On Communicate with Power: What Do Small Business Owners Know About Their Own Business?

Barry McLoughlin and Laura Peck invited me onto their show, Communicate with Power, to talk about the 2026 Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index (ZFCI). The episode was published on October 10, 2026, and you can watch or listen to it here: What do small business owners know about their own business?

About the hosts

Barry and Laura are leadership and crisis communications consultants and trainers. Barry has spent decades coaching executives, politicians and business owners on how they communicate. Their Substack covers communications where it meets politics, business and culture.

Most of my conversations about the index have been with accountants, journalists and policy people. Barry and Laura came at it from a different direction. Their question was what owners believe about their own business, and why it matters when that belief is wrong.

What the index found

The Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index surveyed 565 Canadian small business owners in 2026, weighted to Statistics Canada totals by region, size and sector. The national score was 56.7 out of 100.

The findings Barry and Laura highlighted in the episode notes:

• 77.2% of owners rate their finances as good or excellent, but only 43.5% score in that range.
• 27.6% delayed paying themselves in the last 90 days. Owner pay is usually the first thing to go, ahead of vendors or CRA.
• Businesses with fully integrated financial systems scored 71.9, compared with 44.1 for those running mostly manual processes.

These are associations, not causes. The full methodology and results are in the 2026 report.

What I wish I had said on air with them!

The gap between how owners rate themselves and how they score is the finding I keep coming back to. 35.2% of owners rate their finances as good or excellent and score below 60. In practice, lenders and grant programs do not ask owners how they rate their own financial management. They ask for documents, and a bookkeeper can produce those while the owner never looks at them.

Cash runway tells a similar story. 18.1% of owners have zero cash runway or do not know what it is. Among owners with no runway, 62.6% delayed their own pay in the last 90 days. Among those with six months or more, it was 8.5%.

The largest single divide in the data is systems. That is something an owner controls directly, whether or not they hire outside help.

Transcript

(Lightly edited for clarity)

Barry: Let's get started. Laura, you mentioned uncertainty, and that's something we've been doing a lot of seminars on: communicating in an age of uncertainty. Even in the last week, it's heightened. Canadians are deeply uncertain, shaken in their confidence, anxious about the future and unsure of what these tariffs mean for them.

We have with us today a guy who has actually visited Cape Breton, so we appreciate that. Everything else he says is not as important as that.

He is the principal of Zenbooks, and he'll explain Zenbooks briefly, but he is a well-respected financial guru, especially for small business. Eric and I have worked on one or two projects together, and I can vouch for his insights and his ability to cut to the chase, understand the numbers and tell the story in those numbers.

Eric, welcome to Communicate with Power. You recently published the first edition of the Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index, a national benchmark scoring how well Canadian small business owners actually understand and manage their own numbers. You're talking to two small business owners here, so this is an area of great interest to us. We're bringing it up now because of what's going on everywhere we go, with potential impact on Canadians and especially Canadian small business owners. Now is the time to dig into it and understand what small business owners and entrepreneurs can learn from it.

Eric: Thanks for having me.

Barry: It's a real pleasure. Why don't we begin with you telling us a little bit about the index.

Eric: It's not about how much money business owners make. It's about understanding your own business's finances. How well do business owners actually understand their own finances? That's a big question no one has really answered properly at scale.

We scored five categories, each out of 20: whether business owners know their numbers, whether they can see forward, whether they make decisions with them, what produces those numbers, and what happens when those numbers go wrong.

56.5% of business owners in Canada scored below 60 out of 100. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. What will be important is next year. Are things improving or getting worse? Are some provinces doing better than others? Are there industries where people are better at forecasting? A profitable business can score badly, because the index measures how well owners understand their finances.

To bring some current relevance to this: on September 8th, we have tariffs coming into place in Canada. That's a huge deal. Only 17% of Canadian small business owners can precisely state their own profit margin, and 77% rank their own financial acumen as good or excellent. So when you think about how much these business owners need to raise prices or what they need to change, they don't actually know their own margins. How are they going to respond to tariffs properly if they can't readily figure out their own margins?

Barry: We always think of entrepreneurs, and I'd certainly categorize myself as one, as people with a great passion. You love what you do, you're really good at it, you zone in on it and keep improving. That should be enough, shouldn't it?

Eric: You'd think so.

Barry: So what is the index telling you about that vision of an entrepreneur?

Eric: We see it all the time at Zenbooks. The dance studio teacher, or the physician who has a corporation because they have to but doesn't want to be a business owner. Most people want to be a hairstylist, or whatever their craft is. They don't want to manage bank reconciliations and deal with CRA. So there's a sense of avoidance, or of not caring about that as much as their main bread and butter.

