Canada Digital Adoption Program with Alexandra Moore | E112

welcome to the financial planning for Canadian business owners podcast you will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur Jason Pereira through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur plan for success and make the most of your business and life and now your host Jason Pereira hello and welcome to the show of Alexander Moore CEO and Lead strategist at Coach House Marketing in addition to that she's also a certified digital adviser and that's important because I brought on the show today to talk about the Canada digital adoption program a government program that's out there to

guess what help businesses adopt digital strategies and how and the tell us a little bit about how it works and with that there's my interview with Alexander Alexander thanks for taking time today thank you so much for interested in hosting this conversation so Alexandra tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do so I've been the owner of Coach House marketing for nearly 14 years and in the process of a massive life transition just at the start of covid as many of us also experienced I realized that the work I was doing as a fractional CMO for businesses where I was very closely connected to the revenue requirements for their marketing spend long-term planning Business Systems allocations of budgets and other areas of the business and even human resource allocations that I I loved getting a really deep inside view of businesses Beyond simply what a marketing agency tends to do and so at the same time I I'm incredibly passionate about small and mediumsized businesses particularly in Canada and wanting to maintain my Independence as an agency but deep in my knowledge I ended up going back to school I'm a former PhD student in in Shakespeare so I have a very rigorous academic training but when I left that program I was like I never want to be in Academia ever again but there was an a program at Yale's Executive Education a program called uh a digital transformation certification program and so we took on major case studies like on massive corporations like MasterCard ING insurance really really big digital transformation pieces and I went into that program really trying to determine how can we apply this strategy to small and mediumsized businesses at the same time the Canadian government came out with this digital adoption program Grant specifically customizing digital transformation for small and medium-sized businesses so it was just a really natural fit for the way in which my own interest in supporting businesses on a really comprehensive digital landscape met really nicely with this grant fund that provides $155,000 in strategic funding for small and mediumsized businesses excellent so let's talk about what is involved there and by the way bonus marks if you slip any B quotes in here because you should know them all I all right so the 15,000 so talk to me about okay so let's talk about this process and a journey of someone who will go down this so I want I see that there's a program that's to give me money to digitally transform my business right step one what do I do well it really is a question of to do the cedap program or not to do the cedap program how's that for a quote from Shakespeare essentially it's a program that provides a very comprehensive overview of digital systems and a level of expertise that typically only large corporations invest in but when we think about the digital landscape particularly postco and with global economic shifts the digital age is really truly upon us and for small and medium-sized businesses that means a lot of opportunity but a lot more risk as far as adapting and staying relevant in the marketplace and this program is the government's response to that now because it's an area that many small and medium-sized businesses don't even know how to integrate strategically into the way they structure their growth it is a bit of a challenge in terms of translating what the program offers and encouraging people to jump through the Hoops because yes it is a grant-funded program so you do have to apply directly on the government website and ensure that you have the minimum revenue of $500,000 there's a number of different steps that the government has put into place to as a form of checks and balances and the reason why it is beneficial to do is because you get a comprehensive overview of your digital systems working very closely with individuals who are experts at Consulting with businesses on these particular pain pain points you can focus on areas of digital marketing on CRM build outs on workflow systems on your it needs and your erps I'm talking about different areas that we cover as far as different audits but then also doing a deep dive and it it can be incredibly overwhelming for a small business to even think about how would I how would I go about doing this but the value is absolutely an incredibly immense to be particularly clear I am not associate at directly with the government I'm not a government employee I'm a certified digital adviser for the program and I'm one of about 200 I believe advisors across Canada so you really get to pick and choose who you want to work with to support your business and I also want to note that only 3% of the grant funds were used last year which is why the program has actually encouraged us as digital advisors to be their marketing voice in many ways because the value is there the funds are there and it's really a matter of encouraging businesses to access the resources available excellent okay so bottom line is I got up to funding up to between the two programs 17,400 right it's not meant to cover everything but it's meant to give me a path forward that is going to show some sort of cost benefit that means that hey not only is it giving me getting me started it's giving me some access also give me access to Capital I believe through BDC loans as well which are preferable student wage Grant sorry to cut you off there but yeah there is there's it's a whole bundle of benefits if you're an e-commerce business you get to also use stream one which is a 2300 I believe handson support with marketing agencies who know how to support e-commerce businesses that's a program where you get Hands-On tangible support the program that coach house marketing offers is stream two which is a $115,000 digital strategy grant that then opens you up to up to $100,000 in 0% financing through BDC as well as multiple $7,300 used subsidy wage grants to help with the implementation so while the digital advisers are only responsible for the strategy portion there is financial and resources as far as the grants for for