Here’s a sketchnote that summarizes the key points from the book. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Cool Time is a good book for people who work in an office and use calendar systems a lot (or would like to make better use of their calendars). Even if you work on your own, you might find it useful to adopt the “I-beam review” involving 15 minutes of planning before you start your day and 15 minutes after for processing. If your life is even more interrupt-driven, David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done (2012) book is an excellent read focusing more on managing your to-dos.

See more from Sacha at sachachua.com/blog

The beer industry has been flat to declining for several years in Ontario, which is interesting considering other beverage alcohol segments, such as red wine and cider, are growing. To grow, we need to steal market share from a competitor and help re-establish some of the relevance beer used to have.

What is your growth strategy?

A combination of long-term strategy and short-term opportunism is critical for success in a market as competitive and dynamic as ours. Our short-term plan is to outmanoeuvre our competitors with speed to market and great price-for-quality products. The long-term plan is to become a brewery that matters more to its customers and wins hearts and share as a result.

Tell me about using your speed to be successful.

Lime beer is a great example. In May 2008 Bud Light Lime was launched. We at Brick Brewery couldn’t miss the window of opportunity; we knew this would be a big success for the summer, so it took us 6 weeks to launch our own lime beer “Red Baron Lime.” From decision taken we worked very focused and utilized the fact that our suppliers understand our business and we leaned hard on them to make it happen.

How do you usually handle implementation of strategic initiatives?

You can’t top-load the organization; most people don’t thrive under too much pressure. Sustainable results are the key outcome. Try to do the top 3 first and then the next 3 and so on. Not all at once. I as the CEO am a driver, but a process is needed. Sometimes you need to take away one or two things from the everyday work to get the implementation done.

Why do so many companies get implementation wrong?

Deadlines, quality standards and budgets are promises made to an organization. Implementation fails when any of those promises are broken or compromised. When top management doggedly delivers those promises, implementation succeeds. It is very hard to run projects and implement initiatives in a matrix organization — accountability and decision making often aren’t clear. You need to manage expectations, clarity and accountability. Without that, you will struggle with implementation.

Do you think there is more of a “political game” in matrix organizations?

You can call it what you want, politics is a part of the business and undoubtedly among the more significant challenges leadership faces. Size lends itself to be more political. Usually political organizations are not really results-oriented. Labatt is a large organization which is proving the opposite, it is very big but extremely results driven, which minimizes the political nonsense. We also believe a compelling culture can demonstrate and reward the behaviours that lead to success in our company, while at the same times subordinating the more destructive aspects of office politics.

You have a special scheme to keep your staff involved and motivated?

Yes; we are trying to create a culture of people who want to build the business together with us. So we have developed a system we call “Pay for skill.” We are non-unionized, and we pay our employees based on the skill level they have as well as for the position they hold. For example, if you are hired to run the filler machine, but then you also learn how to use the machine that caps the bottles, then you will increase your hourly pay as you have increased your skill, made yourself more valuable and useful to the company. It has been a great success, the employees really embrace it, though a number of people opted out because they did not think it was the right culture for them.

You seem to have an open and communicative organization, how do you build an atmosphere like that?

Well, honesty is straightforward and is 100 per cent earned. What you say must identically match how you act and how you handle things. Trust is the bedrock of any relationship. If you don’t have it the team is tentative. When you have trust, only imagination limits your potential. And it all starts with honesty. It is better to have respect than to be liked, and respect comes from acting on your word. Employee communication is important and openness with tough decisions that directly influences the employees is key.

Johan Johannesson is a speaker, strategic business advisor and the author of “The Honest CEO” a business strategy book for which Johan has interviewed some of the most interesting CEO’s, Presidents, Business Leaders, Consultants and Professors in Leadership and Strategy. The Honest CEO highlights the fact that one of the main reasons for failing implementation is grounded in the planning phase and it is all based on the level of honesty and openness allowed within the organization.

Originally from Sweden, Johan founded his company, Gainful Insight, in London, UK, and now has its head office in Toronto. Gainful Insight specializes in supporting companies through the creation, implementation and managing of strategic business activities for its clients offering sustainable improvements versus short term cosmetic enhancements.

