About Roger Pierce
One of Canada’s top small business experts, Roger Pierce is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur trainer who has founded 14 small businesses over the past 25 years.
Brands hire his marketing agency to produce small business content for their websites – including Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, FedEx, Rogers, Mastercard, Staples, and Sage accounting software.
Roger’s book, Unsure Entrepreneur, is currently in production and will launch late 2025. Roger is also the host of the Unsure Entrepreneur podcast, where he loves to talk about entrepreneurship as a career choice and what’s involved in starting and running a small business.
About entrepreneurs in Canada
Most entrepreneurs start off as solopreneurs. In Canada, there are just under 1.22 million employer businesses in Canada. Of these, 97.8% were small businesses, with zero to 99 employees. Small business is the driving force of Canada’s economy.
Roger’s aim in writing Unsure Entrepreneur is to open up potential entrepreneurs’ eyes to the realities of starting a business.
I think everybody at one point or another in their life has thought, hey, I should start a business. But no one’s really talking about the underbelly of it all.
We want to open their eyes. Of course, I want more people to be entrepreneurs, at the end of the day. I just want them to know what they’re getting into.
While 62% of North Americans have dreamt of starting a business, no one is talking about entrepreneurship as a career choice. And when they do, they sell the glamour of being a business owner. As in, if you try just hard enough, you could also be a billionaire. Guess what? Most people are making $64,000 a year or less.
We need to start asking the tough questions:
- Just because I can, should I?
- Do I have what it takes?
- What are the pros and risks?
- Will this business fit my life as it is now, or will I have to make significant adjustments?
In his training sessions, Roger would often come across students who shared their desire to start a business:
People would come into the program or the webinars, and they’d go, oh, yeah, I want to start this business now. And then I’d ask them a few questions about their personal life. Well, my wife’s about to have a baby, or I’m laid off from my job.
I’d say to them: This is not a good time for you to start a business right now. Anything is possible, but is that really the best timing?”
Some of the myths about entrepreneurship
1. Quit your job
Too often, entrepreneurs stack the odds against themselves with unrealistic expectations by quitting their jobs. The reality is, successful entrepreneurship takes hustle. And it will require, most of the time, side hustling with a full time job, until the income from your business starts to replace your income. But “until then, it’s side hustle, man, it’s side hustle weekends.”
Proof of concept or bringing in money is the ultimate litmus test. Getting actual sales proves that your business idea is viable.
Finding investors does not create a business. What matters is sales. Roger cites the case of a friend, who argued that building a business through sales and not investor funding is a better path for startups. Since he ended up selling one of his companies for 40 million dollars, he’s been proved right.
“Everyone thinks you got to go out there and like Facebook did in the early days, raise millions and burn cash, just build eyeballs. Well, not necessarily.”
3. Technology makes it easy to think entrepreneurship is easy
Technology creates the illusion that entrepreneurship is simple.
For instance, people think all they need to do is set up a website and sell. For instance, “I could go on Shopify this afternoon and open an e-commerce store.”
Software companies that sell to small business owners are also culprits. They sell the myth of easy entrepreneurship through their marketing, but do not reflect the day to day challenges of being in business.
Roger’s advice for entrepreneurs
Start lean and start small.
Build your business on lean startup principles. This could mean one employee and a set of outsourced providers. Roger cites Tim Ferris who, when asked, “Your company is really big. How many people do you employ?” replied, “Zero.”
You don’t need to hire to be a big business. There are now numerous one person million dollar businesses.
“In fact, there’s a lot of speculation on who’s going to be the first one person billion dollar business.”
Tech problems that entrepreneurs encounter
- Cybersecurity. “Two years ago, one of my friends went through this ransomware ordeal. He ended up paying the guy, like 25 grand to retrieve his data.”
- Too many software platforms. “Entrepreneurs I talk to have 10 or 20 different apps on their desktop at any given moment.”
- Manual work. “There are still a lot of businesses out there, small and large, who still work by manual data entry, and by so doing, make mistakes that could be avoided if they were to use software. Accounting software, for instance, has AI embedded so it can be used to check for mistakes, implicit errors or fraud.
And a non tech concern
- Lack of recurring income. Entrepreneurs are worried about diversifying their income streams, worried about the lack of recurring income, worried about tariffs, worried about taxes, worried about customers dropping off.
Realistic first steps to starting your business, from Roger
- Figure out your minimum viable product, starting with low hanging fruit. What can you get away with in a short amount of time? What project or product can start making you money quickly?
- Numbers never lie. Use math to figure out your profit and expense numbers early.
- Use these resources:
Break even calculator from Bank of Montreal
Business tools from TD Canada Trust - To learn more about recurring income, read John Warrilow’s The Automatic Customer.
To get more insights from Roger, visit his website: RogerPierce.ca.
Subscribe to his podcast: https://www.unsureentrepreneur.com/podcast
Get on the wait list for the book: https://www.unsureentrepreneur.com/book