you subsidy wage grants in order to provide ample implementation support excellent okay so basically it's talking about the actual final deliverable right so I go sign up for this there's two different programs tell me about what people receive at the end of the grow your business online Grant right so the grow your business online Grant is stream one and that's the e-commerce Grant so any business that has some sort of transaction on their website would apply and likely be approved and then stream two it's a $155,000 strategy grant that enables you to go through a series of inquiry calls with your chosen digital advisor in order to cover any number of digital questions that you might have so for us I'll just read through the list of the scope and depths of inquiry that we can do as far as strategic areas of focus customer Journey mapping and entric digital experience competitor and Industry analysis organic SEO paid sem and multiplatform campaign development lead generation optimiz ation and strategic CRM integration customer acquisition and retention strategy value chain and margin growth analysis integrated communication strategy strategic ad Management training social media and digital marketing strategy change management and workflow systems digital traditional and account-based marketing brand development and data integration R&D enabling technology accessibility and privacy and though so basically you have a business and you you don't have have an Exit Plan where un unearthing all the opportunities for how you could actually be better as a business would be potentially bad for your exit plan or you don't need to digitize because you're at the end of your business life cycle and in one way shape or form really and truly if you have that 500k Benchmark the stream 2 it is a g it's a literal gift as long as you're willing to jump through the hoops and that's the role of the digital advisor to help businesses jump through those Hoops to to receive at the end to answer your question a digital road map that assesses where they're at and gives them a really good Benchmark a digital needs assessment and unearths the opportunities in the market relative to their goals relative to their capabilities relative to what is happening in the marketplace and then there's a road mapping of exactly how to do that with timeline Milestones requirements dependencies all those good things we do find that the reporting that is required is pretty high level so our goal as coach host marketing is to ensure that the reporting also is very accessible and enables small and medium-sized businesses to take that into and to integrate that into actionable change okay all right so let's talk about your experience in working with people who basically gone through this what kind of time commitment was involved from their end in order to get to the end result and then we'll talk about uptake afterwards yeah time commitment is one of the reasons why businesses who might qualify and actually go through the application process decide not to go through the program but you can technically jump through the Hoops as quickly as your digital adviser can run with you so we've done plans for as quickly as six weeks and as long as six months that you have an entire nine months to complete the program and as far as coach has marketing the way we work is structure the timing of our calls and the depth of our calls based on the based on the entrepreneurs needs essentially because there's a lot that we can do on the back end so it really depends on the needs of the entrepreneur we have done a lot of work with e-commerce manufacturing restaurants service-based businesses and so the way in which that we support companies it really is a matter of looking at what they need and how we can fit the grant to really give them the most value for these funds it's it's really interesting because in the Consulting World particularly in digital transformation my colleagues will say to me how the heck do you do all that you do for $155,000 but a small business will often come to me and say how is this costing $15,000 but at the end of the day it's a value marker that's been put together by the government and we do our very best to give the maximum amount of value under the the grant but this it's within your interest to provide a lot of value early on because at the end of the day there Consulting working can be hired for after the fact right so you're giving them in a lot of ways you're giving them a reason to hire you to do more right and if they don't if they don't perceive that value they don't see the work that you've done then they yeah congratulations 15 grand that's all you're GNA get out of them versus you know hey this is how I can actually help your business and it's funny because that is for so many people in consulting or other fields that are in business services and B2B a lot of is like look I can help it's need an opportunity to show you but that initial engagement is always a stumbling block so this is a great way to get past it absolutely and we're finding that the implementation support is something that our former clients are coming to us and asking us for and we're trying to figure out a way right now actively to structure that in lowcost ways because that's the one thing with small and mediumsized businesses is and I feel very passionately about this in general is no matter the caliber of work it's got to make sense financially for their bottom line so as far as working with a digital advisor it doesn't it actually is a good idea to ask what happens after cab and if they provide services that could help with the implementation and perhaps using that as a metric of determining who would be a good fit as far as the digital adviser for them there are many of us we have a wide variety of specificities I would definitely encourage people to ask very specific questions around what their reimbursement rate is asking for references asking kind of strategy work they have done for businesses before cedap if they're new to strategy work and the other question I would just generally recommend is to ask whether or not they use AI to generate the reports as a former academic something around the Integrity of manual data work is very important to me and custom reporting and if you want to go through the process quickly if you're looking particularly just for that 0% loan and don't really care about the quality of the report that's one thing but a lot of my competitors definitely use AI which there's nothing particularly wrong with that I actually help a lot of my cedap clients learn how to use AI for their digital needs but as far as the caliber of the reports themselves I do think it's a