They're also following their passion, which is the reason they're in business in the first place, so it's hard to fault them. But as a country, a lot of our GDP relies on small business. If owners don't understand and manage their finances well, we need to know that, and we need to know where the gaps are, by region and so on.

Barry: In this climate of uncertainty, we do a presentation on people's awareness, or lack of it. I hope you can see this slide.

Eric: Yes.

Barry: It's the Dunning-Kruger effect. People with limited ability in a specific area may substantially overestimate their competence, because they also lack the knowledge needed to recognize their errors. Over here you have very confident, very limited knowledge. Then, as knowledge builds, you suddenly become aware of what you don't know, and gradually you inform yourself.

I'm raising it because this seems to be about far more than finances and numbers. It's about how people view public policy issues. You get into arguments with people who have a little knowledge, select certain data, and just know it. They own it, and you're stupid for not getting it. It creates a lot of division. In our seminars, so many people recognize that this describes what they've experienced. What's your take? Do you believe in the Dunning-Kruger analysis?

Eric: For sure. When I read about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the example I saw was about physicians and the rate at which they diagnose. New physicians diagnose at a very high rate compared to physicians who have been in practice slightly longer. Once they realize how little they actually understand, they stop diagnosing as quickly. Then, with more experience, the rate climbs again, just like you're showing.

You get a quick message, maybe an Instagram reel, and you think you understand what's going on in the news. But that's one take. Then you get another take and think, wait, does that make sense? You start to question things, and you realize you need to question the whole thing.

Barry: Absolutely.

Eric: This is a real factor in business. I always joke that as a business owner you need a certain level of confidence. You walk into a room, you own the room, you tell your clients you know what you're doing, and then you go back to your office and figure it out. You need that confidence, but it also shows up in owners' finances. They're highly confident they know their own finances. Then it turns out they don't have a budget, they don't track their KPIs, and they don't know their deadlines. The comparison is really interesting.

Barry: Laura, you've made it your business to go out into the real world and interview women who started their own small companies, the real entrepreneurs. Listening to all that, what's your takeaway? Does it resonate with your understanding?

Laura: This is a volunteer project I started a couple of years ago. I realized long ago that having visibility on your business really helps you get to the next stage. I agree with all of the economics, setting a budget, knowing the numbers.

But what I focus on is interviewing women who do outstanding things. I'll go to the farmers market, and I can almost tell as I approach whether a woman wants to talk to me about her business. You might ask yourself why anybody would start another business like that. Well, I'm genuinely interested. I walk up with my phone and give them my business card, to reassure them that I'm a legitimate trainer and interviewer. I've been in the leadership training business for many decades, but this is something I do to give women a boost, and I put it on my Instagram.

It can be anything. I interviewed a woman who makes beautiful cards from recycled materials. Or it could be someone with a Persian bakery, or someone bringing in Jamaican spices. I have to sense that someone is open to the interview. I get them to say their first and last name, because, Barry, as you and I know, so many people say it so quickly that you don't remember it.

Over decades, people have told me about businesses they were passionate about, but they couldn't tell you what business they were in. Even some of the women I mentored couldn't, at first, tell you what business they wanted to be in. When you and I started our business, if you'd woken me at two in the morning, I could have told you exactly what we were going to do. And every time we pivoted or moved into teaching new sectors, I was fully game.

I post the videos on my Instagram, Laura Peck 6, and sometimes on Facebook. They give women entrepreneurs an opportunity to talk about their businesses. When I take the camera away from them, it's to show their signage or their product. Or I'll mention that I ate or bought something from their business and loved it. I've met the most extraordinary people: lawyers, doctors, every kind of professional you can think of. They wanted to do something they're passionate about. Did they know all of the numbers Eric just talked about? No, they do not. But they had a willingness to take a risk and do something they wanted to do. I greatly admire them, and whatever help I can provide, I will.

Barry: I admire that you volunteer that, Laura. It's a terrific way of giving back. Eric, your response? Passion is what gets the plane down the runway and lifting off. But to stay in flight, your index tells us a more sobering picture. Could I use that phrase?

Eric: Sure. Owners who start out with a dream, a little bakery, eventually realize the whole thing needs to be sustainable. You can't just run a passion project for a year. Can I make a living, and can I eventually retire doing this?

Laura: The first week we went into business, it was around September. I had been out campaigning for John Turner, and when I came back to Ottawa, Barry was already in business. It never occurred to me that we could go without a client, because this was going to be our livelihood. That's how much we needed business coming in as well as doing the business.

Barry: And Laura saw an early accounts receivable many years later. Did you call that a business? Clients can be few and far between when you're starting out.

Laura: But we made the rent. We had that little office, and we scraped through.

