Bruce Outridge

Save Money by Understanding Taxes

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Bruce

As a business owner it is important that you at least understand the basics of how taxes work as it is a reality of being in business. Now I don’t for any instance think or encourage you to take taxes on by yourself, that’s why accountants were brought into this world and the world of taxes both personal and business will make you pull your hair out. An accountant for your business is a must, but taxes need to be paid and can greatly affect your bottom line if you don’t at least understand the basics of how they work. I am going to generally outline the basic three that will affect the Owner Operator and I encourage the business owner to dig even deeper to learn how you can save money by working your tax situation out to your best advantage.

Realize we all need to pay personal taxes and those are created from your wage, earnings, deductions and so on. Depending on the setup of your business you may be taxed on the amount of money you made from a wage in your business or the total earnings of your business. This is one of the reasons I encourage Owner Operators to become incorporated and take a wage from their company. Personal tax rates are higher than corporate tax rates so you will be taxed on the wage at the personal level, and the company will pay corporate taxes on the rest which are much lower. if you are Sole Proprietor you will pay the personal tax level on the total earnings of your business. The rate goes up over $150,000 where most Owner Operators operate. Talk to an accountant about the tax rate for your business, you may save money by restructuring your business.

The other big tax for businesses is the HST / GST in Canada. This tax is based on products and services bought and sold in the country with the tax rate changing based on the Province. With fuel this will be a big one for the Owner Operator. It is mandatory for businesses making over $30,000 per year and the tax works on a plus minus type of scale. For instance if you make $100 worth of income plus HST the total (Ontario) would be $113.00. If you bought $80 of fuel and paid HST you would pay $90.40. If you subtract the HST amounts you would have $13-$10.40 =$2.60. When you file your HST return you would have to pay the $2.60 with your return. Understanding how this tax works and learning with the advice of your accountant when is the best time to purchase products and services may save you money on your taxes. This tax applies to everything in your business so it is important to understand its implications.

Fuel tax is one of those mysterious taxes that Owner Operators may or may not know about depending on the company they’re leased on with. You may have been working with the system and not even realized it. The fuel tax known as IFTA (International Fuel Tax Agreement) covers all of North America and is meant to even out road taxes paid by trucks to the Provinces and States they have travelled through. This changes constantly based on the areas travelled and is very hard to understand for most. Some companies do this for the Owner Operator, they may charge it back, or may count it against the fleet. Any Independent Operators will have to get this done on their own. It is a matter of recording the miles or kilometres traveled on each trip and charged against any fuel bought in that State or Province. For instance if you buy fuel in one State but don’t travel very many miles through that State the money you paid may be counted against the miles you traveled in Ontario or another state. You can save money here if you look into the areas you run the most and calculate the best place to buy your fuel, however that calculation may not offset the price at the pumps. If you feel you are paying more fuel tax then doing some tracking in the way you operate, it may be the best use of your time.

About the Author

Bruce Outridge is a business and leadership consultant with 30 years experience in the transportation industry. For more information visit his website at http://www.outridgeenterprises.ca

Beat the Odds, Be Creative!

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Bruce

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Are you intimidated by other people and the education they have after years of schooling. I often found it to be very intimidating to learn about the amount of University someone has, or how they hit straight “A”s all through school. I was never one of those people, my goal was to get the hell out of there and get started in life. Academic types don’t like to tell you that however, often if you can’t handle school you are doomed from the beginning. Now before you get all bent out of shape and start coming down on me about school realize I am not down on school. I attend seminars and now love school. I am seeing it from the other side however and although education is important it is not everything. I believe the schools lose a lot of good kids that’s just haven’t found something that grabs their attention and gives them focus.
In school unless you are attending some type of College or University course on business you usually won’t hear anything mentioned about business. Even on Career Days in schools much of the time the people brought in are working in jobs such as the trades, emergency services and the like. When was the last time you heard of an entrepreneur come into the class and talk about the business world and what you need to get clients, develop products, and create a world that has them doing what they love. My bet is never! Book education is everywhere and you have to learn your own style of learning. The part they don’t tell you in many schools is that the education part will only get you so far in business because everyone is trying to build a better mouse trap. Once you know the basics of business the rest of it is about being creative, your personality, and your work ethic. The business education is just the beginning and the smart entrepreneur will hire someone for that area.

