 Comments

I saw it coming.

Now it has happened.

As foretold in my recent open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) has again abruptly halted accepting new requests for support. Unfortunately, IRAP program suspensions are becoming regular annual affairs.

Only back in business for just a couple of months now, this innovation support program’s shutdown comes only days into the Government’s and IRAP’s new fiscal year that started April 1st. Why you may ask? Well, the straight answer is:  they quickly ran out of money once again because of Federal Government under-funding.

What Happened to the Money? Read more…

‘DO IT!’ Article Wins Sugartone Prize

Posted on | March 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

[NEWS FLASH] According to the announcement posted on the Bloggertone website on March 24th, 2010, Biz Money Matters has been declared one of the winners of the Sugartone business article contest having submitted the article ‘Timely FREE Advice for Biz Owners: DO IT!’ which received 32 votes on the B2B social media site BizSugar!

Here is a copy of this award winning article:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Yes, times are tough for sure. Many people everywhere are struggling all trying to deal with the consequences of the 2008 – 2009 Great Global Recession (curse those stupid / greedy people who caused this economic disaster).

But even though lots of customers have run off looking for cover and many of the rest of us are so shelled shock we just want to hide in a bunker, we can’t waste time bemoaning our fate or the current state of the world. The only way each of us can start improving things is if we get focused on:

• How to make our future better?
• How to start making better things happen some how? And
• How we can get early results now?

Well, here is a simple, easily-executed 5 step game plan for how you can do just that: Read more…

Dear PM Harper: Help SME Business Now!

Posted on | March 19, 2010 | 4 Comments

March 19, 2010

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
Leader of the Conservative Party
Member of Parliament for the riding of Calgary Southwest AB
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa  K1A 0A2
  [Sent by email to: pm@pm.gc.ca]

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Re: Please Help iSME Business Now!

Canadians have now heard your Government’s recent Throne Speech and Finance Minister Flaherty’s 2010 Budget. And yes, times are tough and the deficit is astronomically high, something I acknowledge is likely to continue for 5 more years.

Furthermore, I understand how Canadians ideologically against taxes expect you to not reverse the GST reductions your Government enacted a few years ago by any amount, even though that could ease our country’s strained financial situation quite a bit.

Despite the above, let me raise an important point with you because effectively you are the person who determines what gets done and not done in Ottawa these days. This matter relates to the real backbone for jobs, wealth creation, and tax revenues in Canada: innovation oriented small and medium sized businesses (iSMEs).

Canada’s Job & Wealth Creation Engine is Sputtering and at Risk

Due to the problems in the economy and the capital markets, iSMEs all across Canada are REALLY struggling, particularly in Ontario. Many, if not most, have eaten through their reserves of cash that came from reinvested past profits or early rounds of capital investment. Additionally, new customers, new orders, and critical new sources of financing are all in extremely short supply to those at the base of Canada’s business totem pole. Read more…

Serious Biz Advice 4U: GET NAKED!

Posted on | March 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

Now I have your attention, let me tell you what’s remarkable about this article.

It’s not the controversial title or any suggestive pictures. Rather, it’s in the practical advice about how you can best stand up, stand out, and be vital to those you need to get passionately excited about what you have to offer – your customers.

With times as tough as they are now, at least economically for most, there is a pressing need for practical and effective ways to find more new business prospects to ‘seduce’ and ‘satisfy’ in ways so positive that they just can’t wait to sign up as fans on the company facebook page.

But how can your company do this?   Read more…

Seth Godin @ The Art of Marketing

Posted on | March 9, 2010 | 15 Comments

SETH GODIN was the BIG DRAW at The Art of Marketing Conference held in downtown Toronto on March 2, 2010. Sponsored by Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this Conference drew an audience of 1,600 people to to hear six internationally renowned thought-leaders and bestselling businessbook authors talk about critical cutting edge marketing issues

What Seth Godin DID there was WHAT he has been doing oh so well for the last 15 years: – helping us ALL do a ‘Screen Refresh’ on our Business Brains, this time by sharing his views on Leadership & Creativity in marketing today.

EXEC SUMMARY: SETH GODIN on LEADERSHIP & CREATIVITY

NOW is time to re-appreciate your marketing fundamentals.

MARKETING going forward will be all about focusing on Creating Value for individual customers in individualized ways that are relevant, specific, and special to each.

To do this requires individual and organizational Freedom, Creativity and Courage. This is the only way to commandingly Connect with People today, get them to WANT what you have to sell (if they find it wantable), buy your offerings, and join your TRIBE of loyal followers.

