Insider baseball thread ... I'm primarily a journalist, not a businessperson; I have a tiny bit of experience in business management, but I was never trained to run a business, and I've been learning and making it up as I go along.

If I say so myself, I've done well with the Examiner. Basically, it was just: follow all laws, pay all taxes, pay people well, but spend less than you bring in. It's been a reasonable path to success these 6+ years. Can't complain.

But we have growing pains. I'm spending too much time on the management side (because I'd like to do more reporting) and the business is at that point where we need more established practices and planning.

I've already been working to rationalize and systematize salaries, and I'm happy to report that for the most part, we're already close to ideal parity. The big exception is my own salary, which is far too low. A couple of other minor tweaks, tho, and we're good.

But we need medium- and long-range planning, and possibly funding, and for that I'm speaking with an organization that may be of big help. I've gone through a couple of preliminary rounds, and tomorrow I have an hour and a half interview with their team.

I've never really had any real job interviews before, and here I am doing something much larger, heh. I figure I'll just be myself, but I've been prepping for it for days.

If all goes exceeding well, we might end up with some free consulting work, to help prepare business plans and the like, and provide some bridge financing for expansion. If not, we'll just keep doing what we've been doing, which is working well enough.

But either way, outside help aside, the success of the business rests almost solely on subscriptions, and as we prepare to enter a somewhat more ambitious growth stage, I ask folks to consider subscribing: https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/subscription-account/subscription-levels/

It's your support that has brought us this far, and we are all immensely grateful. I think that with your continued support, we can do still more important journalism. Thanks much!