So if you are thinking about starting a business, but don’t feel you have enough education, choose the path you want, find the people that have gone down that path before you, and study what they did. You may just find you are more qualified than you thought. If you look at entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Russell Simmons, Alan Weiss, and many of the entrepreneurs on Dragon’s Den and so on you will find their real success came from hard work, creativity, and determination. So get out there and live your dream, you will be glad you did!
About the Author
Bruce Outridge is an artist, author, and entrepreneur. For more information on Bruce and his work please visit his website at http://www.outridgeenterprises.ca

Move Forward by Looking Back

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Bruce

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Sometimes we all get stuck in a rut especially in business, either sales plateau, the job becomes complacent, or promoting just seems to be stale. I find this happened in our business over the years about every two years, where a big kick start is required to get things going. Often times we see the work coming in regularly and we stop pushing ourselves into new areas, trying new marketing programs, or looking at our business as a whole. The trick for me is to find that excitement that I felt back in the beginning when starting my business. Do you remember those days, when there was no money coming in and the whole business was a fight to get going? I do and I keep those days very close to my heart because it is one of the ways of keeping myself in the zone.

Do you remember your first sale? Do you remember the first time the phone rang for your product or service? I remember it was about ten months into our business at a full time level that we got the call. We had just started that year full time and I had been retraining myself and marketing hard to get things started. We had been getting business but much of it had been because of out calls, networking, and attending various events. Things were going well, but it seemed to be a fight that kept me exhausted and wondering when things would break free. If you’re like me some days you would look at the phone and wonder if it was unplugged. Of course there is always the chance I didn’t pay the bill but at that point I knew it had paid the bill. As this was our first year of business I had signed up for every workshop that year put on by the Business Bureau in my city. These workshops were put on monthly at a small cost of twenty dollars each. I figured if I didn’t get any business and waited for each one to come along I wouldn’t go so I signed up for all of them at once. This trick which I didn’t know at the time enabled me to be eligible to be showcased in their newsletter and office building. As I had attended all these events I was also asked by the organizers to be on a panel for entrepreneurs. It was October and had been a long ten months. Amazingly that same day at about three in the afternoon, the same night I was scheduled to be on the panel, I remember answering the phone to someone I did not know, who found me without me calling them, they phoned to ask about my services. WHOO HOO! Was I pumped! I don’t remember if the client used my services but I was on a high when I attended the panel discussion later that night. I relayed the story to the panel that evening giving the other young entrepreneurs hope that the day the phone rings will come with hard work.

Often I look back on those days, I want that excitement back and I am the only one that can make that happen. If you often are wondering how to take your business to the next level think back to those older days when you had nothing to lose. Get that excitement back and you will begin working on projects to get things moving. Entrepreneurship is built on excitement and dreams for the most part, and that comes from within.

About the Author

Bruce Outridge is a business and leadership consultant and author of the books Driven to Drive, Running by the Mile, and How to Start an Artistic Business in 12 Easy Steps. For more information on Bruce and his work please visit his website at www.outridgeenterprises.ca

It’s not my fault, I’m just passionate!

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bruce

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Are you passionate about something? Were you passionate early in life and have left those passions behind to follow the hustle and bustle of life? What I found is that you can’t just shut down passions, they either take over you and consume all your time, or you mentally push them to the back of the room and don’t ever look at them again. Passions can come in both good forms and bad and there are some passions that should be stopped and professional help may be required in that area. What I am talking about here however are the positive passions that many of us have and can turn out to great things in later life.

