Saliem Talash

Saliem Talash is a Toronto-based founder. He is the founder of Zome , the growth platform for trades and home service businesses, and the editor of ZELR , a publication of notes on tools, work and the city. The two pieces of work point the same way. Zome is where he builds the tools a small service business needs to be found online, win the job and keep its customers. ZELR is where he writes down the plain, checked information around that kind of work: the tax rules and dates, the records worth keeping, the technology a small operation depends on, and the city it runs in. This page is a short profile: what Zome is and does, the free report it offers, where it stands today, what ZELR covers, and where to watch and read more. Everything about Zome below is taken from Zome's own site as it read on October 8, 2026. Zome Zome is the growth platform for trades and home service businesses. Its site names plumbing, heating and cooling, electrical, roofing, landscaping, cleaning, painti...

Most home offices are assembled rather than designed. A kitchen chair, a laptop on the dining table, a monitor on whatever shelf was free. It works for an afternoon. After a few months it shows up as a stiff neck, sore wrists and tired eyes by mid-afternoon. The good news is that fixing it is mostly a matter of order and a few measurements, not expensive furniture. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has a set of office ergonomics pages that are the clearest I know of. This post walks through them in the order that matters: chair, then desk, then screen, then the habits that hold it together. Start with the chair, not the desk Everything else is set relative to your body in the chair, so adjust it first. CCOHS gives a step-by-step method: Seat height. Stand in front of the chair and set the height so the highest point of the seat is just below your kneecap. Feet. Sit down and keep your feet flat on the floor. Seat depth. Check that the gap between the ...

Open the notes app on your phone and scroll to the bottom. You will probably find hundreds of notes you have never looked at since the day you wrote them: a half-finished list, a phone number with no name, a paragraph from a book, three lines from a call that made perfect sense at the time. The problem is rarely the app. It is that the notes were written for the person taking them, in that moment, and not for the person who would need them later. A system you actually reread fixes that one thing, and it does not need to be complicated. Write for the reader you will be Tiago Forte of Forte Labs puts the goal well. He describes making notes as "designing a product for a demanding customer — Future You," and describes that customer as impatient and skeptical. Future you has not got time to decode shorthand or reread a page to find the one useful line. Every habit below serves that reader. Habit 1: one inbox, captured fast You cannot reread notes you cannot find, and you can...

Fifteen minutes from the foot of Bay Street, the noise of downtown Toronto stops. The Toronto Islands are a chain of small islands in Lake Ontario with beaches, a lighthouse, a boardwalk, an amusement park and no private cars. They are the easiest day trip in the city and the one visitors most often get wrong, usually by arriving at noon on a Saturday and spending an hour in the ferry line. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. This is the plan I give friends for a good island day. Prices and schedules below come from the City of Toronto's pages, checked in September 2026; the ferry timetable changes by season, so check it on the day. The ferry: where, how much, and how to skip the worst of the line All public ferries leave from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal at 9 Queens Quay West, at Queens Quay and Bay Street, behind the Westin Harbour Castle hotel. There is no parking at the terminal, so come by transit, bike or on foot. Ro...

A used phone or laptop can be a very good deal. It can also be a nicely polished object that will never work for you, because it is still tied to someone else's account, has been reported lost, or has a battery that is nearly finished. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. These are the checks worth running every time, in a sensible order. Most take a minute. Together they separate a bargain from a brick. Before you meet: ask three questions Message the seller first and ask for: The exact model and storage size. "iPhone, 128 GB" is not enough. You want the model name so you can check what the device should be worth and which battery rules apply to it. The IMEI, for a phone. This is the phone's 15-digit identity number. The Canadian Telecommunications Association (formerly the CWTA) says you can see it on most phones by dialling *#06# on the phone keypad. It also appears in the settings. A screenshot of the batt...

Every small business eventually has the bad day: the order that did not arrive, the wrong colour, the booking you forgot, the customer who writes in capitals. What you say in the first reply decides whether you keep that customer, and often whether they tell anyone else about it. Scripts help because a bad day is exactly when it is hardest to find good words. Written in advance, calmly, they let you reply quickly without sounding defensive or robotic. Edit them into your own voice, save them where you can paste them, and they will carry you through most of what goes wrong. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. The names in the scripts are placeholders. Know what the customer has been told to expect The Government of Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs publishes a "Complaint Roadmap" that coaches consumers on how to complain. It tells them to stay calm and be clear, to write down who they spoke to and when, to ask for ...

Most small businesses set their first prices by looking at a competitor and going a little lower. It feels safe. It is usually the most expensive decision they make, because it ties the price to someone else's costs, someone else's customers and someone else's mistakes. A better method has three steps: find your floor, find the ceiling, and choose a point between them on purpose. Then present the number honestly, which in Canada is also a rule. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. The examples below are fictional and for illustration only, and none of this is tax or accounting advice. Step 1: find your floor The floor is the lowest price at which a sale does not lose you money. Below it, every sale makes you poorer, and more sales make you poorer faster. To find it, add up three things per unit (per product, per hour, per job): Direct costs. What you spend to make or deliver this one thing: materials, packaging, sup...

The photo is the product, until the customer holds the real thing. For a small shop selling online, on social media or through a marketplace listing, a clear, honest, consistent photo does more for sales than almost any caption. The good news is that a current phone is more than enough. What makes the difference is light, background and consistency, and all three are nearly free. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. This is the simple setup I recommend to anyone who sells physical things and shoots their own photos. 1. Clean the lens first It sounds too obvious to list, and it is the single most common cause of soft, hazy product photos. Phones live in pockets and hands. Apple's own advice is to wipe the camera lenses with a soft, slightly damp, lint-free cloth, such as a lens cloth, and not to use compressed air or cleaners with bleach or hydrogen peroxide. Do it every time you start a shoot. 2. Use one window, not the ceilin...

