According to the MetLife and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index, in the second quarter of this year small businesses’ concern over inflation remained at a record high. With inflation keeping costs high, and high interest rates, smart business owners are asking themselves how to weather the storm.
Here are three things small business owners can do now to navigate the changing economic landscape.
The best way to tackle the challenges your business faces is to know your business numbers — but how can you do that when finance feels like a foreign language?
Think of your financial data as a story, with historical financials telling you where you’ve already been, KPIs showing you where you are today, and the budget/projections describing what you think will happen next. Up-to-date financial statements help you understand profitability and cash flow, while keeping you ready to negotiate extensions or new financing with lenders or investors.
Having a few essential KPIs, like the number of conversations it takes to get a “yes” from a client, or the time it takes for a supplier to confirm your PO, gives you an early warning about any changes coming your way with enough time to adjust course.
Frequent comparisons of your budget/ projection to your actual performance helps you identify where your thinking was on target and where it might have missed the mark. Clarity around the assumptions you made that didn’t work out gives you a great place to start in order to adapt your business plan to changing market conditions.
One of the easiest ways to navigate high inflation, tight labor markets, and wonky supply chains is to confirm that every product or service you sell makes a profit — and identify what needs to change for any that don’t.
Calculate your unit economics — the average revenue and costs for every product, cart, project, or customer — so you know the average gross margin and net profit across all products. Then, compare each of your products
or services to that average so you can decide which offerings you need to adjust or cut out altogether.
For example, one of my clients that resells goods changed their pricing from a fixed price schedule to a fixed discount on manufacturer suggested retail price so that any price increases from their vendors would be passed to their clients, and their gross margin would remain stable despite rising costs.
3. Remember that inflation doesn’t just impact your business
Inflation hits each business owner differently, so a quick analysis of the following areas can help you identify the potential impact:
• Market realities: How long can you absorb increasing costs while delivering a quality product/service before you need to raise prices?
• Your business financing: Do you have any variable rate financing agreements? Will you need to secure additional financing within the next 18-24 months?
• Your personal financial situation: Do you have personal obligations that may increase with inflation, such as credit card debt or a variable rate mortgage? As you prepare for potential business slowdowns, think through how your personal and business finances work together and depend on each other.
Tackling any one of these topics will not only improve the resilience of your business during challenging economic conditions but will also make you less dependent on outside capital as those markets continue to tighten.
Knowing your economic story and the specific challenges for your business will help you navigate the uncertainty that will affect most every entrepreneur in the coming months. Most importantly, becoming the expert about what’s working (and what isn’t) in your business helps you stay nimble and build your own confidence in each decision you make.
include employees’ kids is key in order to help avoid high, unplanned healthcare costs including emergency room visits, and school absence.
According to the CDC, dental cavities are among the most common chronic diseases in children, and kids miss about 34 million hours of school due to unexpected dental complications. But employees should routinely bring their kids to the dentist for reasons that go beyond cavities as well, since dentists are able to recognize dietary-related problems that can lead to childhood obesity and even diabetes.
A lack of dental and vision care can affect overall employee well-being. And companies, both large and small, also feel the impact with lowered productivity levels — as well as negative effects on employee retention and attendance.
Just consider this alarming statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “More than $45 billion in productivity is lost each year as a result of dental emergencies requiring unplanned care.” Meanwhile, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) indicates that “every day about 2,000 U.S. workers sustain job-related eye injuries that require medical treatment.”
Those are big numbers. What’s more, prospective employees are becoming acutely aware of the importance of dental and vision care in their lives — so much so that it can influence their job-search decisions. A 2021 survey by the payroll-services company Paychex showed 62% of respondents agreeing “that employee well-being support and benefits are a top priority when applying for or considering their next job.”
The medical community is emphasizing the significance of regular, preventive visits to dentists and optometrists — and how our mouths, teeth, and eyes can reveal many potential health problems
(from diabetes and cancer to cardiovascular disease).