For me it was drawing at the age of ten and then later driving at the age of sixteen. At ten years old, it was the early seventies and Rock and Roll was in full swing. At that point I didn’t know what music was or how much it would impact my life but I did know I enjoyed what I heard, whatever it was. It would still take a couple of years to kick in but it was starting. Where it came into a central area of my life was when I went into middle school, grades six to eight. With only a record player I found the rock group Kiss. Now you may be thinking that I would go head over heels into music, but I fell into a different area, drawing. What does drawing have to do with music? It has everything to do with it, if the group you are drawing is the group Kiss. My friend and I used to draw them on every piece of paper we could find and if paper wasn’t available there was always the front of a notebook. You may be wondering why I didn’t take any art classes being so much into art, or why my parents didn’t find an art camp for me? In school the art classes were taught out of a book, something I still see being done to this day. The classes were about keeping kids busy with Paper Mâché or the like, so the thought of taking other classes wasn’t an exciting attraction. To be honest I never even suggested it to my parents, it was almost like it was my secret passion that nobody really knew about. It is very hard to run to your parents and say look at my drawing, holding up your notebook when two hours earlier you were given a detention for drawing on the cover. It was a passion I would do in my room, something I didn’t talk much about. What my parents saw were my other hobbies such as hockey, riding my bike, and listening to music with friends. My music I am sure was nothing but annoying so that certainly couldn’t be considered passion to my parents ears. In those days we didn’t understand passion to a point because the hobby was just fun, something I did without being told, something my friends and I did to waste time. I didn’t know back then that drawing a rock group on my notebook was shaping my life and my career for later life. Skip ahead 40 years and today I am a professional illustrator, I still like the rock group kiss, and I still have a deep love for music.

We often think we have to hide our passions, maybe we just don’t realize how much a passion has a hold on us. My belief is you shouldn’t try to push or holdback your passion especially for young people. Let it evolve on its own, some fizzle, some take centre stage, either way you will wake up and realize that your passion played a role in your life. It may just take 40 years!

About the Author

Bruce Outridge is an entrepreneur, artist, author, and speaker. More information can be found on his website at www.outridgeenterprises.ca

Winter Driving Means Keeping a Your Options Open

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Bruce

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In Ontario Canada winter driving is probably the time of year when driving conditions can change on a dime. That being said, in many other parts of North America you can find weather conditions that are just as terrifying, just as variable, and just as problematic than other times of the year for weather. No matter which type of weather affects the area of North America that you travel in it is important to know what type of weather can happen in the area and keeping your eye on your options can be the key to making it through your trip in a safe and timely fashion. Experienced professional drivers know that keeping your options open are the key to a successful trip, in fact for many watching and learning about weather patterns can make you money.

My wife and I were on our way back from Florida one year, we had gone on vacation over the Christmas period and were now on our return trip back home. Our normal route would have brought us up the East Coast from Atlanta arriving along the shores of Erie Pennsylvania, through Buffalo and home to Toronto. Our other option was to stick to I-75 travelling up through Detroit, along the 401through Ontario for 4 hours to home. Both routes are common routes for people travelling from the Sunshine State. As we travelled back home I was keeping a keen eye on the weather patterns. That winter had been riddled with severe winter storms as seems common around the Holidays and even our time in Florida had been much colder than expected. Now many people start looking at weather patterns when it arrives close to the area they will be driving through, however I had started watching the weather that was coming across from the West Coast from Southern California, Texas and other locations. Once a weather system got east of Colorado it would warrant my attention and my goal was that it would fizzle out way before it would reach the Midwest or East Coast. We began our journey on the route originally intended and thought we would miss any patterns long before they impacted our route. That wouldn’t be the case however and a system travelling east looked like it would make the last leg of our trip something to be reckoned with. As we were watching the weather system I was thinking about our route, so when suggested to my wife that we stay in West Virginia overnight instead of Ohio the suggestion wasn’t met with high excitement. I had to back up my suggestion with some logic. This storm was going to be a bad one and when I estimated where we would be at the time it hit the road we would have been on we had a good chance of being caught in the worst part. By stopping at a point in our trip where we could make a decision and possibly come up behind the storm made much more sense. Overnight the storm continued on its track and because we made some decisions early we were able to travel to the west side of Lake Erie and had good weather almost all the way home. The other way would have had us on the east side of the Lake where the weather would have been the worst.

Weather patterns travel in regular patterns and watching them travel and estimating your travel route for problems may be just the thing that makes your trip a memorable occasion. Always keep your options open when travelling as Mother Nature has a way of wanting to be everyone’s travel partner.

About the Author

Bruce Outridge is a transportation consultant with over 30 years of experience and author of the books Running by the Mile, and Driven to Drive. More information can be found on his website at www.outridgeenterprises.ca