Find out how the latest in federal government innovation and commercialization initiatives can help your business. Hear from experts at the following departments and agencies to get up-to-date information on how their programs and services support innovation and entrepreneurship: Public Works and Government Services Canada Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP) National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada Going Global Innovation (GGI) Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario Investing in Business Innovation Program (IBI) MaRS – Building Canada’s next generation of global technology companies.

This content was created by MaRS Discovery District for the ONE network.  You can find more tools for entrepreneurs on the MaRS website

“Startups experience change all the time,” says Jeremy Potvin, CEO of ShiftHub, a Toronto-based startup developing a cloud based employee-scheduling application. “Six months from where you are right now, something could be completely different from a technology space.”

Staying relevant, and keeping your business operating according to the law, means keeping employees updated on every relevant aspect of your operations. This costs money, and is no easy task.

But while every industry is different and every company needs its own strategy, there are a number of best practices that work across all forms of businesses to keep staff up to date without emptying the company coffers.

The Daily Pow Wow

To cope with the constant flux inherent in the tech startup world, Potvin organizes a daily meeting with his staff, and encourages each member to advise the team on something unique and new in their industry.

“We have a standup every morning,” he says. “I ask these guys ‘what interesting thing have you read today?’ because everyday there’s something new that pops up.”

This strategy ensures Potvin’s staff benefit from eachother’s insights while also working to keep themselves informed.

“We try to get it done in under 10 minutes,” he says. “It’s just basically a dump. Here’s what we did yesterday, here’s what we’re doing today, I’m stuck on this. It always ends up fuelling great conversation, and really helps with the overall innovation of the company.”

Potvin also advises other entrepreneurs to move quickly when responding to industry changes, and to avoid making major decisions alone.

“It’s easy to get left behind these days,” he says. “When you see something, think it through properly. I’m a big believer that, if you’ve got a great team and you’ve got great business partners, their help in making these decisions quickly will be essential.”

Dedicated HR Professionals

Valerie Corbin, president of Full Circle Consulting, believes that even small organizations, especially those in rapidly changing industries, can benefit from dedicated human resources professionals.

“Organizations are recognizing that their HR person should not be the receptionist that was really good with people, that became the office manager, that became the HR manager, which is often what happens in small companies,” she says.

Hiring a dedicated HR professional can be costly, but Corbin has some affordable suggestions for small business owners.

“Either partner with other organizations who are in the same industry and find someone like myself or someone who trains (professionally) and share the cost of that trainer,” she says. “Or create your own training program and sell it to other companies to finance your own training.”

Corbin also suggests hiring staff that have some experience in HR, even if it’s not their primary focus, to help with training.

“It adds so much more depth when you have people who are working within that job doing the training,” she says. “You can’t always apply it, it depends on what the training and the industry are specifically. But it’s certainly one way to go if you want to engage your employees, save a little bit of money, and intensify the learning process.”

External Experts

As manager of the United States and Mexican customs division for Milgram, a Canadian transportation company, Sofia Spoltore has had to deal with rapidly changing security regulations on a regular basis ever since 9/11.

“The border has been evolving tremendously because of the fact that we always have to make sure, on both sides of the border, that it’s safe,” she said.

Each time a new regulation surfaces, Spoltore must communicate these changes with her clients, first in writing, and then follow up over the phone or in person to answer any questions they may have.

When it comes to keeping her own staff informed, however, she occasionally brings in an external expert who can better explain the new regulations.

“For example, if it’s FDA, and we need to know the new rules of the FDA, we would take someone who’s really specialized in food products and have them come here and explain how this impact us, how we fill out these forms or how we do this prior notice process, etc.”

Learning on the Job

Anil Verma, director of the Centre of Industrial Relations & HR at the Rotman School of Management, believes training sessions are only a first step.

“Formal training provided by the employer is only one sliver of it,” he says. “My guess is that it’s only 10-20 per cent of what you need to learn to keep yourself current, and the rest of it comes from your own initiative and your own work.”

Verma explains that, unlike the industrial era, where employers were responsible for making sure staff stayed up to date, today’s high turnover rate puts the onus on employees.

