In an exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Brad Poulos, a seasoned entrepreneur and educator, shares his expertise on the key elements that help small businesses thrive. With four decades of experience in scaling businesses across telecom, software, and cannabis, Brad’s insights have shaped how companies approach growth, profitability, and sustainability.
Interview By Maheen Bari
Brad Poulos is an entrepreneur, educator, and advisor who has spent 40 years building, scaling, and studying small businesses — from the inside out. Over that time, he’s worked in corporate roles, scaled a startup to #8 on the Profit 100 list, taken a company public, and helped launch and grow multiple ventures as a founder, investor, and advisor across the telecom, software, and cannabis industries.
Today, Brad teaches entrepreneurship, small business management, and strategy at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he also created Canada’s first university-level cannabis business course. He’s known to his students and clients as “Canada’s Small Business Professor” — a title that reflects his rare combination of real operating experience and the ability to teach it clearly.
Your new book, Most Problems Solve Themselves, makes a counterintuitive case for “strategic inaction” in a world that celebrates constant hustling. What do you mean by that, and how can small business owners tell the difference between a fire they must fight now and a problem that will actually resolve itself if they don’t overreact?
Hustle culture has convinced owners that constant action equals progress. It doesn’t. It mostly equals exhaustion and half-solved problems.
Strategic inaction means recognizing that most things that feel urgent on a Tuesday look completely different by Friday. Intervening too fast often makes a minor problem worse — or wastes energy on something already solving itself.
The test is simple: is this problem getting worse fast enough that waiting makes it unsolvable? A cash flow gap three weeks out is a real fire. An unhappy customer who hasn’t asked for anything yet is probably noise.
And here’s the underrated benefit — when you stop reflexively jumping in, your employees actually step up. They solve things. They grow. Owner intervention is often just employee development in disguise.
The discipline isn’t passivity. It’s learning to sit with discomfort long enough to figure out if the problem actually needs you.
You’ve been starting, scaling, and studying small businesses for 40 years, across telecom, software, and cannabis. From that vantage point, how has entrepreneurship changed—and why do you believe it might actually be a better time than ever to start a small business today?
The fundamentals haven’t changed; solve a real problem for someone who can pay you, and don’t run out of cash. That part is eternal.
What has changed is the cost of starting. When I was launching DirecPC (Canada’s first satellite-based internet product) getting to market meant investing $2 million before we served our first customer. Today you can test a business idea for a few hundred dollars over a weekend. But lower barriers cut both ways because it’s easier for competitors to start too. The advantage doesn’t come from starting anymore, it comes from staying and building something hard to replicate. Relationships, reputation, deep expertise, and most importantly, grit, are what creates winners.
The other shift is AI. Most transformative technologies I’ve watched favoured large players who could afford the infrastructure. AI is different. A one-person firm can now operate with capabilities that would have required a department a decade ago.
Pricing is one of the most painful and misunderstood topics for owners, yet it’s central to profitability—the core theme of your work. What are the most common pricing mistakes you see small businesses make, and what simple shifts can immediately improve their margins without alienating customers?
Most business owners are too afraid to raise prices. They mistake customer price sensitivity for an immovable constraint when, in reality, customers are rarely as price-sensitive as owners fear.
The math works far more in your favour than most owners realize. If your margin is 40% and you raise prices 5%, you can afford to lose over 11% of customers and still come out ahead on total margin. You’d likely lose far fewer than that, and the ones you do lose are probably your worst customers anyway.
The second big mistake is confusing a sales problem with a pricing problem. When customers push back on price, owners assume they’re too expensive. But more often the real issue is they haven’t communicated their value clearly enough. Price is a signal. When we raised prices on Nortel at mmWave, our sales team panicked — Nortel never flinched.
The simplest fix? Test a price increase on new customers first. Add a premium tier. Track your daily break-even in dollar terms and watch what actually happens when you hold your price instead of discounting. The feared customer exodus almost never materializes — and if a few do leave, you’ll survive.
In your books and teaching, you often emphasize learning from real-world stories, like the challenges of minority shareholders or the nuance of managing credit differently for different customers. What do those examples teach about judgment, and how can owners get better at making “it depends” decisions instead of relying on one-size-fits-all rules?
Those stories teach one fundamental lesson: context is data. Alex at Micro Components always paid late and always paid in full, with the U.S. military as his anchor customer. A rule that says “cut off anyone past 60 days” would have destroyed a relationship built on a track record that mattered more than the timing. Susanna didn’t have that context. I did. The rule wasn’t wrong — it was just incomplete without the story behind the number.
Same with minority shareholders. “Give key employees equity” sounds generous and reasonable until you realize that a 5% stake in a private company with no dividends, no liquidity event, and no real voting power isn’t an asset.
The way owners get better at “it depends” decisions is by building judgment through pattern recognition, which only comes from honest post-mortems.
Good decisions come from experience and experience comes from bad decisions. When something blows up, ask what signal you ignored. When something works, ask why it worked in this context but might not in another.
You’ve just launched Most Problems Solve Themselves and co-authored From Pitch to Payoff: A Founder’s Guide to Finance, which aims to bridge the gap between finance theory and what actually happens in deals. For Canadian small business owners and founders, what key mindset or financial habit would you most like them to adopt so they can build companies that are built to last, not just to pitch?
Stop optimizing for the pitch. Start obsessing over the cash flow statement.
Most founders I work with understand the P&L intuitively — revenue minus expenses equals profit, easy enough. And they’ll nod along when you talk about the balance sheet. But the Statement of Cash Flows? That’s where businesses actually live and die, and it’s the one report most owners never truly master until they’ve already survived a scare.
My finance professor at Ivey, Jim Hatch, used to say “If it doesn’t jingle, it doesn’t count.” He was talking about cash. You cannot make payroll with EBITDA. You cannot pay a supplier with net income. A business can be profitable on paper and broke in the bank simultaneously — and growing businesses experience this constantly because of how working capital math actually works.
The mindset shift I want Canadian founders to make is this: fall in love with cash flow forecasting, not storytelling. Pitching is about the future you’re imagining. Running a business is about surviving Tuesday. The founders who build companies that last are the ones who know their cash position cold, who collect receivables aggressively, and who never confuse profit with liquidity.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