Some takeaways I've learned: who your accountant is matters a great deal. How your accountant runs their practice has a direct impact on you, on your access to them, on your willingness to move forward and anticipate. Or are they just reacting to every direction I give them?

Barry: Don't look to me, I'm not an accountant. People don't come to see Laura and me because we're accountants. I'd love a little more accounting skill, but a lot of busy entrepreneurs rely on outside help. Even with a bookkeeper in-house, they still contract that service out, including to companies like Zenbooks. Does that resonate with your experience?

Eric: Yes. First, I'm not going to sell our services here. We're an accounting firm, we could do that. But one of the interesting findings is that how often you talk to your accountant is strongly linked to how well you understand your own finances.

Of course, you have to get along with your accountant. You have to be able to have a conversation with them.

On our zero-to-100 score, owners who spoke to their accountant only once a year scored around 50.6. Those who spoke to them multiple times a year scored 67.3 on average. And 43.5% of Canadian business owners speak to their accountant only once a year [CHECK: 43.5% is the share who score good or excellent; confirm the once-a-year share in the report]. Owners who talk to their accountant more than once a year score considerably higher. That's the biggest habit I'd point to, whether you talk to us or to another firm.

What's the point of understanding your own finances? How does it translate into anything useful for a business owner? One finding: 27.6% of business owners delayed their own pay in the last 90 days. Any business owner will tell you that resonates. If you're not a business owner, you may not realize it happens. Even among businesses with a million dollars or more in revenue, 19.7% held back the owner's pay in the last 90 days. So it's not just startups.

From a policy perspective, business owners are the shock absorbers when their businesses hit tough times. They're the ones who get cut first, because the owner doesn't have to tell anyone. They don't have to cut off any vendors. They just hold back their own pay.

Barry: When we talk about tariffs, it's always at the level of nation-to-nation relationships and sectors like aluminum and steel. Connecting the dots to a small corner store or a small service company is harder. What should governments be thinking about? It's a big question, I realize. The small business sector drives so many jobs in this country. Those owners may not be lobbying ministers, but they're hard at work keeping food on the table for their families.

Eric: Economists and people who write policy often assume a very efficient business owner, one who can make forecasts and decisions based on rational policy signals. When you talk to business owners, and I talk to them all the time, they say, "Oh, there are tariffs? I didn't even hear." The people in the policy world hear about it multiple times a day. Business owners are dealing with their clients. So they're not changing their prices or updating anything, and they're not hyper-efficient in their forecasting. You can only forecast based on assumptions, and if those assumptions aren't being updated, the forecasts are simply wrong. Policy people often assume everyone understands all the moving parts and makes decisions efficiently based on them.

Barry: For us, we started virtual seminars and coaching sessions during COVID, and that has picked up because of the Canada-US situation. We do have an office in Washington, but we're doing our American business virtually. What I've found with our American clients, including an executive we worked with very recently, is that they're aware we're from Canada, although we don't make that the premise of what we do. And we can engage them almost as well as in person, although I really like in person.

I'm raising this because the word I'm thinking about is adaptation. We had to adapt in COVID, as the world did. We're adapting now to this new uncertainty, this new reality. It's very hard for the local restaurant owner. There's another announcement of one going up for sale, and I actually like this one. It reminds me of my high school days. It was a great place to hang out, a restaurant and bar. What struck me was that everyone interviewed about it said they hoped it would stay exactly the way it was. Even though the world has changed, the demographics have changed and tastes have changed, they want it to stay the same. When I hear something like that, I think, okay, we need to have a conversation here.

Eric: From a finance perspective, sometimes the business isn't doing well. It's not efficient. It's actually losing money. Sure, your patrons are telling you not to change anything. But this can't keep going. It's not sustainable. You need to make changes that make it sustainable so people can have the restaurant they love for a long time. If it's inefficient, losing money and facing all this uncertainty, it won't last. People sometimes forget that.

Barry: When things get choppy, that can be a challenge. It's important not to panic. Stay calm. When we go in to coach people, yes, it's about leadership, communication skills, media and so on. But underneath that, you're really getting at the heart of it. What business are you really in? What is your value added? How do you position your company or your service in a competitive marketplace? What makes you stand out? Those become business coaching questions, not just communication questions.

The other point I'd make is that people, even owners, don't necessarily think strategically. They think tactically. Nobody puts together a better news conference than I do. We line up the post-news-conference interviews. Tactic, tactic, tactic. It could be brilliant.

But I remember walking into a minister's office years ago. A quarter of the way through getting ready for a news conference, I turned to the minister and said, "Minister, tell me why you're holding this news conference. I don't see the value added for you. You're not the main newsmaker on this story. You're reacting to it. Media will come to you for reaction comments. So why are you planning to hold a news conference?" He looked at me and said it came from the Premier's office. So I got on the phone to the Premier's office and asked why he was holding a news conference.

