But the past two years have been especially challenging for small business owners and their employees: the global pandemic and the many ways it has impacted their professional and personal lives. And more.

Yet even during the earliest days of the pandemic — and its continuing challenges– we began also to hear small business stories of optimism.

Stories with words like:..

Opportunity.

Resilience.

Pivoting.

Growth.

To small business owners, employees, suppliers and customers, we thank you.

Thank you for the inspiration you provide us all.

Happiest of holidays and best wishes for a wonderful new years.

SmallBusiness.com will be back on January 4, 2022.

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U.S. consumers are expected to spend more than $20.1 billion on gifts and other items for Father’s Day (Sunday, June 20, 2021). The amount is a record high according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey conducted by Prosper Insight & Analytics.

“Americans are looking forward to celebrating their fathers, husbands, and sons this Father’s Day. With our nation now making significant strides toward recovery and reopening, retailers are prepared to help customers safely find items they want and need to make this year’s holiday celebration extra meaningful.”

NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay

75% | The percentage of those surveyed who plan to celebrate Father’s Day.

50% | Plan to buy gifts for their dad
26% | Plan to buy a gift for a husband
11% | Plan to buy a gift for a son

Consumers plan to spend a little more on celebrating their dads this year, over last’s.

$174 | Survey respondents indicate they plan to spend an average of $174 on Father’s Day items ($26 more than last year and a record high for the survey).

The ages 35-44 will be this year’s biggest holiday spenders. This age group plans to spend an average of $259 on Father’s Day gifts, which is $49 more than last year.

What those active shoppers are planning to give their dads this year.

59% | Greeting cards
49% | Clothing
46% | A special outing
45% | Gift cards
28% | Personal care items

Where gifts are being purchased this year

40% | Online
33% | Department stores
22% | Specialty stores

The top items being purchased for Fathers Day

59% | Greeting cards
49% | Clothing
28% | Personal care items

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Small business owners are receiving wonderful endorsements and appreciation this morning.

Why? Well, one reason is, “you deserve it.”

Another reason is that this week is National Small Business Week.

Sort of.

If you take a look at the SBA website (from May 3 to 5, 2012) you won’t find any mention of National Small Business Week.

But there are many places where you will find references to the week.

Why?

One critical reason may be that SBA staffers are busy managing the application process for the PPP loan.

Some cities, like San Francisco, have shifted to virtual events.

And here are more reasons for small businesses to celebrate:

According to the Union Bank California Small Business Mid-Year Mindshift 2021 Survey, the top four COVID-19-related areas small business owners invested in were personal protective equipment (58 percent), cleaning and sanitization services (54 percent), marketing and advertising (45 percent) and e-commerce (41 percent).

“California small business owners were hit especially hard and adapted to complex restrictions for longer periods of time than those in other states,” said Todd Hollander, Head of Business Banking and Small Business Banking at Union Bank. “But despite the challenges, many small businesses remained resilient and optimistic for the future.”

And that’s why there are many, many #SmallBusiness #SmallBusinesWeek tweets wishing happy small business week to one another.

Which is all great.

So, let’s celebrate Small Business Week.

And be hopeful for those who are staying resilient and optimistic for the future.

#SmallBusinessWeek #SmallBusiness

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(Note: Updated April 2, 2019) Disasters can be massive for small businesses; impacting an entire region of the country. Or they can be isolated to one small business and its employees and customers becoming the victims of disasters like cybercrime or fire or an unanticipated death with no succession plan in place.

Here are just a few of the free resources you’ll find in the SmallBusiness.com Guide to Disaster Planning and Recovery.

We encourage you to bookmark it before you need it.

1. It’s Time to Prepare for the Natural Disaster Targeting Your Business
2. An Extreme Weather Plan is a Life or Death Small Business Requirement
3. Review These 4 Types of Insurance During Small Business Disaster Planning
4. The FEMA App is a Must-Have Tool For Every Small Business
5. Federal & State Government Emergency and Disaster Relief Resources

Thank you for following the flow of information we share each day via SmallBusiness.com, Twitter (@SmallBusiness), RSS, Facebook, and other channels. However, many of you have told us there are times when you need help on a specific topic at a time that doesn’t sync up with the time we publish a related how-to, tutorial, checklist or advice. For that reason, we created SmallBusiness.com Guides.

What are SmallBusiness.com Guides?