“The job is only safe for 18 to 24 months, it will end eventually,” he says. “That’s how fast technology is changing and making old processes obsolete. So it’s much more the responsibility of the individual to be worrying, ‘am I learning things that will get me my next job?’”

As a result, says Verma, the small business owner’s responsibility lies not in training itself, but in allowing staff the opportunity to learn on the job. He adds that while large companies have the luxury of moving staff around between departments to teach them new skills, small businesses should provide their staff with a wider variety of day-to-day tasks.

“If you’re a company of 10 people, five of them should know everything within the company. If someone leaves or someone is sick, you will not be stranded,” he says. “The best thing an employer can do is to create opportunities for people to learn new things within the business group.”

And for the businesses building Ontario’s burgeoning solar industry, every week comes with the threat of regulators pulling the rug from under their feet.

One such business is Certified Solar, a Windsor-based residential and commercial solar energy company established in 2009. Operating throughout Ontario, they face constantly changing regulations, costs, and tariff rates, indefinite blackout periods for registering new projects, and compliance with 82 different utility providers, each with their own regulations.

Their entire organization needs to stay abreast of all these changes in order to meet industry regulations, which makes keeping their staff up-to-date a constant challenge.

“There’s no surprise that there’s going to be a surprise,” says Gordon Simmons, the company’s senior vice-president and co-founder.

According to Simmons, industry regulations not only change often, but do so without warning.

The company had its genesis when the Ontario government introduced the Green Energy Act in 2009. The initiative allowed renewable energy providers to feed electricity directly into the Ontario power grid and set the rate at which producers were compensated for power production.

That same year Certified Solar ran a test market in Windsor to see if rural landowners would invest in a solar energy project through either roof or ground-mounted systems. These projects cost around $100,000 to build, but would produce enough electricity to collect $300,000 in compensation over their 20-year contract.

“People (were) very anxious to see that kind of return on investment,” Simmons says. “After the first year we started expanding, and now we’re Ontario-wide.”

But the rate at which the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) reimburses green energy producers has declined dramatically since the program began in 2009, from about $0.802 to about $0.53 per kilowatt hour. On the other hand, Simmons estimates that it is now 40 to 60 per cent cheaper to install a solar energy system than it was in 2009, which keeps the total net gain for clients at a consistent 15 per cent.

These numbers change frequently, but that isn’t even the biggest challenge the company faces. Providers like Certified Solar often have hundreds of applications for new projects waiting in the queue. But every time one of the legion of regulators to which they answer decides to suddenly modify rules or rates, the businesses have to scramble and hire new staff to change every application.

These temporary hires are typically brought in for administrative jobs, such as updating compliance forms or documenting existing projects, and therefore don’t need any specialized training. But the hiring is time-consuming and adds an unexpected cost.

Once, Simmons recalls, the OPA announced they needed engineering studies conducted for every applicant in the Small FIT program to ensure they had complied with new roof requirements. Certified Solar had to hire staff to visit and document hundreds of project sites, at a cost of almost a million dollars.

“That puts companies out of business (if) they don’t have the capital,” he says.

According to Marc Hurwitz, assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and chief insight officer for Waterloo-based HR firm FlipSkills Consulting, unexpected changes like these make it difficult to thrive.

“The green industry is such a moving target right now,” he says. “You go into the market, you do your research, you get your money, and then the rules change. That’s hard.”

Hurwitz says the best weapon against this constant flux is a stable vision for the future, but it’s difficult for Simmons to maintain a forward-thinking approach in such a rapidly changing industry.

When the tariff rate changes, Simmons needs to draft a completely new business plan, and every pillar of the organization is affected. The company has to renegotiate with solar technology suppliers to remain competitive, adjust their marketing strategy, and retrain staff in accordance with these changes. Furthermore, changes to the tariff rate are commonly accompanied by changes to the OPA’s application process.

“(The OPA) continually adds more forms and more processes, as opposed to making it easier and simpler to get a customer connected to the grid,” says Simmons.

Staff need to know these processes inside out, and the company’s online forms must be reprogrammed to stay up-to-date. This lengthy process often negatively impacts timelines.

