Guides: what a small-business owner should know

The Charter of the French Language and your marketing

This guide sums up what the rules published by the OQLF and Éducaloi change for your signage, your names and trademarks, your website and your social media, particularly since June 1, 2025.

You will learn:

• what the "marked predominance" of French means on a sign;
• how a business name can keep an element in another language;
• what Éducaloi says about websites and social media;
• a marketing checklist to run through before every launch.

This guide is not legal advice. It helps you ask the right questions of the OQLF or your lawyer, and design marketing in which French naturally leads.

A 90-day growth plan

This guide shows you how to build a short, realistic growth plan yourself, in five steps: establish your baseline numbers, find the cheapest growth lever, choose three to five priorities, build the calendar and choose the indicators.

It contains calculations you can redo with your own data, for example:

• the annual value of a customer from average sale, margin and repeat-purchase frequency;
• the effect of a 5% price increase on your margin per sale;
• what an increase in repeat-purchase frequency brings in, without a dollar of advertising.

It is the same method as our growth strategy service.

Getting found across the 19 boroughs

This guide details bilingual local search in Montréal: defining a profitable service area, writing a French-first Google listing, creating service pages in both languages, avoiding repetitive area pages and setting up a steady review routine.

It includes a profitability calculation by area and a table of the indicators to track each month. It complements our Coverage page, which describes each borough.

What these guides don't do

Our guides provide a method and reference points; they don't replace a lawyer, an accountant or your knowledge of your own market. When a guide cites a public rule, it links to the official source, and that source is what counts.

We don't publish unverified local statistics or promises of results in them. The worked numbers are examples: they show the logic of the calculation so you can redo it with your own data. If a figure from your business gives a very different result, that is useful information, not a mistake.

We update the guides when the rules change. The date of the last update appears on every page.

Who the guides are written for

They are written for the person who makes decisions in a small or mid-sized business: often the owner, sometimes a general manager or a partner responsible for sales. They assume no marketing training. Every term that could be jargon, such as conversion rate or hreflang markup, is explained where it first appears, with an example.

How to use these guides

If you don't know where to start, read the 90-day plan first: it will help you decide whether the priority is language, visibility or something else. If you are about to launch a sign, a campaign or a website, start with the Charter guide. If your problem is simply getting found on Google, go straight to the local search guide.

And if, after reading, you'd like to talk it over, the initial 30-minute consultation is free. Go to the Contact page.