“The decisions we make as small businesses, on an individual level, are insignificant – but collectively can steer entire communities and regions in a specific direction.”

In partnership with Inniskillin, Canada’s first estate winery, Startup Canada is celebrating and spotlighting leading entrepreneurial changemakers and disruptors across Canada. Startup Canada was pleased to sit down with Sarah and Daniel Cosman, Co-Founders of Cosman & Webb Township Organics, to learn about their journey and the impact of their work.    

After years of dreaming, planning, and waiting with their fingers crossed, Sarah and Daniel purchased a property adjacent to Daniel’s family farm in 2013. Knowing the expanded farm would now need to support two families, Sarah and Daniel began working on a new brand for the syrup and exploring the potential for bringing it to the west coast of Canada, where Daniel had been living since 2006. In December 2014, Cosman & Webb Townships Organic was launched – organic, unblended, single forest maple syrup direct from the Cosman farm.

Daniel manages the business operations, sales, and logistics of Cosman & Webb, while Sarah develops and markets the Cosman & Webb brand, directs web sales, and takes care of the bookkeeping. They’re most often found at farmers’ markets, on the road making sales trips, and hiking in the sugarbush with their children Yannick and Eleanor.

SC: What does being an entrepreneurial changemaker mean to you?

Sarah Cosman: For me, finding a way to set yourself apart. Shifting expectations. Going above and beyond in every possible way.

Daniel Cosman: For me, personally, it’s about having a little bit more control over your own life. Not that it is possible, but it’s about being the mastery of your own destiny. It’s about benefitting from your own ideas and the fruits of your labour.

SC: Tell us about your entrepreneurial venture(s) – what do you do? What role has it played in your life?

Daniel Cosman: Well, it’s very simple. As a family farm, I should preface this answer by saying that it is not exclusively my venture, it’s a family operation. But what Sarah and I helped to do was to go after some of the value added potential of maple syrup rather than just producing and selling a commodity. By packaging it and marketing it, we wanted to have a little bit more control over when the syrup was sold and to whom, and to alleviate the pressure on the farm from needing to sell barrels.

In terms of the role it has played in my life, it’s sort of all consuming. What it really did was allow me to branch out and network with businesses across Canada in a way that I had not expected. It’s surprising how integrated these businesses are, and it has been a lot of fun navigating that. So really, the family business has brought me out of just farming an into a more social side of business.

Sarah Cosman: It has allowed me to be more creative. Being self employed as a young family has allowed me a flexible schedule and provided me more time with our children.

SC: What motivated you to become an entrepreneur?

Daniel Cosman: I’m not sure I had much choice in the matter. Being raised on a farm, farmers are historically the quintessential Canadian business people. The enterprise and entrepreneurialism is what farmers live and breathe, and so that was the context in which I was raised.

Some of my earliest memories are daydreaming about business ideas – it’s just what we learned. I love everybody’s business. One of my favourite things to do is to just have an evening of brainstorming about somebody else’s venture. It’s easy because it is not my business and it is not my money, so I get to walk away at the end of the evening. I can’t help it. I, like Sarah, love ideas and I get lost in them.

Sarah Cosman: I am a daydreamer. I get lost in ideas, and some of those ideas are really great ideas.  After working for other people for so long and needing to conform to their visions, it is wonderful to be able to work hard on our own vision, our own project.

SC: What are you most proud of related to your venture(s)?

Sarah Cosman: I am most proud of our customer service. We appreciate every customer and hopefully convey this to them in our interactions with them. When we have a repeat sale it lets us know that they appreciate us too…and our syrup!

Daniel Cosman: My answer on this one differs quite a bit from Sarah’s, though she really is the backbone of customer service in our business. Her patience endlessly impresses me.

We didn’t start this business with very much money. It has often been a struggle and I guess what I’m most proud of is that we were able to build our business to what it is today with both of us simultaneously being employed full time. We both had full time jobs – so imagine working 40 to 60 hours a week for somebody else and starting your own business and building it. In order to get past the capital shortfalls, having to constantly compromise sales because you could only afford X number of cardboard boxes and glass bottles. Then just constantly reinvesting every time we sold a bottle – we were able to bottle up another bottle and not take any money out of the company. I think that’s what I’m most proud of.

SC: Tell us about your biggest hurdle – what was it and how did you persevere  through it?

Daniel Cosman: If somebody has a great idea and very little capital, it can take so long to get things up and running that by the time they are up and running, the idea has passed over. The best candlestick maker in the world no longer has an opportunity with the advent of electricity. We had a slow start – and I can’t emphasize that enough, it really took us about 4 years to get off the ground to get to the point where we didn’t have to have sleepless nights because we had to order a pallet of glass.