little premature in the the marketplace to have comprehensive digital strategies autop populated by Ai and in fact some this presentation on AI I will say that that is absolutely true and as I always say in a world full of easily generated content done by artificial intelligence the marginal value of that is going to drop to near zero and frankly like only someone who provides actual subject matter expertise and put takes their time to write something only that is gonna be valuable so yeah it it really was a vote of confidence when one of my cedap clients her business consultant came to me to work with me for cedap and he had seen many other reports and he chose me as his cedap advisor and it it it's humbling to no end in fact many of my clients I'm just so incredibly honored that they have selected me I get to work on incredibly challenging and interesting projects and it's it's just a gift to be able to to give to small businesses but also be given such an opportunity to speak so deeply into the needs of businesses today excellent okay so basically the so they get this program they want to go through with it then they have options for let's go over those again and talk about the process for that looks like and how long that typically takes for turnaround right so once the the digital adoption plan program road map is submitted by your digital advisor you upload that to your dashboard and if you want to follow along I can read out the the website that you would go through it's it's a little bit of a long one but that is exactly where you would start the process of applying and it's the website that's the one that I service but as you have heard there is also $2,400 in funding if you are an e-commerce business that's available so once you sign up you pick your digital advisor you do a digital assessment and then you begin the process of one-on-one Consulting calls with your digital advisor I do have a full team behind me of incredible Specialists including senior Business Systems analysts formally at iabm and RBC as well as an amazing workflow expert who has supported CBO with his automation expertise as well as an amazing Shopify expert so it's usually a very comprehensive in-depth process you receive the report that's hopefully very custom to you you upload it to your dashboard and then that enables you to take your road map to BDC to receive 0% financing to implement the plan so the plan will include a budget a proposed budget by the digital advisor we have to be systems agnostic we have to be vendor agnostic but we can talk about the requirements and if you are already working with a specific software or if you have a software in mind we can analyze that for you and how it would be beneficial to your company but we cannot name the solution in any way that might suggest that we could potentially be getting some Financial benefit for making any kind of recommendation so that loan application isn't required as far as you working with BDC if I although I always say if you can receive those funds it's 0% financing and the look at our market today it just makes sense to use that you can use it for any range of digital needs and when you include that in the plan with your digital advisor it really can support small businesses on a financing level and then as well there's a $7,300 use subsidy wage Grant to help with a loow hanging fruit so let's you have a CRM that needs to be updated and there's manual database checks and balances that need to be done or you want to run Google ads and you want to find someone who's young who can do that for you at a low cost or you want to look at your workflow systems and there's processes that you need documented that can then translate into software adaptations you name it these use subsidy wage grants are there to really help move the dial forward on those manual tasks because the truth is a plan is only as good as it can be implemented and the implementation piece is where things get challenging and so as far as the structure of the grant itself I really do believe that the Canada digital adoption program has been very strategically and astutely put together withme needs in mind I've supported digital Grant programs in other areas as given by the the can and government in different uh programs and there's not been a program so thoroughly thought out as the candidate digital adoption program that I've I've worked with high pris excellent okay so basically the bottom line is it's money to get you proper report from proper experts as to what that how to transform your business it is access to funding that basically will allow you to execute on imp the implementation of that plan including contacts to who could do it I guess other than time commitment you know what else is what else do the clients or do the the business owners need to know about this program I I should mention that the funding is it only covers 90% of the plan they want to make sure that the business has some skin in the game so they are responsible for 10% so $1,500 but if you look at what you receive in return it really is the best $1,500 I think that you can spend I mean I'm biased but in your business it it's definitely a worthwhile investment but that is important to know going into to the program I think just be mindful that there are some hoops to jump through and I it's very possible to get approved within the same day I've I've had a client had that happen so the funds also they work really hard to reimburse them as quickly as possible and move people along the lines but my recommendation really would be to interview a number of digital advisers to ensure that you are getting the best value for you and at the stage of growth that your business is in excellent well Alexander thank you so much for taking the time to explain all this to us where can people find you coach hosm marketing.com excellent so thank you very much thank you for your time so that was my interview with Alexander Moore regarding the Canada digital adoption program please take the time to look into it if it is something you're interested in as uh you know basically I want to say free money but money that can help transform your business that you would otherwise not think to access so take look as always if you enjoy this podcast please review on Apple podcast SoundCloud Spotify or your podcast until next time take care this podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial an award-winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals business owners and their families to learn more go to Woodgate tocom you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcast Stitcher Google Play and Spotify or find more episodes at J pra.com to subscribe for