Resilience for Small Business in a Digital Landscape
Understanding the system is one thing; building a business that survives it is another. This session is about practical resilience — reducing dependency on any single platform, building channels you actually own, and finding growth outside the algorithm.
We'll cover creative export into the U.S. and U.K., wholesale and in-person markets as ballast against digital volatility, and the documentation habits that make the difference when something goes wrong. We'll also look at where Canadian policy on marketplace regulation is heading and how small sellers can get their experience into that conversation.
Rough outline:
- Auditing your dependency: where your revenue actually comes from, and what happens if one channel disappears
- Owned channels — email, direct storefront, community — and what's realistic to build at small scale
- Creative export: selling into the U.S. and U.K. as a small Canadian business
- Markets, wholesale and offline revenue as deliberate strategy, not fallback
- Documentation and escalation practices that hold up under pressure
- Where Canadian marketplace policy is going, and how to be heard
- Attendee-driven Q&A carried forward from Session One
Who it's for: Anyone selling through Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, Square, Instagram or a marketplace they don't own. No technical background needed.
About the facilitator
Laura Sultan is the founder and CEO of Designs by Nature Gems, a handcrafted gemstone jewellery studio she built from a market stall into a multi-brand business operating out of the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina. The company sells across Amazon, Etsy and its own storefront in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., and employs artisan jewellers in Toronto at living wages with full benefits.
The company was named Fastest Growing Company – Canada at the 2022 Stevie Awards, and was profiled by Amazon in a documentary produced for its Rising Stars series. A year later, a marketplace algorithm change erased a substantial share of that revenue overnight — with no notice, no explanation and no meaningful appeal.
Rebuilding from that pushed Laura into policy work. She has since been recognized as a Female Entrepreneur of the Year and named a finalist for the Lenovo Evolve Small Grant, placing in the top 5% of more than 400 applicants across Canada and the U.S. She writes on platform accountability and seller protections, and has spoken with MPPs at Queen's Park as part of the Better Way Alliance's Meet the Business Owners series. She previously served as an Entrepreneur in Residence with RISE.