I had the pleasure of doing a business speaker engagement recently in Toronto, Canada.

I get to go there on occasion and I always enjoy it. It is an interesting mix of  metropolitan bustle and Canadian laid-backness. I tell people it reminds me of a mix of New York, Chicago and London…just a lot more mellow.  Since I like New York, Chicago, London and mellow, you can imagine I like Toronto, too.

I enjoy the business climate there, too. People are very focused on running their businesses and creating more deals. You can tell that people here take care of business, because even though there are clearly a lot of people who are not wealthy, I cannot find any signs of poverty. One can also easily find the wealthy parts of own, and there are lots of them.

One of the ways I measure a city is to visit one of the local Whole Foods grocery stores. You can tell what sort of a market you are in by the size of the Whole Foods store and the array of products. Downtown Toronto has one of the biggest and most interesting Whole Foods I have ever been in.

My keynote speech seemed to go well. I had a lot of nice compliments from people and I felt good with the interaction. I hope it leads to more interesting opportunities.

I also got to meet one of my self storage marketing heroes. I met Allan, the owner of Jiffy Self Storage in Toronto. He has been in the self storage business for over 20 years and has probably forgotten more about marketing self storage than most people have ever learned about it. Just search the key phrase “Self storage Toronto” on Google or Yahoo and see how strong his results are.