6 Ways to Support Small Businesses

Here are 6 Ways to Support Small Businesses (from a pandemic-era entrepreneur)

How can you support small businesses in your life? Whether it’s your favorite coffee shop down the road, your friend’s handcrafted wooden sign shop, or the cute Airbnb you staycation-ed in, small businesses are the backbone of our economy and our community.

Small businesses (under 100 employees) make up around 98% of total businesses in Canada, and they employ about 64% of Canada’s workforce.

They are owned by our neighbors, our friends and our families, our old coworkers who ditched the corporate world to follow their dreams. They create jobs, they put money back into the local economy, and they care about their communities.

Small businesses have their fair share of challenges, from rising costs of goods and labor (thanks inflation!), the pandemic and other natural disasters, and of course, large online retailers offering extremely low prices and same day delivery (often by exploiting labor and the environment).

How can you support small businesses? Here is a list of ideas, some free, and some not.

6 Ways to Support Small Businesses:

Spend Other People’s Money

Does your employer need to order in lunch for a work meeting? Suggest ordering from your favorite local restaurant. Additional tip: Call in and order pickup instead of using a food delivery app, which passes their costs onto the restaurant and gouges their profits.

Is your manager looking for gifts for Administrative Professionals Day? Suggest gift cards to your friend’s boutique!

Is your mother-in-law insisting on organizing your baby shower? Now is a great time to convince her to splurge on those bougie cupcakes from your aunt’s home-based baking business that is out of your budget.

Supporting small businesses without having to spend your own money? It’s a win/win for this broke millennial.

Social Media

Like, share, and save their posts on social media. Comment. Engaging in any way helps their posts gain traction and allows more people to see it. More views = more potential customers reached.

Tag friends in their posts.

Take and share your own photos on social media and tag them in it, allowing them to repost your user-generated content.

If you see someone looking for recommendations online, mention your favorite small business!

Leave a Review

Leave reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Facebook, as applicable. Reviews encourage new customers to try a business for the first time by building trust and rapport with the company.

Be honest, but also be kind. If you had a less than stellar interaction, address it directly with the business first.

If you had a great experience, DM the small business! Give them permission to share your kind words with their followers.

Gift it!

Purchase products or gift cards from your local small businesses as gifts. This way, you can share your favorite small businesses with other like-minded folks. Chances are, if you think it’s great, others in your life will as well!

Think ahead to occasions coming up, and be deliberate in purchasing gifts for birthdays, Christmas, Valentines day, etc.

Some pre-planning will give you time to find the perfect gift from a local business, instead of last minute ordering a book about trees off Amazon for your hippie sister.

Sharing your favorite small businesses with others is a great way to bring in new customers for that business. They get to try products at no cost to them, and hopefully will become a customer in the future.

Pay With Cash or Debit Card over Credit Cards

That fancy credit card you have that gives you 3% cash back? Those costs are passed directly onto the small business. Amex isn’t coughing up your travel rewards themselves.

Credit card processing fees usually range from 1.5%-3.5%, with premium rewards cards being on the higher end of that range. Add in additional fees like PCI compliance and hardware rentals, and small businesses pay about 2.5-5% on every transaction.

Cash is king, debit is a close second. Debit cards are usually a flat fee of 10 cents so it’s much lower than a credit card.

It’s not always a feasible option to pay with cash or debit, but I personally try to save my credit card usage for the big guys.

Rep Their Merch

If they have hats, shirts, stickers, water bottles, whatever, buy it and rock it!

We had merch at our first restaurant, and nothing would make my heart swell so much as when I saw someone walking around in one of our shirts. It’s free advertising for your favorite small businesses, plus you never know who will strike up a conversation about your hat and end up being a new customer.

Honorable Mention: Don’t Ask for Friend and Family Discounts

I was so confused the first time a friend of mine refused a discount from me. It’s become so commonplace that I didn’t think twice about offering a 10% “friends and family” discount. She adamantly insisted that her meal was worth that price and she was specifically there to support my business. Of course she was paying full price, why wouldn’t she? It changed my way of thinking from then on.

In food service industries, like your favorite restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks, profit margins are usually about 5-10%. That means that after they pay for the ingredients, the labor to prepare the food, their utilities and rent and repairs and maintenance and the aforementioned credit card fees, your $100 meal has made them a profit of $5-10.

With enough volume, it becomes financially successful. But every discount given out will shrink that profit margin.

Don’t ask for discounts from your local small businesses. Support them and pay them what they are asking, because chances are a lot of thought went into their pricing model.

If they offer a discount, and it is within your financial means to refuse it, do so.

Save This List:

Go Forth and Support Small Businesses!

Drop me a comment below if any of these resonated with you, or if you have any more tips and advice to support small businesses in your community.