SmallBusiness.com Guides provide an alternative way to access and go deeper into the helpful topics you find on SmallBusiness.com; a way to find the help you need, when you need it, not when we publish it.

You can find our growing library of SmallBusiness.com Guides by hovering over the “Guides” tab on any page.

Where can you find a SmallBusiness.com Guide on a specific topic?

On a computer: Use your cursor to hover over the “Guides” tab. Hovering over the category. will reveal guides related to that topic. (see below)

On a mobile device: Tap on the menu icon and scroll down the guides listed alphabetically.

SmallBusiness.com Guides (By Category)

BANKING | MONEY | FINANCE | TAXES

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Alternative Funding
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Payment Systems
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Taxes
SmallBusiness.com Guide to The On-demand Economy
SmallBusiness.com Guide to U.S. Exporting and Trade

CHECKLISTS

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Business Checklists

GETTING ORGANIZED | MOTIVATION | INSPIRATION

LEGAL | COPYRIGHT 

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Creative Commons and Open Source
SmallBusiness.com Guide to U.S. Exporting and Trade

MARKETING | ADVERTISING | SALES

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Great Local Holiday Shopping
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Influencer Marketing
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Managing a Listing on Google Search and Maps
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Marketing to Small Business Decision Makers
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Marketing With Photos
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Mastering the Whiteboard
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Using Video for Marketing
SmallBusiness.com Guide to U.S. Exporting and Trade
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Website Basics

OPERATIONS | EMPLOYEES

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Co-Working Office Sharing Space
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Human Resources & Staffing
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Office Design and Furniture

PRIVACY | SECURITY | RISK

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Business Computer and Tech Security
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Disaster Planning and Recovery

RESOURCES

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Resources for Small Business Owners
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Resources for Military Veterans

STARTING A BUSINESS

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Starting a Business
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Starting a Blog (Sponsored)
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Website Basics

TECHNOLOGY 

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Computer and Tech Security
SmallBusiness.com Guide to High Speed Internet Access
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Starting a Blog (Sponsored)
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Website Basics

TRAVEL

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Business Travel

MISC

SmallBusiness.com Guide to Small Business in History
SmallBusiness.com Guide to Halloween

istock

Thanks to the Internet Archive Way Back Machine, you can see what the home page of SmallBusiness.com (in the hip-lower-case lettering of internet 1.0) looked like in 2001.

(Click on the image to view the Way Back Machine’s archive version.)

A brief history of SmallBusiness.com

By Rex Hammock

Since its founding in 1991, Hammock Inc. (Hammock.com), the company that created and manages SmallBusiness.com, has developed customer media and content programs  for clients who market products and services to small business owners and managers. While in those early days, we were best known for publishing magazines for such national clients as NFIB, we also were developing digital media for small business audiences  since the days of Compuserve.

Such early digital work for clients like Northern Telecom and First Data Corp led me to register the smallbusiness.com domain name in 1995.

From 1999–2001, a small team from Hammock joined a group of talented developers and online community managers to start SmallBusiness.com. It featured peer-to-peer advice from many people who are today’s best-known small business bloggers and influencers.

That community grew to more than 100,000 registered members, with advice contributed by thousands of them.

Unfortunately, the company called SmallBusiness.com did not weather the “dot.com bust” and was closed in 2001. It was awful and despite what I and others write when trying to explain how opportunity works, failure sucks.

Despite the failure of the business, that company spawned many successes.

People who worked at the pre-2001 SmallBusiness.com have gone on to start and sell businesses to such companies as Intuit and PayPal. Others have started such Nashville-based technology firms as Emma, the email marketing company. And others have played key roles in leading and growing Nasvhille healthcare companies like HealthStream.

While the company SmallBusiness.com closed in 2001, the content created by that small business community served as the DNA content used to create an early version of what is today the SmallBusiness.com Wiki (SmallBusiness.com/WIKI) in 2005, a user-created resource with close to 30,000 pages of information today.

Back to the Future

During the summer of 2013, a team from Hammock began adding the types of content you now see. (But the Wiki is still here, also.) Our focus is on helpful how-to and explanatory content that is designed for optimal display on the smallest screen a small business owner is using at the time he or she needs an answer or to fill a gap in knowledge.

Hammock’s business is creating and managing media and content-rich sites like this for marketers who serve audiences of big companies and small. (And we still publish incredibly powerful print media that people love. They are called magazines; maybe you’ve heard of them.)

SmallBusiness.com serves as a great lab for us to discover what works, and what doesn’t, while serving a community we belong to and respect.