Simmons has instituted a number of strategies to minimize loss and keep his staff abreast of new developments. Every department head attends a Monday-morning meeting to discuss changes from the previous week, and all senior management staff receive real-time updates from the OPA.

“Then we pass that information off to our sales managers across Ontario,” he says.

But no strategy can change the rocky nature of the business.

When the OPA launched its microFIT 2.0 renewable energy program in 2012, it set a limit on the amount of renewable energy contracts it would accept. It now only has the capacity for 800 new contracts before the program is set to expire, which would mean an end to one of Certified Solar’s biggest sources of revenue.

To cope with the impending change, Simmons has started looking into other markets.

“Because of the nature of a government incentivized program, if that government program stops we have to look elsewhere,” he says.

But Simmons isn’t discouraged, and says the challenges of dealing with the industry have made his staff well-prepared to take on other markets.

“It’s a part of every government (initiative) around the world, so it’s just about adapting and focusing your energies where it makes sense,” he says. “Change is part of the program.”

The Culture Blueprint is an upcoming book that draws on lessons from Zappo’s corporate culture. It offers a mix of high-level advice as well as practical tips on how to influence your company’s culture and help your company be more effective. I liked the chapter on implementation, which includes a sample conversation showing how someone negotiated an experiment’s scope until the person got the resources and commitment needed. The tips are geared more towards medium- to large-sized companies, but even small business owners can benefit from the focus on values and stories.

Read more from Sacha at http://sachachua.com

However, Anderson is probably best known for his former position as editor-in-chief at WIRED. He revitalized and retooled the magazine during his 12-year tenure from 2001-2012, eventually surprising the world by resigning his post to pursue his entrepreneurial passions full-time with 3DRobotics.

Anderson, who will be in Toronto on May 14th as a keynote speaker at the Canadian Digital Media Network 3.0 Conference, spoke with Star Business Club editor Tom Henheffer about the maker movement, the rise of 3D printing, and the exciting changes he sees coming to the world of entrepreneurship.

You seem pretty optimistic about the future of industry

And not just because of the maker movement. There’s so much work that needs to be done on energy, health, biology and transportation, and there are bold people taking on the future—I’m super optimistic.

What is the maker revolution?

It’s the web revolution meets the real world, what happens when all the innovation and experimentation and social innovation moves from the screen to physical things.

What are its causes?

It’s a series of technologies that have suddenly matured that resemble, in many ways, similar technology from twenty or thirty years ago. It’s largely desktop manufacturing, like 3D printers and laser cutters, plus CAD and 3D scanners which have been around for decades but in the last five years have become cheap, small and easy to use.

The other essential element that makes this possible is called cloud manufacturing, which allows you to upload a digital design to factories over the internet. It’s an outgrowth of the fact that designs are now digital, so it’s easy to share, collaborate and upload.

What does this mean for consumer marketplace?

You don’t have to guess, you can look to kickstarter and see it there. It’s a billion dollar company, I’m wearing a watch from it now. Indiegogo and Etsy are other examples.

Down the line, what we’d expect is that it will have the same effect on consumer options as the internet—it creates an opportunity for niche product companies to exist.

There’s a lot of markets out there, say of 10,000, that are too small for mass production and too large for individuals. The global manufacturing supply chain didn’t lend itself to that, and if you’re an artist you can only make one (product at a time).

One you can do, millions you can do, 10,000 is really hard. This maker movement has enabled (people to tap) the 10,000-person markets.

How will this change entrepreneurship

Four months ago I quit my job at Wired to run my maker startup (3D Robotics). We have two factories, we’re a multimillion dollar company. Five years ago I didn’t know how to spell factory, and my 25-year-old co-founder (Jordi Munoz, the company’s head of hardware engineering) didn’t either.

But he knew you could go online and just do stuff, you don’t need permission, you don’t need training. So he bought his first factory equipment on eBay, started in a garage, and by the time I came onboard it was a multimillion dollar company. It’s real factories, built by kids with credit cards who looked up stuff on the internet.

What are the limitations of this new industrial revolution?