“Maintaining preventive care can help combat these concerning issues, leading to a healthier and more productive workplace and lifestyle,” said Dr. Dean Fry, the chief dental officer at Humana, a national insurer that provides innovative dental and vision plans.
A former firefighter for the Town of Davie, Florida, experienced this firsthand when a dentist helped save his life after he’d attended a wellness lunch-and-learn event. There, the dentist noticed a concerning health issue after doing an oral screening on-site.
Post-event, during a follow-up visit, the firefighter found out he had an early stage of cancer. But thanks to this preventive screening, he was able to get the care he needed and eventually retired cancer-free. The Town of Davie’s HR department never forgot this particular case and continues to emphasize holisticbenefits education.
Medical providers continue to underscore the need for children to receive preventive care, along with dental and vision check-ups. Access to employer-provided benefits that
Vision care is also critical for kids since issues with the eyes can affect childhood development, learning abilities, and possible setbacks when they become working adults if left undiagnosed. For instance, a 2023 meta-analysis by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health concluded that myopia is a global problem that can affect overall quality of life and work productivity. And its progression can be “associated with prolonged near work and less time spent performing sports and outdoor activities.” Its onset is becoming more prevalent during childhood, with kids currently having immediate access to smartphones, tablets, and computers.
Offering dental and vision benefits can be critical to success of a business
Prioritizing dental and vision benefits is a win-win for companies and their employees. With these benefits, companies experience less absenteeism, have more engaged professionals, and help their employees manage their work-life balance.
“We offer innovative and flexible plan designs to ensure our members receive convenient access to dental and vision care,” Dr. Fry said. “From teledentistry for all ages to mobile dental clinics available right at the workplace, we help members get the care they need when and where they need it.”
Written by Omar Sommereyns
In our online economy, digital advertising and marketing have become critical to forging connections, not just commercial but also personal. The pandemic drove this point home, as digital advertising and marketing, including targeted ads, email, social media, websites, and e-commerce platforms, helped many small businesses survive.
I’m a Phoenix, Arizona, digital marketing and advertising consultant, a small business owner myself, who assists other small business owners to reach deeper into local markets, expand geographically, and make more sales.
Many of my clients wouldn’t be able to advertise at all without digital advertising. Print, radio, and TV are too expensive, not to mention inefficient. Using anonymous, aggregated data available on social media, search, and other platforms, my clients have increased revenue by as much as 40%.
Unlike traditional advertising, digital advertising, which leads customers directly to the point of sale, enables us to gauge results and make improvements. At no time in history have such large audiences, media platforms, market research, and creative tools been available to any start-up, entrepreneur, or momand-pop shop.
Some of my clients spend just a few hundred dollars. Sitting on the Advisory Council of Internet for Growth, a nationwide small
business coalition advocating for digital advertising, I’ve met small business owners who spend nothing at all to build organic audiences on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and improve their bottom lines. Of course, a good product and personality help.
Not only is interactive, digital advertising more cost-effective than the traditional kind, but it can also be more authentic, an avenue for unique products, points of view, and instant feedback. The value to the average consumer or internet surfer is immense.
Internet for Growth includes web publishers and content creators — everyone from food bloggers to game developers — able to offer their content for free, thanks to digital advertising revenue. A study by two M.I.T. researchers shows the average American receives almost $30,000 of free, ad-supported news, entertainment, email, navigation, and more each year.
Other research shows most Americans appreciate the personalization and convenience of targeted digital advertising. The more personalized and convenient an ad for your favorite restaurant or band on your favorite streaming program is, for example, the more valuable it is to both buyer and seller.
Just as innovation and opportunities are increasing, however, digital advertising is under attack in Washington, D.C., where legislation and regulation to punish a few big tech companies could have
everyone.
Congress and federal agencies have introduced a slew of bills and proposed regulations to restrict or eliminate data-driven, relevant advertising. Our members support a national data privacy bill to simplify a complicated patchwork of state laws, but the one Congress recently considered would preserve state laws, potentially outlaw publicly available information, and expose small businesses to fines and lawsuits. Costs to the U.S. economy could be severe.