While I find the past and future interesting, my favorite time is now.

I don’t need a hover board when I have today.

People often ask us if we accept guest posts for SmallBusiness.com. While we don’t accept guest posts, we accept something a lot more valuable to you and our other users: Your wisdom, your experience, your know-how and the helpful advice you can provide the users of SmallBusiness.com.

Keep reading or go straight to our suggestions and guidelines for submitting
content you believe will help the users of SmallBusiness.com.

Our users are looking for your wisdom. Maybe not your guest post, but your wisdom.

Each and every day, we receive emails asking, “Will you accept this guest post?” The answer is rarely yes. Not because we don’t accept guest posts, but because we follow the suggestions of Google and steer clear of guest posts that even seems like a part of any attempt to outfox the algorithms of Google.

OK, OK. We realize that your guest post isn’t the “spam” kind. But those other guys and their spammy guest posts ruined it for the rest of us.

Fortunately, we have a way for you to share your wisdom with the users of SmallBusiness.com that is better than your posts. It’s your how-tos, your observations, your suggestions … your wisdom.

We’ve created a page of advice and help that will provide you with some insight into who our users are and the types of information they seek. Review it and you’ll find ideas for things to share with us that are more beneficial to the users of SmallBusiness.com.

With the desire to replicate the retailing success of the post-U.S. Thanksgiving Day sale that’s come to be known as “Black Friday,” big box retailers have launched a series of competitive Black Friday in July promotions, including:

• Today: Amazon’s Prime Day, “a blowout sale bigger than Black Friday,” the company claims.
• Walmart.com’s response: a “rollback” of prices on items in categories including electronics, home, baby and toys.
• Target’s “Black Friday in July” sale has been around since 2010
• Best Buy has a “Black Friday” sale, July 24-25

Small Merchants Should Respond

Much like political candidates in a heated campaign, big-box retailers are quick to respond to the promotional moves of their competitors. Even if July isn’t a holiday gift-giving season, national and online retailers are always looking for a way to create a reason for consumers to, well, consume.

If big boxes are looking for a mid-July reason to get shoppers in the stores to clear the shelves before the big back-to-school push, then small merchants should join in. American shoppers would welcome it.

#SmallBusinessSummerSaturday: A DIY Pop-up Promotion

November’s Small Business Saturday has been a success due to the massive promotional investment of American Express.* While that company has benefited from increasing the number of small merchants that accept the card in their stores, the promotion has grown in ways that make it about more than American Express (like Thanksgiving has grown past the Macy’s Parade) and has become a great reminder to shoppers to remember small and local businesses among all of the hype about Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

As corporate sponsors for Small Business Saturday are already deep into planning for this year’s event (and we are fans of their efforts), a Summer Small Business Saturday needs to be 100 percent grassroots. Especially this year, when it’s more like a “pop up” event than a planned promotion.

A pop-up hashtag event: #SmallBusinessSummerSaturday

Pick your date. (The third Saturday in July? Sounds good to us.)

Declare it. Promote it. Do it yourself.

Hashtag it.

(Drag off this logo and use it if you want.)

*Small Business Saturday is a registered trademark of American Express. We support and applaud the efforts of Small Business Saturday, but in no way are affiliated with that event (except as fans).

A U.S. Thanksgiving Day message from Rex Hammock, founder and “head helper” of SmallBusiness.com.*

In his book The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how the internet has created a shift in the way businesses are expected to behave—one that evokes an earlier age when customer and seller knew each other by name.

In this new era, the word thanks isn’t merely a clichéd coda to a business transaction. Gratitude is now the necessary mortar for cementing relationships in which buyer and seller are bound by mutual trust and respect.

Of course, the word thanks is not merely a powerful marketing word. Scientists are discovering that living with a sense of gratitude is connected to a wide array of physical and emotional benefits.

Each November, as Americans commemorate the prayerful thanksgiving of our country’s first European settlers, we hope you will join us in celebrating a holiday focused on an even higher role of gratitude in our lives beyond the businesses we run.

In her book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott writes about this kind of thanks: “Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides … When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.”

Happy Thanksgiving. And thank you for your support of SmallBusiness.com throughout the year.

Rex Hammock
Founder, Head Helper
SmallBusiness.com

*This message also appeared in Idea-Email, a free bi-weekly service of Hammock Inc., the customer media and content company that brings you SmallBusiness.com.