What We Heard at BDL’s Small Business Week Event, Scaling Success

On October 23, we were joined by entrepreneurs, policymakers and business leaders from across Canada for a special Small Business Week event, “Scaling Success”. We were honoured to have Candace Laing, President and CEO at the Canadian Chamber, the Honourable Rechie Valdez, Minister of Small Business, and Eva Lorenz, VP Country Manager, Canada, Amazon, kick off the event.

Before the panel discussion, Marwa Abdou, Senior Research Director at the Canadian Chamber’s Business Data Lab, delved into the findings of Scaling Success: The Characteristics of High-Growth Small Businesses in Canada. This new report expanded on the narratives surrounding small businesses first explored in A Portrait of Small Business in Canada (published January 2024) and dug into interesting questions like which small businesses in Canada are scaling and what pathways they’re taking to grow.

Opportunity for Growth

Unfortunately, the report revealed that more small businesses are closing than opening. However, a greater percentage of small businesses are expecting to achieve high-growth than medium- or large-sized businesses. Contrary to expectations, these businesses are not found in high-tech industries but in manufacturing, accommodation and food services, and professional services.

Given Canada’s economic situation — low productivity, slow economic growth and underinvestment leading to weakened competitiveness and standard of living — it’s critical that small businesses poised for high-growth can get what they need to succeed. Among the most critical factors for growth are access to financing, technology, exporting and a favourable policy environment.

Factors for Growth

Our panellists went on to discuss the role some of these factors have played in their own journey.

Panellists:

• Mathieu Galliot, Economist, BDC
• Brock Murray, Co-Founder, seoplus+
• Ash Mahmoud, President, Cairo Development
• Francois Garcia, Managing Director, Core Venture Partners 

The Role of Financing

All three of our entrepreneurial panellists found ways to bootstrap and organically finance their small businesses, citing learning how to stabilize their incomes, not scaling beyond their means, and diversifying their products and services as methods for growing and being profitable.

The Role of Exporting

In agreement with the BDL’s report, recent BDC research confirmed that exporting — including interprovincial trade — is key to scaling for success.

The Role of Technology

BDC reports that 97% of SMEs that use AI found it helped with their business in some way or another, with many saying that it reduced business costs even when that wasn’t the intended outcome. Chatbots especially have emerged as the standout tool.

All three of the entrepreneurs on the panel have experimented with AI in different capacities:

• Seoplus+ uses AI to augment the team by increasing efficiencies and standardize processes. The company uses ChatGPT in their work but are transparent with clients about its use and have developed a policy to reduce the risk of private data being leaked.
• Cairo Development is working on creating an AI system that will allow project managers to oversee more projects by improving decision making time and reducing the number of repetitive tasks.
• Chi Chaga uses AI to help translate their website’s content into the languages of the countries they export to as well as keep their blog active.

As Canada’s population ages, there will be even greater need to increase worker productivity, making it essential that businesses invest in technology. Experimentation and trial and error are important steps in learning what works best.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

Our panellists left attendees with some great advice for Canadian entrepreneurs:

• When hiring, look at fit first. You can always teach people skills, but you want to hire the people who align with your vision, mission and values.
• Be intentional with setting a good company culture, or it will set itself.
• Don’t rush to grow just for the sake of it. Be patient.
• Don’t get fixated on your competition or get distracted by what they’re doing. Do your thing and do it right.
• Don’t just build a digital presence, maintain it too.
• Try to be adaptable to market conditions. You have to think about the future and focus on the macro, not just the micro.

This event was made possible with the collaboration of Amazon Canada and BDC.