The punch everyone already asked for
CJ's Punch didn't start as a business. It started as the thing you brought. Rooted in a Kittitian and Jamaican family, it was the rum punch asked for by name before anyone took a plate of food.
Read the piece →Advice from founders
Hard-won lessons.
Founders writing for founders. Real stories, real numbers, real mistakes. Each piece is contributed by a business owner and filtered by topic.
Featured this week
This week’s spotlight
Young founders.
Owner · Perth, ON
We built the menu out of our neighbours. The beans, the bread, the brews are all local, and a lot of what comes in goes right back out into Perth.
Read the piece →Mobile barbering · Toronto, ON
I started cutting hair in my parents' garage at seventeen. The whole business grew out of the rooms I was already in, the locker rooms.
Read the piece →Vigabit Gaming
Owner · Ottawa, ON
[Short snippet, in the founder's own words, supplied by them.]
Read the piece →Recent pieces.
Updated weekly · 14 published
Sorted by most recent
Birth of a NATION
About twenty years ago a mutual friend introduced Marc and Donovan, chasing the same thing: a place where people actually reached the goals they walked in with. So they opened a gym.
The punch everyone already asked for
CJ's Punch didn't start as a business. It started as the thing you brought. Rooted in a Kittitian and Jamaican family, it was the rum punch asked for by name before anyone took a plate of food.
Jazzy’s Brewhaus
We built the menu out of our neighbours. The beans, the bread, the brews are all local, and a lot of what comes in goes right back out into Perth.
The grant nobody told me about
For eight years we hired the same way every summer. Pay full wages, lose a third of our margin June through August, hope the fall rush made up for it. Then a customer mentioned Canada Summer Jobs and the math fell apart. We had been leaving $18,000 a year on the table. This is the application, the awkward conversations, and what I would tell myself eight years ago.
Cash flow is the thing that kills you, not profit
Most Canadian small businesses that fail were profitable on paper. The money just arrived later than the bills did. Here is the simplest 13-week cash view that gives you 90 days of warning before a gap opens — and what to do the moment you see one coming.
Your first hire costs more than their salary
Between CPP, CPP2, EI at 1.4× the employee rate, and the time you stop billing to manage someone, your first employee costs far more than the wage. Here is how to budget the real number before you post the job — so the hire grows you instead of sinking you.
The grants you can actually get vs. the ones you can’t
A huge share of program funding is for non-profits and charities, not businesses. Chasing the wrong ones wastes the one resource you can't get back: time. Here is how to tell, in two minutes, whether you can apply directly, need a partner, or should walk away.
Raising your prices is a sentence, not a strategy
Owners agonize over a price increase for months, then deliver it like an apology. The increase is almost never the problem — the delivery is. Here is the plain way to tell existing customers, what to expect, and why far fewer leave than you fear.
Hire for the slow season, not the rush
Everyone hires when they're drowning, which means hiring badly under pressure. The owners who get it right plan seasonal hiring against a cash forecast and bring people on before the wave. Here is how to time it so payroll lands when revenue can carry it.
Contribute
Have something worth saying?
If you have run a business for a few years, you know things that matter to every founder coming up behind you. Mentioned exists to make that knowledge visible.
If you have run a business for a few years, you know things that matter to every founder coming up behind you. Mentioned exists to make that knowledge visible. We lightly edit for clarity and length. No commercial pitches, no thinly disguised marketing. Just the real version of what you would say to another founder over coffee.
How contribution works
- 01 Pitch us a topic from your dashboard
- 02 Write 600 to 2,000 words in plain language
- 03 We edit lightly and publish within a week
- 04 Your business is linked from the piece