Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦

🇨🇦 The cheapest carrier for a parcel going to Halifax is usually not the cheapest one going to Kelowna. Most brands pick a carrier, negotiate once, and then send everything through it. That's one rate card doing a job that needs several, and you eat the difference on every parcel headed somewhere that carrier isn't strong. Rate shop every parcel.

Hockey this morning, then a Vancouver Giants game tonight with the boys and their friends. In between I'm heads down on CanShip features.

🇨🇦 Canada Post's peak season rules are out. From Nov 2 to Jan 10, a guaranteed parcel has to be 2+ business days late before the claim gets honoured. The Oversize and Unpackaged surcharge goes to $30 from $21 over the same stretch. Worth finding which SKUs trip that before November. canadapost-postescanada.ca/c…

🇨🇦 The cheapest shipping fix most Canadian brands haven't made is putting the right box on the right order. Dim weight means you're paying for air on every oversized carton. One extra box size in the pick line usually pays for itself fast. It's boring and nobody wants to own it, which is why it's still sitting there.

🇨🇦 Anything on the water from the US right now, go find the bill of lading. Counter-tariffs went live yesterday. In-transit goods are exempt but CBSA says the proof has to be in your hands. Low value doesn't get a pass either. Shipments under de minimis still get surtaxed.

Hockey season's coming back, and for the first time I won't be coaching my oldest. Both U13 rep teams have paid coaches this year. That's the right call, and I still had to sit with it for a minute. Those kids have had the same core group of dads in the room since they were five. They need new voices more than they need me. I'll still be on the bench for my youngest, and I'll probably end up head coaching his field lacrosse team with another dad. So the calendar isn't getting any emptier. Just a different seat this year.

Nothing on the schedule again this weekend, so the boys and I are going to sink a few hours into our Minecraft realm. There's a merry-go-round in there now. I suspect by Sunday night there's going to be a whole amusement park.

I missed an entire skid on a receipt count. Not a box. A whole skid. It was a big receipt, every carton had to be opened and counted, and somewhere in there I just lost one. The only reason it never became a client's problem is that we count double blind. Two people count independently, neither sees the other's number, and it gets flagged when they disagree. Mine was wrong. The other one caught it. That's the actual argument for process. Not that good people don't make mistakes. That you build the thing that assumes they will.

I back off way too easily with other people's kids. With my own, I push harder. Not because they need it more. Because I'm not afraid of upsetting them. That's not a coaching philosophy, that's just the person in front of me changing what I'm willing to risk.

🇨🇦 There are two US tariff changes hitting Canadian brands right now and they work in opposite directions. The first one landed Jul 24. Canada sits in a flat 10% band, and goods entered duty-free under CUSMA are exempt from it. So the fix there is paperwork, and a lot of smaller brands never set up CUSMA certification because the old de minimis made it pointless. The second one is Aug 19, and it does not care about your paperwork. An extra 50% on a long list of Canadian goods, and CUSMA specifically does not exempt you. It reads as autos, alcohol and dairy, but the actual lists reach into apparel, furniture, toys, cosmetics and sporting goods. If you ship physical product into the US, go find out which list you are on before the 19th. Those are two very different problems and only one of them is solved by filing better.

I'm building a game. Not for a business reason. I've wanted to properly build one for a long time and I finally started. It's web-based, it doesn't have a name yet, and the loop right now is build, test, build, test. Best part is my eleven year old likes it. He's the toughest tester I've got, because he'll tell me something is boring without softening it even slightly.

🇨🇦 Happy BC Day! Long weekend, nothing on the schedule, and the warehouse is closed. Hope you're somewhere good.

First weekend in a long time with absolutely nothing on it. No rink, no field, no drive times to work backwards from. We're taking the boys to see Spider-Man and that is the entire plan. Ask me in October how much I miss this.

🇨🇦 Canadian brands keep benchmarking their shipping against US delivery times and then apologizing to the customer for the gap. Sorry, but you need to stop apologizing. The geography is different, the carrier density is different, and a customer in Whitehorse knows that better than you do. What actually loses them isn't the extra two days, it's finding out about the extra two days at the door instead of at checkout. Or worse, when the order is already enroute. Be accurate up front and most people are fine. Be optimistic up front and you've bought yourself a support ticket.

Everyone optimizes picking. Almost nobody touches receiving, and receiving is where the errors are actually born. A pick error is usually a receiving error that took three weeks to show up. Wrong count at the dock, item binned in the wrong spot, lot number never captured. By the time it reaches a customer it looks like a warehouse problem, and the fix was 20 feet from the back door. If you're auditing anything this month, start where the inventory comes in, not where it goes out.

Cheapest fix in ecommerce nobody bothers with: make the apartment or unit number its own required field at checkout. Half of failed deliveries aren't the carrier's fault, they're an address missing a piece. Catch it at checkout for a few cents instead of at the door for a reship and a support ticket.

🇨🇦 Hamilton, Ontario earned a nickname a hundred years ago that still sticks: Steel City. Two companies built that reputation, Stelco and Dofasco, starting just before the First World War. For most of the last century, if something in Canada was made of steel, there's a decent chance it started as a coil out of Hamilton. Dofasco still runs there today. Steel's a smaller part of the city than it used to be, but the name stuck for a reason. Hard to think of another Canadian city so tied to one material. More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stelco

Running three businesses and coaching four teams sounds insane written down, and honestly it is. But the sports are the thing that keeps the rest in proportion. It's hard to spiral about a bad week at work when you've got a rink full of ten-year-olds who need you to actually be there. The calendar looks crazy. The crazy is load-bearing.

If your 3PL can't tell you exactly where a given unit of inventory is right now, that's not a technology gap. It's a trust gap. Knowing where the stock is is the whole job. If the answer is ever "let me check and get back to you," you've learned something important about the operation.

I run my life on two tools that shouldn't work together: a calendar and a paper notebook. The calendar keeps the family and the sports schedule from colliding. The notebook is where the work actually gets thought through, longhand, no notifications. Digital for the when, analog for the what. I've stopped trying to merge them.