The government recently announced that it wanted to change some long-standing tax rules on incorporated business. Here’s how these changes might impact you and your business. Should you incorporate? Until recently, the answer was fairly simple: if you needed to use all the income you made in a given year, then there wouldn’t be much of a tax benefit to incorporating. If some money wasn’t needed for personal use, but rather could be kept inside...

Handing over your company to your kids may sound like a good idea, but in many cases it’s not. Here’s why you may want to consider another option.   After decades of sweat and stress, many business owners would love to pass the family business on to loved ones. But having a spouse or kids take over shouldn’t always be part of the succession plan, says Michael Louie, a partner with D&H Group, a Vancouver-based accounting firm. When one...

Why etiquette matters when you take clients out for lunch. Chewing with their mouths open. Doing awkward things with napkins and utensils. Speaking casually with wait staff. Such was the business-lunch behaviour of a Bay Street sales team that Linda Allan, a Toronto-based management consultant and trainer who offers business-etiquette training, met up with a few years ago. She was hired by the VP of sales, who’d been told to “fix it, and fast”...

Just because you’re retired doesn’t mean you have to stop working. You could be one of the many Canadians who have found fulfillment by turning passion into prosperity.   Many retirees aren’t ready to call it quits. In fact, plenty of people use their retirement years to pursue business opportunities they could never find the time to start up while they were working a 9 to 5 job. Now that you’ve made the decision to retire, it could be the...

An increasing number of people are spending their days in a home office, but working from home can be tough. Here are some tips on how to stay productive.   For Shelley Grandy, one of the best parts of working from home is the time she saves commuting – especially in the winter. “Not having to commute on snow days, I feel extremely smug,” says Grandy, president of Grandy Public Relations, which is based out of her home in Erin, Ontario,...