There’s no business like sh… small business!
Small business makes the world go around!
SOURCES:
https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data-center
https://advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Frequently-Asked-Questions-About-Small-Business_2024-508.pdf
https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/
https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/the-ultimate-guide-to-advertising-types-strategies-and-best-practices-for-2025/
This month I am plugging Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital. To donate, please visit https://rankenjordanfoundation.org/donate/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Someone asked me one day why the business world is so complicated.
And I think they were surprised by my answer.
“It’s not complicated at all,” I said. “Business is very simple. You sell something for more than it cost you to make it. A kid can do that with a lemonade stand.”
“But what about manufacturing and accounting and marketing and logistics and shareholders and HR and all of those other things?” they’ll ask.
“You don’t have to do any of those things to be in business,” I said. “You can hire people to do all of those things. The only reason businesses have those things is because they’re trying to save time and money. Sometimes the best way to make more money is to spend less of it running your business.”
“But if it’s so simple, why do people get degrees in business?” asked the other person.
“Because they’re less interested in starting a business than working for one,” I shrugged. “Starting a business is really hard. But anyone can do it if they try hard enough.”
“But don’t you need to be a genius to start one?” the other person pressed.
“Do you like Hershey’s chocolate?” I asked.
“Of course,” they said.
“Milton Hershey was no genius. And he only had a 4th-grade education. But he built one of the biggest brands in the world. And after he did that, he started his own school for underprivileged children and then left his fortune and his chocolate company to it.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s candy,” they protested.
“Henry Ford didn’t go to high school,” I said. “He spent his spare time as a teenager fixing pocketwatches. He got interested in steam engines because he was trying to avoid farm work. And he built one of the biggest brands in the world and revolutionized industry.”
“But that was a long time ago,” the person said.
“OK, how about Steve Jobs?” I asked. “He was a pretty unremarkable student, and he dropped out of college to go wander around Asia seeking enlightenment. He did a lot of drugs and got busted for underage drinking. He also ripped off his best-friend, Steve Wozniak, for most of the money they made when they created the game Breakout for Atari. Those two guys went on to found Apple, and you know what happened there.”
“I dunno,” the other person said. They still weren’t convinced.
Could it really be that easy?
I’d argue that yes, it really can be. And I say this as someone who once ran a very profitable lemonade stand. The problem isn’t that business is hard.
It’s that you have to compete in a marketplace where everyone else is trying just as hard as you are. And most of those people who are competing don’t have MBAs or fancy job titles or giant marketing budgets.
They’re small businesses, just trying to make a buck.
So let’s talk about small business and why it’s so vital to all of the business we do in the United States!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Pretty much every day, I get an unsolicited email from someone I’ve never heard of claiming that they can take my business and turn it into something bigger and better through the power of marketing!
And what tool they’re pitching varies a lot – it might be fixing up my website, or refining my strategic plan, or applying better SEO, or boosting my social media presence, or supercharging my leads or using AI to do all sorts of things – but these pitches almost always have one thing in common.
They don’t understand my business.
See, I’m a full-service insights researcher offering professional services to marketers around the world.
I’m also the owner of a small business.
And my business is very much in the realm of “B2B” – business to business – and in order for my organization to be successful in that setting, there are three things that do matter.
- We need to have an obvious expertise in what we do.
- We need to have an excellent reputation.
- We need to be readily available to serve those who need it.
There are other things that will help us to be more or less successful – our pricing, our response time, our polish and so forth – but we first need to have those three things locked down no matter what sort of business we’re in.
And then we need to figure out how to let people know about them.
When our company started in 1983, that expertise and reputation came from our founder’s background and the people he could refer potential clients to who’d vouch for him.
Being readily available in the 1980s meant having a phone that people could call, and that meant making sure your number was listed in the phone book and also on your business cards.
If you were really lucky, you might make it in someone’s rolodex.
Our founder, David Rich, has also told me that in the 1980s, since people couldn’t learn much about you from looking you up in the phone book, your address really mattered, and so he found the least expensive sublet he could in the business district in Clayton and had set up his office there.
Nowadays, people don’t look too closely at your address.
But they do look at your website, since it’s the first place they’ll look if they want to know if you’re credible.
It’s helpful if you have an established brand and a slick design and a lot of glowing testimonials and good reviews.
But it’s vital that you make it easy for people to contact you.
Being available in 2026 means making sure that website at least has a phone number and a way to contact you via email available.
But I’ll be honest – very little of our business comes from people calling us out of the blue.
A lot of it comes from people who know us already or heard about us from someone else.
And that means we have to make sure we’re making it easy for people to reach us.
That means not only communicating through email – by far the most common way we hear from people – but also making it easy for people to find us on professional social media platforms like LinkedIn.
Over the last few years, I’ve also been giving out my cell phone number to clients so people can text me if they need something.
If someone wants to do business with me, I want to eliminate as many barriers as possible.
I use RPG as an example because we’re not fundamentally different from any other business. In fact, as a small business, we’re pretty typical.
Believe it or not, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, 99.9% of all businesses in the US are small businesses.
There are 33.2 million of us, and we employ about half of America’s workforce – that’s over 60 million people working for small business – and represent 43.5% of the country’s GDP.