We’re kind of at the dot matrix stage of 3d printers. The first ones printed something, but it was a single colour, it was relatively low resolution. Today you can buy a two-colour 3D printer that’s higher res. Tomorrow, three colour, so you’re close to full colour, and higher res again. Then you’re going to get multiple materials. It’s pretty easy to put conductive materials in that, and suddenly you’re printing wires.

What does this mean for overseas manufacturing?

(Small Businesses) can be anywhere.We’re competing with China but we’re not in China. Thanks to growing up on the web we ended up building a factory here (in California), and that turned out to be much more profitable than it would be there.

Manufacturing overseas lacks flexibility and means buying in huge volumes. Producing here lets us tightly control our costs, and because it’s so much faster we have innovation built in.

What does an entrepreneur need to capitalize on these trends?

There’s really no excuse for not jumping in. If you don’t want to buy (equipment) you can go to a makerspace.They have all the tools, the training, you can work around all these inspiring people. Or you can use these services online. It’s a little slower, but if you have an idea, you can build it.

The next step is trying to decide whether to build a company. Just as important as the 3D printer is the rise of crowdfunding sites. Kickstarter, it’s really magic. It gets company’s money when they need it, at the research and development and tooling stages—not when they’re in the selling stage and have already mortgaged their house.

Kickstarter also does market research, it tells you ahead of time whether the market wants a product or not. If you don’t hit your funding, that’s a gift. It tells you people don’t want it.

And the (last thing you need)  is community. You’re becoming a part of a collective. You can get tens of thousands of comments with suggestions. Just watching that feedback loop between customers and designers, people feel they’re part of something, and they’ll evangelize it. It’s a marketing tool, and there’s nothing like word of mouth.

And if a customer orders (the finished product) when it finally shows up you’re like ‘yay! It works!’ Even if it isn’t as good. It’s almost the closing credits of the movie, you’ve seen the whole story play out. It adds a lot of drama to the act of buying a product.

Do you have any words of wisdom to aspiring small business owners?

The barriers of entry are all barriers to entry. All the other barriers of running a company, they’ve always been there. Congrats, you’ve just passed your Kicksarter goal, you now have to make 10,000 of these, now what? You have to incorporate, hire people, get liability insurance. Hello government regulations. Time to get a bank account.

If you look at our operation today it looks like every company has always looked. We use better software tools and are more web based and cloud oriented, but by and large it looks like GE. It’s basic stuff, but it’s so easy to get to the moment where you have demand that you forget some of the other elements of running a business really have remained unchanged.

Bryan Segal, Vice President , Sales – comScore Media Metrix As online presence is a key component in reaching Canadians, it is important to understand the landscape to determine the most effective way to reach and engage with your audience. In this presentation, Bryan Segal will delve into the state of the digital media universe in Canada. He will focus on where Canada stands in terms of usage and duration from a worldwide perspective, as well as taking a closer look at the behaviors of Canadians online. What are some of the differences between Canadians surfing behavior and surfers from around the world? What are some of the hot and cold categories? How do you target populations online, and what are some of the ways to reach those online targets? As well, to ensure that we keep up with the most up-to-date trends, Bryan will delve into the Social Media, Video, and Mobile industry. MaRS – Building Canada’s next generation of global technology companies.

This content was created by MaRS Discovery District for the ONE network.  You can find more tools for entrepreneurs on the MaRS website.

Print media may be changing, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Just because ad revenue is down doesn’t mean it’s too late to digitize your presence — and make money off it, too.

“It’s a very tricky time,” says Gavin Adamson, an instructor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. “I think everyone is sort of searching for the right models and the right experiments.”

There is no surefire solution to the post-print dilemma, but here are some ways to modernize, and better monetize, your publication.

Create a social media presence

This may seem obvious, but there are still lots of companies — media or otherwise — lacking a substantial presence on social websites.

“You need to drive more traffic to your website,” says Adamson. “More and more people — especially the younger demographic — are coming to their media first through sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.”

Every tweet and Facebook post holds the opportunity for more website clicks. But a social media presence doesn’t end with pushing out content. These sites are meant for users to have conversations — if you don’t engage with readers, they won’t pay attention.