To marketing people and organizations: do this and you will SUCCEED; don’t do this and you will get FIRED!

[* The enduring value Seth Godin delivered at the Art of Marketing Conference was NOT in the 'WHAT' of WHAT Seth Godin said but in the 'WHAT' about WHAT Seth Godin talked about. In this I encourage you to think along the lines of Marshall McLuhan and his statement that “The Medium Is The Message” because marketing success today is not to be found so much in doing what Seth Godin says but in doing things like Seth Godin does. Baffled? Well then I invite you to read on for there is an explanation in the assessment / evaluation commentary section below.]

SETH GODIN in Profile

Hailed as "America’s Greatest Marketer" by American Way Magazine, Seth Godin is best known for:

• Promoting emarketing terms and popularizing concepts like permission marketing among many others;
• writing the most popular marketing blog in the world;
• being the author of numerous bestselling marketing books including All Marketers Are Liars;
• speaking to large groups on marketing, new media and what’s next;
• and being the founder of Squidoo.com, a fast-growing recommendation website.

Read more…

How to Succeed Like TIFFANY & CO.

Posted on | February 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

Want more revenue? Well then, make your offerings stand out more, so much so that your customers and prospects see what you have to sell as head and shoulders above the competition. You can do this if you harness the power of focus, clarity, simplicity, and utility, for these are the hallmark aspects of so many great things. Harness them in your business and you will enjoy no end of success. But you need to appreciate how doing this can prove quite a challenge. That’s because strengths like these cannot be gauged effectively on their own (or by you looking just starring at yourself and your company in the mirror). No, these are aspects that require a benchmark to be judged.

Tiffany & Co. presents a powerful and readily accessible benchmark for gauging your offering’s sales and marketing strength, one that B2C and B2B businesses can both use.

If savvy business owners and top executives pay attention, they can learn a lot about how to thrive on the lengthy road to success from this world renown manufacturing and merchandising company, particularly in the realm of brand focus and how to craft high demand offerings. Started with a $1,000 loan by two entrepreneurs almost 200 years ago in New York City, Tiffany’s products and iconic brand have long stood out, winning a legion of loyal customers in the highly competitive arena of the jewellery business.

Tiffany’s Mission Statement & Brand Promise

To quickly put the above comments in perspective, let’s have a look at a Tiffany & Co. advertisement that appeared in the front section of the Monday February 22, 2010 Globe & Mail newspaper. I invite you take in the Focus, Clarity, Simplicity, and Utility conveyed in this ad, as well as its marketing message and what it powerfully has to say about Tiffany’s mission statement & brand promise: Read more…

How Best to Grow & Sell More

Posted on | February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

It’s hard finding ways to beat the competition let alone keep up with them, especially in the challenging economic times we have today. So, if you get a chance to hear about key business strategies that ambitious companies intend to follow in the coming year, I think it’s well worth the time and effort to pay attention to what gets said.

And courteously of Ernst & Young LLP, that’s exactly what I got to do a week ago when I was in downtown Toronto attending the Financial Executive International Canada breakfast seminar called “Managing the upturn: Key strategies for sustained profitable growth”.

Today’s Key Strategies for Sustained Profitable Growth

This February 19, 2010 seminar was held to report the findings of a January 2010 executive research project undertaken by CFERF (the research foundation of FEI Canada) and sponsored by Ernst & Young. Their report presents the consolidated survey results from more than 200 Canadian senior financial executives that identified key strategies they will be using in 2010 to position their companies advantageously for the emerging recovery as well as detailing what are their current main issues and key concerns. 

Here is a summary of the report’s main findings:

~ 60% of those surveyed expect a return to normal growth in mid to
   second half 2010
~ 70% expect inflation to be the biggest concern
   (but this is expected to become problematic only in 2011 or later)
~ 38% felt declining profit margins was their most significant financial risk
~ 50% see IT systems as their number one capital investment priority

And of particular interest to me was the following -

~ 80% have ‘grow revenues’ as their prime 2010 corporate
   strategic objective!

This ‘we-want-more-sales’ statement really jumped out and caught my attention. That was because the specifics on how such results are expected to get delivered were not provided, other than the vague suggestion made that such would be achieved by providing better customer service. But the logic that providing more customer service can generate more sales doesn’t work for me. I think this because I see customer service as being fundamentally a post sale activity. When it is a pre-sale activity, I view it as nothing other than an expected component of the sales solicitation process.

