I was watching the 6pm news last night, and heard a story about the impact small businesses have on the job market. It related: how small businesses generate 60-80% of all new jobs and are at the heart of our economy, how a recession would impact small businesses, and, again, how much small businesses impact the economy- crazy circle talk!
They highlighted a small business owner in the NE somewhere who owns a gourmet food shop called Garlic & Oil. She sells mid to high-end gourmet food items. When the reporter asked her what issues she was dealing with, she listed: higher utility bills, higher delivery costs, higher product costs, and fewer customers. When the reporter asked her what she was going to do, she said (in this order):
- Let go of her part time staff and work more herself-to cut costs
- Open up on Sundays- adding another day to her already 6 day work week-to be more available
- Somehow, someway get more people to come to her store- she needs more foot traffic. (Can you say, demand generation? )
She indicated she had about 12 weeks left (if things didn’t improve) before she would have to shut down her business.
Couple of thoughts- this was an interesting view of the “conversation going on in the heads of the small business owners.”
Her first reaction to pressure was- try to cut costs (overhead, and other costs.) Her second was to increase availability- which, if she was online, wouldn’t matter. Her third idea was to generate more demand to save her business- “more foot traffic.”
Obviously, this is a single business owner, however, there will likely be a TON of TSB’s that begin to fail due to the “recession.”If we could somehow begin to save them from failure- by using our services- we would be Heroes! Can you say Bold and Audacious?
I’m not sure how we would get the word out, but I literally wanted to call this women last night and say, “You need some help generating demand and using additional channels for selling, get and use partners etc., and last but not least you need our software to make all this easy- and cost effective.”
Food for thought!!
Posted In: Small Business
