| They clean your clothes, fix your furnace, detail your car, mow your lawn, pamper your pet, make handmade gifts, grow local lettuce, cook hash browns just the way you like and are steadfast supporters of hundreds of your local community activities.
These are your local independent business owners, accounting for sixty percent of all retail sales in America.
Without them, you’d be doing all your shopping in malls, never getting a chance to step into and sniff that local bakery or donut shop; you’d miss out on that blue plate special, five minutes of good local gossip or find out when that big pothole down the street is going to be fixed.
You read newspapers, trade journals, wander the facing after facing of business magazine covers in Barnes and Noble and you would think all business is e-centered, that Web 2.0 is universally spoken, that web commerce, click throughs and social networking sites are all there is.
We interrupt this frenzy of technology and reinvention to remind you there are still millions of independent business owners out there, making up the majority of jobs, fueling the local economies, volunteering at their local food bank, leading a scout troop or after school finger painting class. And offering you first class merchandise, often made in America, sometimes made by hand. They hire our sons and daughters and their business and volunteer networks truly get things done in our communities.
This is our domain… we work every day with independent business owners, local non-profit agency directors. We travel from big city to small town, crossroad villages and urban neighborhoods and we learn new business lessons every day. This is a long way from the front cover of a business magazine and MBA’s may not flourish here, web commerce still far in the future, where hand shakes and giving your word still do matter. Micro enterprises flourish here and this economic garden nurtures and grows our future businesses.
We’ve now guided 2,000 business owners and non profit agency directors through our 90 Minute Branding and Marketing Plan workshops, conducted in large and small towns, in church basements with box coffee, to conference centers with commanding views. We work with them in large and small workshops, in one-to-one consultations and we get to know them well as they write custom marketing action plans for their businesses and organizations.
What we hear from them is the need for simplicity in marketing planning, taking steps that lead to action and sales, improved funding strategies, attracting more volunteers to an organizations. They expect that their advertising will produce results, are impatient with ‘branding’ and positively do not have time to blog. They don’t have patience for business theory, long meetings, mission statements, very much internet marketing or the excessive processing that is endemic in public institutions. They’ve got a business to run and it’s all consuming. They need public support, not more regulation, more customers, not more taxes.
You would not believe how often — how many times each day — they are asked to contribute, donate, offer in-kind, or just plain give cash for all the good civic causes that knock on their doors first. They can’t sponsor every team, donate to every auction, fill every gift basket or take tickets for every event. But somehow, they do.
We hear their confusion over the nearly overwhelming number of media choices, what to do with their advertising dollars; we hear their continuing battles over taxes, regulation, insurance and health care costs and health care costs and health care costs. We share their optimism and honor their entrepreneurism.
This is an appeal to take time to support your local retailers in 2008, shop in their stores, buy their goods and services, go to their craft fairs and farmer’s markets, resolve to make every gift all year a locally made gift. This is an appeal to support your local artisan, musician, writer, poet, sculptor, painter, pottery and bread makers. Take time to support the non-profit organizations who keep your community healthy in so many ways.
These small locally owned business and services truly are an overlooked and under appreciated part of our economy and community. When you go looking for the center of your community, you’ll find them already there, volunteering to wash cars on Saturday for a worthy cause or serve on a board everyone takes for granted.
From business center conference rooms, from sitting across their desks and service counters, from service bay to message table, we see these true heroes of American business. They are in a daily fight to survive and if we are going to honor our pledges to build sustainable local economies, our shopping dollars need to go to them first.
Support your local retailer all year long. Because without these local independent business and store owners, you’ll likely be stuck in a driving rain at the far end of an unlighted parking lot of a big box store on the outskirts of town on a nasty, windy winter night wondering if you will find anyone to wait on you when you finally get inside. (Probably not).
(Editor’s Note: Bill Hoke and Patricia Graf Hoke own Small Business Marketing Partners in Bremerton and offer their 90 Minute Branding and Marketing Plan workshops throughout the US. Patricia conducts a 90 minute workshop for women owned business and a special version for non profit organizations. Reach them at hoke@90minutemarketing.com or visit www.90minutemarketing.com for more information.)
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