In tough economic times, saying your organization is going to drive more sales by providing more service sounds suspiciously like nothing more than politically motivated corporate messaging ‘coded’ by executives to divert attention and deflect potential criticism, not manage expectations. Read more…

Biz Owners: Can $’s Buy You Happiness?

Posted on | February 11, 2010 | 9 Comments

Motivation (yours, mine and everyone’s) is ‘the’ bedrock issue when it comes to business. That’s because in capitalism and the study of it (economics), there’s nothing more fundamental.

As business people / managers / owners, we’re all focused on motivation: how to motivate ourselves? / how to motivate staff? / how to motivate customers?

But isn’t the way to better motivation management to be found by knowing more about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of motivation, ‘the why’ of motivation, and ‘the science’ of it? I think so which is why I invite you to join me now in an exploration of the ‘why’ dimensions of motivation — particularly as they apply to entrepreneurial and family owned business situations.

Maximized Happiness: I Want It But How To Get It?

So why do we or our companies do what we do? Check any basic economic textbook and you’ll find economists saying what drives people is the pursuit of utility maximization. But what really are they talking about? Heck, when the subject is nothing more than an abstract concept, how can you go about maximizing it?!? Read more…

Debt Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Posted on | January 21, 2010 | 5 Comments

Today’s online newspapers have real drawbacks.

First, they don’t let you to scan all the news. Second, all too often important articles in the print edition never make it to the paper’s website. And let’s not forget how fewer and fewer people are getting real newspapers delivered these day. As a result, there is a ton of important developments that go unnoticed by an ever growing portion of the public at large.

Now, just getting a real newspaper doesn’t means you read it or even absorb the information presented there, but what I saw today that really caught my attention in Globe & Mail’s Report on Business section were a raft of business failure related articles and announcements.

It made me think: finally, we’re starting to see all the big debt and business failure ‘chickens coming home to roost’ for a bunch of high profile / high flyer companies in a really public way. And because of that, and how the rest of us in business could learn important lessons from these situations, it made me think of car crashes.

Bankruptcies Really Are Like Car Crashes

Car crashes always get lots of attention.

The bigger they are, the more destruction they cause, the more fatal their outcome only serves to compel us all the more to slow down and take a good look at what happened. You know what I am taking about. Picture the scene: all those flashing lights, all the police and emergency vehicles, all their personnel taking charge, and all the traffic tie-ups.

But what value is there in slowing down to look? Read more…

Risk, Character & New Year Resolutions

Posted on | January 15, 2010 | 3 Comments

It’s January 2010. Welcome to the second decade of the third millennium!

To those of you who made New Year resolutions this year, good wishes and good luck achieving your goals. Given that only two weeks has passed since we sang Auld Lang Syne, I trust you still are keeping diligently to all the pledges you made. If you are, great. But do you have what it takes to make these promises come true? Many, dare I say most, don’t. And the reasons why may surprise you.

What’s The Relationship of Resolutions to Business?

Let me suggest to you that there is an important relationship between New Year’s resolutions and business. What links the two is: Character.

Character is a multifaceted window that allows observers a glimpse into a person’s psychology and motivation and you can learn much about the strength or weakness of a person’s character from how they deal with making commitments, not matter if they are trivial, personal ones, or important business ones. Such knowledge is really important and helpful when deciding who deserves to be on your company’s management team and who does not. And I for one think that character, particularly when companies are looking for new executive talent, is something that is too little considered in new hire decisions.

The character a person shows in respect of making and honouring commitments gives great insight into that person’s integrity, something that is a really important quality for everyone in management, from ownership on down first line supervisors. Read more…

Posts by:

 Tony Johnston
 President
 Compass North Inc.

Tony provides executive management and advisory services that help companies get MORE !!

Tony delivers the leadership or leadership support needed that can make remarkably outstanding results happen operationally, economically, financially and in the eyes of customers, lenders & transaction counterparties.

If you are a decision maker in a company that wants MORE, give him a call at 416-342-5652 or check out the Compass North Inc website [click here].

Tony's ability to help companies achieve important/challenging goals is well demonstrated by his long record of success, which includes:
- 4 successful turnarounds lead
- $66 mil+ increase public
  company's value
- $34 mil value harvested
  from biotech cofounded & lead
  as CEO
- $12 mil/3x investment gain
  in 2 years delivered for
  VC partners
- $2.5+ bil in public & private
  market debt, equity and
  M&A deals done
- 1 successful company IPO
- 4 new businesses organized &
  grown: Biotech; Securitization /
  Mortgage Servicing; Third-Party
  Logistics (3PL); & Consulting

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