"Well, we want to make sure our message gets out."

No. This minister doesn't own this issue. He's reacting to it. The people who just released the report are the newsmakers. And the Premier's office backed right down.

I always think of that as an example of great tactics and bad strategy, and I've seen quite a bit of it. So it's not all about money, but as you say, you can't totally separate out the underpinnings. There's the business, and there's the business of the business. All of us are guilty. The business of the business is meetings and paperwork. We take the things we're least good at and park them somewhere to get around to later. Your experience has been that's probably a disaster.

Laura: I have to bring up Dolly Parton, may she rest in peace, because she was a woman who actually enjoyed the business of show business. She liked being in a meeting facing all the suits. She sustained a career like that, and she kept her marriage going, which is no easy feat either. That's what we're learning about her now. I love women in business. Even as a little kid, I loved women executives. My whole life I've been inspired by them and aspired to be one.

So, Eric, my question to you: is the Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index available as a paper copy? Is it something people can see on your website?

Eric: Good question. First of all, we're paperless, so everything is on the website. We have the full index with all of this year's results. I don't have a paper copy to show you, but there are links to go through it.

Laura: I want to make a suggestion. I think you should be on more podcasts.

Eric: Sure.

Laura: No kidding. I'd never heard of Scott Galloway until a couple of days into COVID, and somehow Scott Galloway had me on his show. I had no idea what I was doing. Look at where his career has gone. And, like me, he teaches in universities. My point is, if you had something to hold up, you could tell people, if you want to see my financial clarity index, look at my website.

Barry: So you think he shouldn't just hold his phone up?

Laura: Yes, which is what I started out doing. He's the one who asked me, Laura, do you feel like, as a Canadian, you're living above the meth lab? He said that in the early days of COVID, and things have gotten even crazier since. Now, Barry is bringing out one of our books.

Barry: I wanted to raise an example of what Laura just said. This one isn't in publication right now, but we're going to do 2026 versions of a number of Pocket Tips books, plus brand-new topics. Stay tuned. This Pocket Tips book was about the packaging: the format, the bullet points, 100 pages of that. We would sell 200 to 400 copies at a time to the US Coast Guard, the Canadian Armed Forces, the public service. I stumbled into that packaging. People told me, Barry, if you did a book, we'd buy one for our library, and I didn't want to do that. Laura keeps saying we have to do the online version, which we will. But publishers told me that if you don't match online with an actual book, or a Pocket Tips book in this case, it doesn't sell very well. One feeds the other. I found that very interesting.

It's a long way around, but it goes back to strategy: how you're going to achieve your goal and what's unique about it. They say if you can do one good thing a decade in business, you're doing okay. That was our one thing for the decade.

Let's pull this all together. Is this the first time you've done this index? Is it going to be annual?

Eric: Yes, it's annual, and this is the first year. My friend at the C.D. Howe Institute reviewed the methodology in his own personal capacity, and we had multiple academics endorse what we're doing. We're looking forward to next year and the year after. That's where we'll get the real insights, and maybe one day enough to write an interesting book. I think there may be something there.

Barry: We always say there's a story behind the numbers, and there are probably a thousand stories behind these numbers. People love to read about people. Your numbers are telling some very interesting stories: the difference between success and failure, and the importance of understanding your numbers. If you don't understand them, you're flying blind. Those are my own words, but that's what I'm getting from your index. It's very valuable, and I recommend it to all of our Communicate with Power subscribers. Do they go to Zenbooks and download it?

Eric: You can go to the zenbooks.ca website. We have a link directly to the index, with all the data. It's highly valuable to anyone in policy, journalism or writing, because it gives actual evidence for the arguments you're trying to make. There are a lot of opinions about how to manage a small business, but not a lot of evidence supporting them. So we're getting that evidence.

Laura: What a unique concept. People don't seem to know what things are based on. Well, I saw this. Somebody told me. I saw it online. You hear a lot of that. Evidence. So you're the evidence guy, Eric.

Barry: We really appreciate you coming on. We have a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs listening, and people from across the spectrum, and this is going to be a very valuable tool. We welcome people to go to zenbooks.ca and find out all about it. Eric Saumure, CPA, which I should have mentioned at the beginning, thank you so much for joining us today.

Eric: Thanks, Barry. Thanks, Laura.

Laura: Thank you, Eric.

About the Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index

The Zenbooks Financial Clarity Index (ZFCI) is an annual benchmark of how well Canadian small business owners understand and manage their own finances, published by Zenbooks. The 2026 edition is based on 565 owners, weighted to national totals. The next wave fields in 2027.

Read the 2026 report

Take the Financial Clarity Assessment