Use video

Videos, says Adamson, give print publications the chance to get a piece of revenue they otherwise wouldn’t have. With video comes the opportunity for additional advertisements, appearing both before and after the actual video footage.

“Print publications are now going with video, because as a print magazine, you’re never going to get the pre-roll ads that you see on CTV.ca or TSN.ca,” Adamson says.

Two effective approaches are creating an offshoot documentary series that builds off already-published stories, or posting videos of your staff members providing additional background or describing how they get their stories.

But Rob Otsfield, CEO of entertainment site andPOP.com and music site ChartAttack.com, says poor-quality video won’t cut it.

“The reality is that it’s harder to get into the video content business than the text content business,” he says. “To write an article, I just need a laptop and a WordPress account. To produce good video content, I need equipment, software, a lot of time, and a professional who knows what they’re doing.”

Because it’s harder to create video content,says Otsfield, the publications that do it well quickly rise to the top. And better video means more opportunities for pre- and post-roll ads. Plus, videos provide the chance to further hone your niche, and a good niche will keep advertisers coming back again and again.

“You need to provide advertisers with something they can’t find anywhere else,” Otsfield says. “Go above and beyond to extract a specific audience.”

By doing this, he says, you give advertisers a well-defined market — allowing you to approach certain businesses that cater to that market. In essence, you’re doing all the work; all the ad company has to do is pay you to access your following.

Go mobile

As the percentage of news consumed on smartphones continues to grow, it’s becoming increasingly important for publications to have mobile-specific versions of print issues. Regular websites can be clunky and slow on smartphones, so there is an undeniable advantage to having versions optimized for iOS devices, Android, and Blackberry.

“We’re on a one-way track to consuming, gathering, and sharing on mobile devices and tablets,” says Humber College Journalism Program Coordinator Mike Karapita. “We’re already seeing the decline of home computer use and the rise of tablets and mobiles. It’s absolutely essential that your media entity exists in a digital realm, and that it has a user-friendly look and feel.”

There are multiple approaches. If you’ve already got a solid digital team, you can enlist a third-party application like Mag+, which provides templates to be filled in-house. Businesses can also contract to conversion houses such as LibreDigital, who convert PDF files for use on the Google Play Store. Or you could hire an outside business to develop an app just for you.

Find new and innovative ways to deliver content — both editorial and ads

“You have to think outside the normal range of content of pretty pictures and video,” says Adamson. “You have to think of a new way that your mobile app can interact with your reader.”

Adamson cites, for example, Newsana, a members-only website that lets users “pitch” an already-written article they think deserves attention. The top five stories across a range of subjects are featured on the site’s front page. It adds a level of competitiveness to the regular consumption of news, or as Adamson says, turns “online content into a game.”

It’s also important to deliver ad content in new and exciting — for both the company and the audience — ways. Otsfield did this by putting brands right into his video content. For example, andPOP had a video series sponsored by Steam Whistle. The beer company got title sponsorship, and also had its products featured in each video.

“People didn’t have choice,” he says. “They had to see the product — but it wasn’t done in an intrusive or insulting way.”

Consider what your advertisers are looking for…

If you know your market, you should also know which advertisers it attracts. Approach those who may be willing to front you cash to explore a new digital initiative in exchange for premium ad space and the promise of clicks.

“If you’ve got an advertiser who is willing to provide advertisements to your particular readership, then they’ll be willing to spend money on your innovation,” says Adamson. “It just takes an advertiser who wants to experiment with you. That’s a way to do it risk-free: find advertising at same time [you’re developing new initiatives].”

…But stay true to your content

There are lots of new platforms and potential revenue streams, but great content is still at the core of any successful online publishing venture.

“Content is most important thing,” says Otsfield. “Distribution may change, but as long as the content is good, and is made clear and visible to the audience, then the advertisers will follow.”

The industry is undergoing a serious evolution, and its uncertain future makes it difficult for traditional publications to hold onto their existing readers, gain new ones, and generate cash.

The Walrus magazine, a Toronto-based publication known for its long-form journalism, is trying to accomplish all three feats. To do so, the traditional print magazine is building out — and attempting to monetize —  its digital presence.