Another piece of legislation would break up integrated advertising services that finally solved the problem of too many opportunities for small businesses, making ad-buying and selling on countless websites easy. Based on the idea that digital advertising is “unfair” and “deceptive,” other bills and rules are worse.
The Federal Trade Commission recently described the entire internet as “commercial surveillance.” Over a thousand members of Internet for Growth can attest to the power of the free-and-open internet and digital advertising to transform lives, but both parties in Washington appear fixated on reversing progress. Is it because ordinary people now have access to marketing and media channels previously accessible to only the most powerful institutions? Our coalition is fighting to protect digital advertising tools that have leveled the playing field for small business owners of every background and industry.
cost to the customer), Zappos became incredibly popular.
The company went from bankruptcy to being sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion seven years later, all because they had the right offer.
The mantra for success is simple: Do more for others than anyone else will. Exceed their expectations. Add more value.
Don’t make the same fatal mistake that I see so many entrepreneurs make. They fall in love with their product or service when they need to fall in love with their customers. If you get caught up loving your product or service, you’ll develop loyalty to that instead of loyalty to your clients.
what
When did you first learn you had a passion and talent for inspiring others?
I grew up in a tough environment. I had four different fathers and I remember telling my very strong-willed mother, “Mom, I’m confused. Why do I have four fathers?”
I had to become a practical psychologist. It was how I navigated the unstable shifts in my upbringing.
I became obsessed with understanding what makes the difference in people. Why did none of my four fathers ever find success or fulfillment in life? Why are there some people who have everything and fail, or can’t fight their way out of a paper bag? And yet others, whom life has given incredible amounts of adversity, go on to defy the odds and inspire us the most?
I discovered there are patterns. Patterns that make people happy, sad, successful, failed, fulfilled, and frustrated. By tapping into these patterns, first within myself, and transforming my own life, I had the power to transfer this to others.
What is your top advice for new and aspiring business owners?
I’ll give you three keys that any business owner needs to tap into when starting a new business:
1. Know your ideal client
It doesn’t matter what industry you get into; you have to know your ideal client. You have to know more about the customer than they know about themselves. You have to dig in and find out what they want, what they need, what they hate, what they fear, and what excites them. I’ve always said that life is the dance between what you desire most and what you fear most.
2. Create an irresistible offer
Next you need to create an irresistible offer. Something so enticing that your ideal client would feel foolish not to act on. In the instance of Zappos, they offered free shipping on shoes and free return shipping for any shoes that did not fit. People thought they were crazy!
At the time, trying on shoes at home vs. in-store was a novel idea, but because of this newly offered convenience (and at no additional
And if you’re wanting concrete skills to scale your business idea, I have a five-day immersive business program called Business Mastery where we help entrepreneurs discover the surprising factors that are holding them back in their business, create a monumental vision for their business, and develop actionable tools to grow their business.
What would you say to someone thinking about starting their own business to get them to make that leap of faith?
Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. If you want a comfortable life, you won’t have success or passion. “Comfortable” never started companies, took investment risks, or created any meaningful progress.
Push past fear — turn fear on itself. What scares you more? Being uncomfortable, or settling for a life that’s less than you desire or deserve?
The only way to get through is faith over fear. It doesn’t necessarily have to be faith in a religious sense, but that deep knowing that you’re made for something more.
Swapping out an outdated legacy point-of-sale solution sounds intimidating. But the benefits of a modern, cloud-based unified POS and payments platform can’t be ignored.
The world is enduring a period of economic uncertainty — 85% of U.S. small businesses are concerned about a looming recession, according to the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council. One source of stress for retailers in this environment is older, legacy point-of-sale (POS) offerings that are increasingly outdated.
“There are a ton of pain points with legacy POS solutions,” noted Ana Wight, general manager of Retail at Lightspeed, a unified POS and payments platform. “You just don’t have the sophistication of tools that really matter now for a small business trying to be successful.”
which can have a huge impact on the bottom line, considering retail shrinkage averages about 1.5% of sales.
