Emily Richardson has taken Ray Ivany’s targets to heart.

Richardson is the Founder and CEO of Halifax-based GoFullSteam, a startup developing a series of tools that can help small businesses plan and execute the early stages of their development. The online product includes tools that help business people with their pitches, their business plans and their financial projections.

Richardson and her team – CTO Deepika Agarwal and Director of Community Ben Boudreau -- were struck by the Ivany Report, which called for private sector leadership in lifting Nova Scotia out of its economic morass. In particular, they took note of the report’s goal of launching 4,200 new businesses a year to grow the private sector. So GoFullSteam is doing its part to help.

“We’re making our platform free for everyone in Nova Scotia that has an idea for a business and needs a plan of attack to get it off the ground,” said Richardson, sitting in her office in the Volta startup house in Halifax.

GoFullSteam started last summer and instantly got a boost when Richardson was accepted into the Women Entrepreneurs Bootcamp at Communitech in Waterloo, Ont. It was a forum where she could not only learn but also discuss her platform with other entrepreneurs.

The idea behind the product is that there are a gazillion online products to help entrepreneurs but many are confusing and/or time-consuming. GoFullSteam aims to give the new business person a series of simple, easy-to-use tools that can help anyone get their business going.

The company is working with various partners in the community. It has formed a partnership with East Coast Credit Union to introduce the product to the lender’s clients. And it has also worked with the immigrant services community to ensure the GoFullSteam platform easy for new Canadians to use.

GoFullSteam now has a few hundred users, including clients as far away as India and South Africa. As it increases its user base, it plans to introduce new products so that growing entrepreneurs use the suite of products as their business becomes more sophisticated.

“If we could produce digital tools that we could use ourselves, then that would help our fellow entrepreneurs to see it as something you come back to again and again as part of the ongoing process,” said Richardson.

GoFullSteam so far has been funded by the team with small contributions from friends and family. Richardson hopes to raise seed capital in 2016.