Most big cities keep their nature at the edges. Toronto has it folded into the middle. Rivers and creeks cut deep valleys through the city long before there were streets, and when the city grew, it mostly built around them. The result is a network of wooded ravines you can drop into from an ordinary residential street and, within five minutes, lose the sound of traffic. The numbers are large. The City describes a ravine system of more than 300 kilometres, and municipal officials have put its area at about 11,000 hectares, around 17% of the city's land, according to a UN Environment Programme report on Toronto's urban forest. Much of it is public parkland with marked trails. I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses, and a ravine walk is how I reset a week. These are five good places to start. 1. Glen Stewart Ravine (the Beach) Best for: a short, beautiful first walk. This is the gentlest introduction. A small ravine in the Bea...

Most small local businesses do not need a clever website. They need one that answers a stranger's three questions in about ten seconds: Do you do what I need? Do you serve where I live? How do I reach you right now? I'm Saliem Talash. I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses. This guide is the short version of what a small local business needs online, in the order I would do it. 1. Set up your Google Business Profile first For a bakery, a dog groomer, a bike shop or a mobile hairdresser, many new customers never reach a website at all. They search "dog groomer near me", look at the map results, and call from there. That listing is your Google Business Profile, and it is free. What matters: You can list a service area instead of a street address. Google's own guidance lets service-area businesses (the ones that go to the customer) hide their address and show the areas they serve. You do not have to publish your home address. Complete e...

Every city has a list of small problems that nobody owns until someone reports them: the pothole that has been eating tires since March, the streetlight that flickers, the graffiti on the underpass, the tree branch hanging over the sidewalk. In Toronto, almost all of them go through one door, and that door is 311. Plenty of people know the number and never use it, usually because they assume nothing will happen. What happens next depends a lot on how the request is made. I'm Saliem Talash, I live in Toronto and build practical tools for small businesses, and this is a short guide to using 311 well, based on the City's own pages as of October 2026. What 311 is for The City describes 311 as the place for "non-emergency City services, programs and information." It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the City says it "can offer assistance in more than 180 languages." The City's own 311 service standard dashboard tracks the kinds of requests it...

"Storage almost full" always arrives at the worst moment: halfway through filming something, or just as an update needs to install. The temptation is to start deleting photos at random until the warning goes away. That works, but it is slow, it is risky, and the warning comes back in a month. There is a better order. First find out what is actually using the space. Then clear the things that are safe to clear. Then change the settings that keep it from filling up again. I'm Saliem Talash, I build practical tools for small businesses in Toronto, and for many small business owners a phone is the main computer. The steps below come from Apple's and Google's own support pages. Menus move a little between versions, so if a name differs on your phone, look for the closest match. Before you delete anything Make sure your photos and important files are backed up somewhere other than the phone. Several of the steps below remove the copy on the device on the assumption t...

The first hire is the moment a one-person business becomes an employer, and the paperwork arrives all at once. Most of it is not hard. It is unfamiliar, spread across federal and provincial websites, and full of easy-to-miss deadlines. I'm Saliem Talash, and I build practical tools for small businesses in Toronto. This post puts the official requirements for a first employee in Ontario in the order you will meet them. Every number comes from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Employment and Social Development Canada, the Government of Ontario or the WSIB, read in October 2026. It is a starting map, not tax or legal advice, and an accountant or bookkeeper is worth an hour of your time before the first payday. Step 1: get a payroll account with the CRA You deduct and send money to the CRA on your employee's behalf, so you need a payroll deductions account. The CRA describes the number as a "15-character payroll deductions account number": your nine-digit business numbe...

Property tax in Toronto has a rhythm, and by October most owners have stopped thinking about it. That is understandable: for anyone on the regular schedule, the last 2026 instalment was due on September 1. But the last three months of the year still hold a handful of dates and decisions that cost money if you miss them, and one of them, the relief program deadline, matters a great deal to the people who qualify. This is a plain guide to what is left, based on the City of Toronto's own pages as they read on October 1, 2026. I'm Saliem Talash, I build practical tools for small businesses here, and this is the short list worth keeping in a calendar every autumn. How the year works The City issues two property tax bills a year. Interim bills are mailed in January and final bills in May. On the regular schedule, each bill is paid in three instalments. For 2026 those were: Interim bill: March 2, April 1 and May 1. Final bill: July 2, August 4 and September 1. If you pay that w...

Every November the same thing happens in Ontario. The first real snowfall arrives on a weekday morning, tire shops book up for weeks, and a lot of people drive to work on tires that were never meant for it. None of this is hard to avoid. It mostly comes down to doing three things in October instead of December. This guide follows the Ontario Ministry of Transportation's winter driving page and the province's insurance regulator, as they read on October 1, 2026. I'm Saliem Talash, I build practical tools for small businesses in Toronto, and a surprising number of small businesses here depend on one car or van getting through the winter. Step 1: get the car checked The province's first recommendation is simple: get a maintenance checkup to make sure the vehicle is ready for winter. Book it early. The point is to find a weak battery or worn wipers in a garage in October, not at the side of the road in January. While you are at it, two small habits from the same page: ...