Modern unified POS and payments offerings like Lightspeed Retail make it easier to have an accurate view of inventory across multiple locations — the warehouse, online, and your social channels. “Before Lightspeed, we would call the shop every 10 or 15 minutes to find out stock levels and sales figures for products,” noted Lightspeed Retail user Yaw Djang, co-founder of homewares retailer Oklahoma. “We’re saving tons of time.”
Djang is not alone — in a recent survey conducted by Lightspeed, 68% of retailers said that adopting new
recently added NuORDER by Lightspeed, a leading B2B ordering platform that allows retailers to easily add inventory at the point of sale. This makes the discovery of new brands and suppliers much easier without leaving the unified POS and payments solution.
The instinct to avoid a new expense by sticking with an existing, old-school POS solution to avoid short-term upgrade costs is a mistake. A modern unified POS and payments offering can help streamline your business and offer robust inventory tools,
technologies, including inventory management tools, had resulted in a positive impact on their businesses.
The extensibility of POS offerings is a key predictor of how well they will adapt to the always-evolving retail market.
For example, Lightspeed
The impact is easy to see. “This tool is absolutely revolutionary, with the ability to import all items from a purchase order into Lightspeed with nothing more than a click of a button,” said Daniel Greenhalgh, president of Skinny Raven Sports. “The import is rich, with pictures and description. The only work that remains is to put it into categories. A massive time saver.”
The extensibility of modern unified POS and payments offerings is only going to become
The biggest barrier to change is the fear of change.
more important over time; retail technology continues to evolve rapidly, and features like autonomous stores, click-andcollect and buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) tools, more selfservice options, and “endless aisle”- type experiences will soon be expected aspects of the shopping experience. A flexible and customizable solution is essential.
Embedded payments and branding
The ability to embed payments into the commerce platform itself is another essential feature of a modern unified POS and payments platform. “When you embed your payments with your commerce platform, you take out a lot of manual steps, a lot of errors,” Wight explained. “There’s that basic, time-saving accuracy,
and there’s also a ton more you can do in terms of reporting, insights, and analytics.”
Those capabilities are crucial because connecting with your customers is an increasingly complex challenge. Customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience, and businesses have to find ways to meet their customers where they are: at a physical store, on social media channels, or on an app or website. It’s also an opportunity to drive branding, customer loyalty, and retention.
This is especially important in the modern retail environment where shoppers are aggressively comparing prices across platforms — 45% of consumers have switched to cheaper alternatives, and 44% seek out coupons and
promotional codes more often. And retail shoppers will usually only wait about 5-10 minutes before abandoning a purchase, which makes having embedded payments and lightning-fast inventory tools essential.
Making the leap
Wight understands why some business owners still hesitate. “The biggest barrier to change is the fear of change,” she said.
But those legacy POS solutions are increasingly untenable due to expense and the difficulty of using and maintaining them. For example, it takes about 40 hours to learn a legacy POS offering, time that could be better spent actually selling your stock. A more intuitive interface can also make it easier to train even seasonal or temporary workers.
Wight advised that the best thing a business can do when choosing to upgrade its platform is to choose a partner wisely. “It’s hard to make a change and swap out a solution,” she said. “But here at Lightspeed, for example, we’ve really worked hard to make this an easy switch.”
That includes an onboarding team for the initial setup, account managers who guide the business through the process, and access to a 24/7 customer support team.
For her part, Wight is bullish on the future of unified POS and payments platforms like Lightspeed Retail. “Over time,” she predicts, “we’ll see consumers understand there’s a certain type of retailer or restaurant that uses a certain type of point of sale. There will be a sort of halo effect or brand association of like, ‘Oh, I recognize this interaction with the cashier. And I know that I’m in a store that’s gonna offer me a great experience with great products.’”
Written by Jeff Somers