The goal is to eventually reduce overhead and help recoup money lost from declining advertising rates. But it’s a hard thing to do, since so much journalistic content is available on the web for free, and advertising rates online are so low: a half-page print ad fetches $6,000, but online, a comparable half-pager sells for only $3,000.

And changing gears to meet the demands of online audiences is a major undertaking. People want more content and more often, so The Walrus — founded in 2003 and published 10 times a year — not only has to change its delivery platforms, but also revamp its entire way of doing business.

“The landscape of reading is changing. If you’re serious about staying viable, you need to be everywhere,” says Nic Boshart, manager of digital initiatives at The Walrus. “The big, long-range problem is, what are we post-print?”

The short-term answer focuses on making the magazine available on mobile devices. There’s already an app for iOS devices, and as of press date, it had just over 1,000 subscribers — although half already have a print subscription and as such get the service for free. But iPads and iPhones are only one part of the market so the magazine is also moving to Android and BlackBerry.

To establish a presence on Android, The Walrus sends PDFs of completed issues to a conversion house called LibreDigital. They create files for the Google Play store, which users download and read with a Google-made Android app. This requires little labour from Walrus staff and has no monthly fee, but all revenues are shared with Google (the deal precludes The Walrus from releasing details about the revenue breakdown). Boshart says the magazine’s BlackBerry edition, still in very early stages, will probably be similar to the Android process.

While delivery methods are changing, the subscription side of their digital business mirrors a standard print model. Once the free app is downloaded, users can buy issues for $3.99 each or purchase an annual subscription for $19. The iOS app has averaged just under 2,000 downloads per week in 2013.

With tens of thousands of downloads and only 1,000 subscribers, the conversion rate is low, which is part of the reason why the magazine is reaching out to Android and BlackBerry. The Walrus expects to gain another 5,000 digital-only subscribers across the three platforms by the end of 2013. They are already advertising in the apps, but aren’t directly charging advertisers. Instead they use the digital platform to sweeten deals, offering free ads for companies that buy $9,150 full-page print ads.

The magazine will start charging for in-app ads once the number of digital subscribers increases. While the digital side is currently nowhere near the kind of subscription numbers their print edition attracts —  approximately 60,000 readers — the magazine has created multiple channels to grow their digital presence and push readers toward the apps.

These initiatives include The Walrus TV (a documentary series on Walrus-inspired subjects that sees about 1,500 views per month), an enhanced social media presence (the magazine has 35,000 Twitter followers and 10,000 Facebook likes), an email newsletter (which has 15,000 subscribers), and a new podcast (exploring the process behind Walrus articles; their first one, as of press date, had 700 hits).

These all create more clicks, which leads to more online ad revenue.

“We’re just trying to keep pace with the industry changes,” says John Macfarlane, The Walrus editor. “That’s our goal at the moment.”

According to Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at the University of Toronto Scarborough, playing catch-up won’t be enough. Success requires accurately predicting and acting on what an audience will want in the future.

“If The Walrus is going to be successful, it has to provide something that can’t be found somewhere else,” he says.

But that’s an incredibly hard thing to do, especially because this digital model is completely unproven.

This is a major concern for The Walrus because their old revenue streams are drying up. Print subscriptions remain steady, but print advertising sales are down 50 per cent from pre-recession levels and haven’t shown signs of recovery. Macfarlane doubts they’ll ever return.

“Our funds are severely limited, so we have to try to be smarter about what we do,” he says.

But because the magazine is owned by the charitable Walrus Foundation, Boshart says they’re in a better position than most Canadian publications. About half of The Walrus’ overall operating budget comes from foundation donations, events, and sponsorships, giving them more legroom to experiment — and make mistakes.

That means they have time to build their digital audience, even if ad revenues are down. And despite their uncertain future, Boshart and the rest of The Walrus team are staying positive. After all, with uncertainty comes the chance to innovate and the opportunity to lead a weakened industry back to good health.

“We do want to be making money and be profitable on our digital side, (and) it doesn’t feel impossible,” says Boshart. “I’m pretty optimistic.”