It Takes A Community

Posted on by coralcea

Starting a new business, developing a new technology, identifying new markets and satisfying new customers is never easy. Putting them together makes you wonder how anyone succeeds in the world of startups!

It is often who you know – and their willingness to help – that can make a difference. Anyone who has been to the Valley is witness to the value of community – as is anyone who has built on a platform or contributed to open innovation or development.

Communities offer support, help find the right resource, provide counsel and a million other things that help Founders keep all the plates spinning while products and markets mature.

As an example, one of my favorite startups here in Ottawa, Openera, is looking for its first enterprise prospects to trial its product. This is a great opportunity for the community to get together and help out!

First of all, it is a great product. If you are a user of cloud services, applications or storage, Openera simplifies management between team members. I haven’t met anyone who isn’t excited about how simple and powerful Openera makes cross-cloud computing!

signing up and we encourage all our partner companies to do the same. Let’s see how many partners we can get by Oct 15th. My 20+ years of experience in startups has proven -you always get back what you put into the community! 

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Small Business Insurance in Canada

Posted on by coralcea

Small business owners definitely have a lot of things they have to think about practically every day. One of the most important things involves small business insurance. Some business owners do not fully realize how vitally important this type of insurance really is. This is usually true of individuals who have just opened their own business without having anyone to show them the ropes of being a business owner themselves. Unfortunately, many individuals have to learn the basics of small business operation the hard way. When it comes to things like insurance for your business, you might not fully realize the importance of it until you find yourself in a situation where you need it and you don’t have it.

If you are operating a business anywhere in Canada, it is absolutely essential that you have small business insurance. Imagine that you have just opened up a shop, one that you have dreamed of opening for decades. You are so excited to see your dream come true but within your first six months of operation, someone has managed to walk into your store and then slip and fall. It was wet outside and they didn’t realize how wet their shoes really were until it was too late for them to catch themselves. In their efforts to grab onto anything to keep themselves from falling, they took out a lot of your expensive and irreplaceable inventory. Worse yet, now they are claiming they are injured and they expect you to pay for all of their expenses and then some.

This might sound like some type of nightmare scenario, but the truth is, it happens to business owners each and every day. If you don’t have insurance for your business, you are not protected against things like this. That means that you are responsible for paying for damages and anything else the individual in question wants you to pay for in most cases. Unfortunately, this has closed the doors of more than one business owner prematurely. If you have insurance in place, it could help ensure that you are protected from things like this. If you really stop and think about it, you are doing yourself a disservice to have any type of business without insurance. You are setting yourself up for failure, and that is not why you went into business for yourself in the first place. 

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