Get Up To $115K For Your Business Technology

CDAP Stream 2 Planning & Loans

Hundreds of Canadian businesses have taken advantage of the Canada Digital Adoption Program. You won’t want to miss your chance.

Following the closures of many businesses during and after COVID-19, the Government of Canada has put together a program to help businesses like yours plan for digital transformation and access funding to help you see it come to life.

So how does it work?

First, everything starts with a plan. Measure twice, cut once.

You apply for up to $15,000 to cover the costs of a digital advisor, such as Sensible Marketer, to help you evaluate your business and come up with a CDAP plan of which tools and technology you need to reach your goals.

Once that plan is completed and approved, you can then apply for up to $100,000 from BDC Canada (and that’s an interest-free loan over 5 years) to put towards implementing what’s outlined in your solutions plan. There are even student subsidies available ($7,300) to hire extra help in your business.

With the CDAP plans we’ve completed, we’ve helped our clients with everything from digital marketing to analytics and business dashboards, to integrating existing systems (meaning ties between systems, say your website talking to your CRM platform or tools connected to your reporting dashboards). The CDAP plan has us review all areas of your business—cybersecurity, inventory, marketing, accounting, etc, so we can help you identify where your biggest needs are.

In your plan, we will identify what costs are, what timelines are, and all of what goes into the amount you’re asking BDC for, if that’s your goal.

How could your business benefit from CDAP Stream 2?

There could be multiple goals you’re after, giving you a different outcome. Where we’ve seen the best outcomes for businesses:

1. They’re looking for funding to help scaling their business and digital transformation.
   • Whether it’s automating tasks, preparing to scale without having to use people to do every task, or funding upcoming system upgrades, the up to $100,000 from BDC is interest-free and quite flexible in terms of what it can be used for in the plan.
2. They’re looking for someone to address pain points in the business that the team doesn’t have time to address.
   • Investment and time to review existing operations is difficult. There could be redundancies, there could be large gaps, or worse, there could be work the team is doing that could be simplified. But who has time to look into that? Having an outside team do the heavy lift and document can bring business owners and leadership teams peace of mind.
3. They’re looking for someone to dedicate time to evaluate and present solutions to their team
   • Some companies know they need new technology, but aren’t sure or don’t have the time to review what they need. A CDAP can help provide overall timelines, budgets and expectations to help businesses plan for the future.

If this sounds good to you, here’s what you need to qualify.

Qualifying for up to $115,000 with CDAP

This stream is a little tougher than Stream 1. Here’s all the lawyer/financier type talk on what your business needs to quality. It must:

• have earned at least $500,000 of annual revenues—but not more than $100,000,000—in at least one of the previous three tax years.  
• have between 1 and 400 full time equivalent employees. Part-time employees are pro-rated as a percentage of FTEs.
• be a for profit entity. Canadian privately-owned business. 
• be incorporated federally or provincially, or be a sole-proprietor with a Canadian-resident owner.

If this sounds like you, well, let’s not waste any time and get to it!

Your Business Qualifies, Now Let’s Apply

Congrats—you meet some of the key requirements and you’re ready to get started. What you’ll need to do is:

1. Go to the Canada Digital Adoption Program and apply
2. Setup a time with Sensible Marketer to discuss what you’re looking for
3. Once you’re approved and signed with Sensible Marketer, we’ll set up a schedule to go through the process
4. We’ll interview you and pinpoint what your needs are
5. We’ll research the tools and investigate what is needed for the areas you want to develop
6. We’ll finalize the plans, present to you, and get your sign off
7. You’ll then submit the plans and in 2-3 weeks, you’ll be approved and have access to subsidies and the BDC loan application.

At the end of this process, you’ll know what areas you need to focus on, what tools you could look at adopting, and a realistic timeline on what it means to implement it. Whether or not you want to then apply for the loans and subsidies is then up to you.

So why wait? Contact us today to discuss your needs and get things started.