While you might dream of being a small business owner in Ottawa, Canada, you can likely do without most of the difficulties that come with owning your own business. To help you, and to bring out the full potential waiting to be unleashed in your business, there are a few sources of support you’ll want to look into. Be sure you put them to good use while setting up your business and as your business evolves.
The Small Business Administration
The Canada Small Business Administration was established to provide small business owners with loan guarantees, financing, counseling, contracts, business advice and more. Be sure to explore their full line of services during the course of operating your business. Besides a website, the SBA also has regional offices, which means there might be one nearby you can visit.
Professional Entrepreneurs
If you’ve never owned a business before, it’s a solid idea to learn from someone who has. Doing so is a great way to keep from making a host of avoidable mistakes, ones that can cost you opportunities, money and time. While you might have to pay for the advice of a professional entrepreneur, that advice could save you much more than you spend. Specifically, entrepreneurs can help you with planning your business, business finances and the day-to-day tasks of operating your business.
File-Sharing Services
If you have files to share between employees, vendors, suppliers and the like, there are cloud-storage services that can make your life easier and your business more efficient. Such services are often preferable to having to constantly remember to bring a flash drive or other physical storage device, and forgetting such a device can cost you time and maybe even money. What’s more is anyone who needs access to specific files can quickly and easily access them either on a phone or tablet.
Business Consulting
How frustrating is it to learn you let a golden business opportunity slip right by without realizing it? To keep this from happening, look into professional business consulting services. Experienced business consultants can teach you not only how to recognize such opportunities, but use them to their maximum potential and create new opportunities as your business grows.
IT Services
Because so much business is done online these days, you’ll likely run into situations where you need the support of IT companies in Ottawa. You can always attempt to take care of IT-related problems on your own through DIY resources, but you’re likely to spend more time and possibly more money than necessary training yourself and your employees on common small business IT-related problems. IT professionals take out the guesswork as well as any doubts you might have about your own technical prowess. Something else to think about it is that IT professionals can help secure your business against common commercial threats, such as hacks, website outages and the like.
Marketing/Advertising Services
Since yours is a small business, you might not have the financial resources necessary to generate a substantial marketing/advertising strategy to successfully reach your target audience. Help a Reporter Out, commonly known as HARO, is a service that connects reporters, bloggers and editors with small businesses that can serve as sources of industry information and insight. Such services can be a valuable alternative if you don’t have the budget to afford a traditional advertising/marketing campaign. Even if you can afford the services of a public relations firm, it never hurts to go the extra mile.
Keyword Tracking Services
In your quest to climb the ranks of search engine results, you’ve likely heard you need to implement the right keywords in your online content. Instead of running the risk of using the wrong keywords and phrases or those that aren’t as popular as they once were, you’re better off using a keyword tracking service instead. Such services inform you of the best key phrases and words for your specific industry and business niche. The time and energy you save can be funneled back into your company, and you can continue operating your organization with the confidence that comes with knowing without a doubt you’re using the most effective keywords and phrases on your commercial site or business blog.
Just because you are a Canadian and have a small business doesn’t mean you have to operate like a small business. Give your company every advantage with the above support services.