I would say that, as is the case with most young and burgeoning entrepreneurs, momentum and capital go hand in hand. Being able to get past that initial pinch is probably the biggest hurdle that most businesses have to face, and it was certainly ours.

Sarah Cosman: We started this business at the same time that we started a family. Everything felt compromised as we were pulled in so many directions, but we worked really hard as we tried to build a business. I am sure that the development of our business was delayed, and opportunities lost, but we kept on going and got through it.

SC: What has your biggest learning been along the way?

Sarah Cosman: Navigating online sales has been challenging. It is ever changing and we are constantly needing to relearn our marketing approach. We are constantly needing to develop new and effective ways for reaching an online market.

Daniel Cosman: Sarah’s answer for this of online marketing is certainly true – it still evades me. She’s much better with computers than I am.

I still can’t quite make heads or tails of the best approach. So many of the venues that are most easily accessible are very expensive in terms of the margin that they take: Amazon, Etsy, etc. So navigating the Internet and learning to use it to your advantage I think is essential for small businesses. In fact, I think it’s essential for all business. But it’s not free and if you’re not careful, you’ll lose all of the margin you would have had for your business.

So on the one side, direct to consumer sales are the difference between having a good year and not for a small business selling farm products like ours. But on the other side, if you don’t try and figure out the free ways of advertising, selling, and marketing, then you may as well just have a distributor manage your product. I still don’t know what the future holds for online sales, but it sure is a steep learning curve.

SC: What drives your motivation when things get tough?

Sarah Cosman: Stress and deadlines.

Daniel Cosman: I would say stress above all else. Exclusively with the goal of alleviating myself of that stress. When things get tough and you need to get things done, they get done significantly in part because I don’t want to feel that stress anymore.

SC: Where can people go to learn more about your journey and organization?

Sarah Cosman: Our GEEK PAGE – we put an enormous amount of effort into our geek page. We wanted this to be a learning experience for consumers and interested parties. We wanted this to be a means of bringing people closer to our farm, our business, and our product.

Daniel Cosman: Yes, I have to concur entirely with Sarah. The Geek page took us a year and a half to develop. We put an enormous amount of research and thought into it. It has continued to evolve since we set it up – it’s not just a place to learn about us, but also a place to learn about what maple syrup actually is. There are a lot of falsehoods and misconceptions. We had hoped to tackle two birds with one stone, and so for people who are intrinsically curious, the geek page is the perfect spot to go.

SC: What is your ideal vision for Canada’s entrepreneurship community over the next 20 years?

Sarah Cosman: I think that connectivity is going to be a defining feature of a successful business. We need to grow and learn together and support one another. Businesses depend on one another. It has been a key to our success.

Daniel Cosman: As you may know, small and medium businesses in Canada are one of the strongest driving economic forces in the country and they don’t get a lot of attention. They’re also one of the strongest employers in the country and they often don’t get credit for that. What I would hope for is an increase in support for that small business community from different levels of government. Including, but not limited to, the federally owned banks that are always available but often require equity or assets that most small businesses don’t have in order to secure funding. I think if more of these Institutions took on a little bit more risk, we would have a far more interesting economy and far more interesting communities. These small businesses and entrepreneurs are what define local economies and local cultures. The franchises and the big corporations in the box stores do not define culture. If we somehow found better ways to financially support small businesses and encourage them, I think we would see some pretty interesting developments.

It’s so important we remember the 80:20 rule. Every time you spend a dollar with a local business, 80 cents stays in the community. Every time you spend a dollar with a big franchise or corporation, 80 cents leaves your community.

SC: What do you think today’s entrepreneurs should be focused on for a better, brighter future?

Daniel Cosman: I think that if entrepreneurs in Canada really want a bright future, all of the decisions they make have to be made in the context of both living in and benefitting from society. This means that our decisions need to have environmental stewardship in mind and, like our business decisions, have to have community in mind. Within that, we need to be thinking about how to support other small businesses. For example, there are boxes from the biggest online distributors but there are also other, smaller scale options we can support. We need to be thinking about local labour requirements – so running our business in a way that if we have to hire people, they are hired for good wages. The decisions we make as small businesses, on an individual level, are insignificant – but collectively can steer entire communities and regions in a specific direction.

Are you an avid supporter of Canada’s entrepreneurship community? Share Sarah and Daniel’s story or showcase your OWN entrepreneurial changemakers across social platforms with the hashtag #CheersToTheChangeMakers!