Believe it or not, according to the Small Business Association, about four in five small businesses are categorized as “nonemployer firms,” which means they don’t have any paid employees.
Even so, even that roughly 20% of small businesses who do have employees make up 99.7% of all firms with paid employees. The average size is 11 employees.
And large businesses?
There are less than 20,000 of them in the United States. They’re very visible, but they’re also quite rare.
If you divided those up by state, that would be just 400 large employers.
And of course many of those are healthcare, retail and food service organizations, not major manufacturing or trade companies that produce and market products.
I mention all of this because the principle I mentioned in the beginning of this episode – that business is about selling something for more than it costs you to produce it – is actually the simple logic by which most small businesses operate.
Many small businesses operate on a cost plus pricing logic – “we’ll charge what it costs us plus the profit we can make.”
We often complicate these discussions by talking about what big brands or large companies are doing, but in truth, they’re only really comparable to each other.
And if you spend your time as a small business trying to imitate large businesses, you’ll often find yourself eating into those profits by buying things you don’t need.
One easy example is branding.
For most businesses, their logo, name and positioning are not nearly as important as the personal relationships the business owners form with other people they want to serve.
Having a high-profile brand or a cool-looking logo is nice, but in all honesty?
They’re mainly useful for appealing to the people who don’t know you and who are most desperate to find a service provider quickly, because they’re a surrogate for quality.
If you offer a great product or service, your brand matters a little.
But what matters most is the value you provide.
That’s what will bring customers back.
I can cite numerous real-world examples of this, but I think the easiest to understand is the hole in the wall restaurant – the sort of off the beaten path place you might discover that doesn’t necessary have great signage or a memorable brand name, but man, that food is something you’d come back for and tell others about. It becomes a destination, a myth, a legend. A place people want to go because there’s only one place like it.
So, where would branding really matter?
If that restaurant wanted to grow its footprint and try to stand out in the highly competitive category of chain restaurants.
Then the brand needs to signify something – that no matter which location you’re going to, you’re going to get the same great food with the same value.
And it needs to also tell you a little bit about the chain’s philosophy and cuisine and service model and style because you’re no longer going to a single hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a single physical location that tells a story in and of itself.
You’re going to need more information.
Another thing a lot of small businesses don’t need is a professionally designed website.
And I know, I know – if you work in web-based marketing, this sounds like high heresy. But hear me out.
Most people who search for a business or category never get past the search engine or AI tool where they first search for information.
In fact, the phenomenon is so common it has a name – zero click searches.
You know how when you search for something in Google, you’ll get a bunch of little windows that pop up with information cards, AI results and info boxes? Those are what people tend to click on.
It gets even more complicated when those consumers are relying on voice search, in-app searches in social media, shopping aggregators or Google Maps itself.
And the reviews they read about your business, or the hours they see or the contact information they use? Most often, they’re the information Google provides in those summary cards.
A recent report from Bain & Company estimates that 80% of consumers rely on zero-click searches at least 40% of the time.
Many never make it past the first page of the Search Engine Results Page, and increasingly, they’re not even looking at the links themselves – just the summaries.
In an environment like this, having a professionally-designed website isn’t nearly as important as having a functional one.
And there are many tools out there that help small and mid-sized businesses create websites that get the job done, even if the end result isn’t quite as creative or interesting as working with a professional designer.
You might presume that ecommerce would be an exception, and it is to some degree.
But few businesses write their own ecommerce software anymore – most are using existing white label platforms that have third party engineers and support teams working in the background to make the experience better for the business users and the consumers.
Which brings me back to my earlier point. A website that’s functional and easy to use meets the criteria most users have.
And even web-based software platforms, which definitely do require a professional design to be acceptable to the user, still need to focus on functionality far more than they do on design flourishes.
One more area where small businesses can waste a lot of money is in advertising.
There’s a lot of bad advice out there about advertising because there are a lot of people selling it.
You can spend a small fortune on advertising and never see an increase in sales.
You can also spend just a little bit and see a huge return on it.
The key is in having an effective marketing strategy, which needs to happen before any advertising budgets are even discussed.
- Building Brand Awareness
- Targeted Messaging
- Driving Action
- Creating Emotional Connections[SJ1]
For a small business, targeted messaging and driving action tend to be the best purposes for advertising, and that means thinking carefully about how that medium or mode is being used to share messages with your core audience.
In 2026, targeting the right buyers is a viable and fairly straightforward strategy.
In the old days, if you wanted to reach consumers, you had to use targeted mailers or telemarketing campaigns that relied on very inexact demographic information or past purchases.
But nowadays, there are all sorts of tools and methods that can be used to reach people based on their interests and general purchase behavior.
And the most reliable source of business is often not new customers, but people who either have purchased from you before or who have explored a purchase.
Again, it’s about strategy, not spending. And small business owners get that, because we’re used to doing things inexpensively where we can and putting our limited resources into things that really matter to our customers.
Like personal service.
Longevity.
Expertise.
A connection to the local community.
And the resilience to hang in there even when things are tough and the going gets rough.
Because if those big brands are like trees in a park, we small businesses are like the blades of grass around them. And when a tree is struggling in the high winds, it might lose some branches or even get uprooted from the soil, sure.
But those blades of grass are going to endure and keep the soil healthy so that trees can continue to grow there.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway! See ya next time!
Leave a Reply