Making Your New Business a Success

Julie Starr • January 18, 2022



Over the past couple of years, more and more startups have started popping up. This is completely understandable. Increasing numbers of people are looking to take the reins on their careers and start their own business as a direct result of the coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic. As the virus has spread around the world over the past two years, many have lost jobs through company collapse, redundancy and incompatible working situations. Many have decided that they want to run their own business, where they can sell what they want, work with who they want and be aware of what’s going on at all times. Of course, running a business is easier said than done and you’re going to have to put a lot of work in to keep your company afloat and generate profits – if you’re going down this path. Here are a few suggestions that should help you along the way!

Know What You’re Selling

The first step of creating a successful business is to create an appealing product or service that has selling potential. It may sound simple and obvious, but you need to know what you’re selling to bring it to life and to market it well. All too many businesses jump the gun and head into the marketplace with a vague idea that they haven’t thought or checked over thoroughly enough. Start by considering your product. Then carry out market research. This will give you an idea of who is interested in your product or service, what they think of it, what they think can be improved and how they want it to be sold to them. This is also a good time to test out ideas regarding pricing, ensuring that what you’re offering is realistic, affordable and – most importantly – profitable .

Know What You Need to Achieve Your Goals

You also need to know what you need to achieve your goals. Different businesses have different needs and will need to invest in different areas. If you’re selling services, you’re going to need staff on board to provide these services on a large scale. If you’re selling products, you need to know what raw materials you’ll need, what manufacturing processes you’ll need to engage in or outsource, and more. If you’re heading into the farming industry, you might need heavy vehicles and machinery. If you’re heading into the healthcare sector, you might need a dynatron 25 series . If you’re selling homemade cakes, you may need a professional mixer to make life easier for yourself. Whatever you need, make sure you note everything down. Remember to include business sustainability in your planning. This will allow you to figure out initial purchase costs, running costs, staffing costs, as well as, supporting the environment through sound business practices.

Constantly Innovate

Many businesses experience success as they first start out, but notice that sales taper off as time goes by. This is often because they have grown stagnant. They’re offering the same products that their target demographic has already purchased and haven’t brought anything new to the table since. It’s important that you’re constantly innovating and working to provide your customers with new products or services that meet their needs as time goes on. Market research and experience can help with this.

Hire Staff

At the start of a business’ journey, the owner tends to take the bulk of the work on their own two shoulders, occasionally outsourcing tasks that they cannot complete themselves. However, as time goes on, as your products begin to sell and as workload increases, you are going to have to hire staff to keep business operations ticking over. This will ensure that all work is being completed, customers are being answered, orders are being shipped and received and everyone is kept happy. Of course, hiring a team can be daunting at first, but they will prove to be the backbone of your business once they’re settled in and used to their roles. Many small businesses find that using a recruitment agency makes this entire process easier and more straightforward. This way, you simply have a consultation, explain what kind of candidates you’re looking for and the recruitment company will find them for you. Then, it’s just up to you to conduct interviews and make a decision regarding the best fit for the role!

These are just a few suggestions that should help you to settle on an area of focus for your business’ improvement. Different ones will work for different businesses, but hopefully, at least one will tick your boxes and get your journey started out in the right direction!

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.