About Cool Companies magazine
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Cool Companies magazine is about the stories Canadian entrepreneurs share when they get together—stories of strategy, challenges, implementation, innovation, working together, and finding ways to incorporate their values into their business.
Our editorial approach is For Entrepreneurs By Entrepreneurs™. This unique approach is important for us for a few reasons:
1. Entrepreneur collaboration is key
There’s lots of material and support available on how to start a business, but starting a business isn’t the hard part. The real challenge is figuring out how to grow it at every stage of growth. We believe that there’s a huge void in Canada to help entrepreneurs grow their business. That’s the space we’re going to fill—starting with Cool Companies magazine.
To help entrepreneurs, it will take entrepreneurs because the best resource for an entrepreneur is another experienced entrepreneur; there’s little other material available on how to grow a business. Applying this insight to Cool Companies magazine, we want our readers to feel they’re in a room listening to good entrepreneurs discuss a topic. To accomplish this, we work together with Canadian entrepreneurs and allow them to speak directly to our readers in first person.
To ensure Cool Companies magazine speaks the voice of the entrepreneur it also helps that we are Canadian entrepreneurs too; Cool Companies is an independent magazine and we are growing it from scratch. Here is some proof that we are building Cool Companies magazine For Entrepreneurs By Entrepreneurs™:
- Cool Companies magazine is a Peer-Reviewed Journal
Our editorial committee of readers - Canadian entrepreneurs like you - approve our magazine content. The chair of our Editorial Advisory Committee is Donald A. Rumball, former Business Editor of The Financial Post and the intrapreneur, Editor and Publisher who started Profit magazine in 1982.- We collaborate on editorial with entrepreneurs
Articles should feel like an organized conversation among entrepreneurs.- Our writers have real entrepreneurial experience and thinking
- Cool Opportunities Classifieds and MarketPlace
These 2 special advertising sections make it affordable for companies of all sizes to advertise in magazine.
2. Canada needs to embrace innovation and entrepreneurship
Not only do entrepreneurs need to work together to help each other, but we need to do this to help Canada. Each year Canada falls farther and farther behind other countries in the OECD rankings of competitiveness and innovation. It’s because we are not a knowledge-based country; our economy is still largely resource-based. We have not yet made the transition, and maybe even the decision, to become a knowledge-based country. That’s very scary.
We need to ask ourselves, as Canadians, fundamental questions like, “Why does Canada only produce one RIM every 20 years?” and “Why, according to the Information Technology Association of Canada, does ‘our ability to move into the 5 top innovative economies of the world hinge on a group of only about 120 companies’ (in Canada)?” Dividing 31 million Canadians into 120 companies gives us one company taking care of the future for every quarter million Canadians. That doesn’t appear to be a big ratio. And then, out of those 120 companies, how many of them are actually doing disruptive innovation (brand new to the world with significant impact) as opposed to incremental improvement? Likely only a very tiny number.
So, what do we need to do? One of the requirements for a knowledge-based economy is to recognize the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation. We don’t have this recognition in Canada, at the moment. Through Cool Companies magazine, we want to help change that and help build the momentum for Canadians to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset. Yes, we believe Canadians want an entrepreneurial revolution and that Canada needs one, and we want to be a player in creating this change.
3. Innovation and enlightened leadership is the way
To help Canada embrace the entrepreneurial mindset we are going to challenge another misconception we have in Canada, which is that making money is a dirty word. We are going to demonstrate that many Canadian companies are proving that you can be a successful mission-driven company that works with higher goals where money is a means to achieving a worthwhile end beyond financial gain. To us a pure focus on profits is for the Dark Ages. Let’s explore being enlightened and building enlightened companies. Let’s learn from companies using a “triple bottom line”—people (employees, customers, community), profits and planet. And, let’s take it to the next level to include innovation, trust and passion.
