Are you participating in Small Business Saturday—or better yet—Small Business Season, where you encourage people to shop small throughout the holiday and not just on the day after Black Friday? If so, you might be scrambling right now trying to put together last-minute touches on what you hope will be a hot time of year for your business.

If you’re wondering how you should spend your hours leading up to Small Business Saturday and what you need for the biggest shopping season of the year, we have a checklist to help.

Small Business Season Checklist

Here are the things you should have (or do) for your small business going into this busy holiday season:

• An offer. This is the first thing you’ll notice about any Black Friday ad.

There is nothing more convenient than whipping out your phone, typing in a URL (or opening an app), perusing offerings, and hitting a few buttons to buy something…anything…everything. We even get our groceries that way these days. But as convenient as online shopping seems, there are several reasons to shop local.

In person is the way to go this Small Business Season. If you can suspend disbelief for a few minutes, we’ll explain why.

Our Favorite Reasons to Shop Local During Small Business Season

Yes, online shopping is convenient. You don’t have to change out of your PJs and it’s always open. But in the t-chart of holiday shopping options, there are a lot of reasons to shop local.

Here are a few of our favorites:

You’re supporting your neighbors.… Read the rest

Are you tired of video calls yet? There was something new and fun about them when we were all locked down for COVID, but now they’ve lost a lot of their sparkle. 

For some of us who work from home, video calls can feel like an unnecessary intrusion where we need to worry about what we look like, what we’re wearing, what our home office looks like, and having to run interference with kids and pets with the possibility of them entering the screen view at any moment. It adds more work and more stress to something that used to be functional communication tool.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can bring back the novelty and enjoyment behind seeing a face and gauging a reaction.… Read the rest