Small Business Resources

Last week I came across a new business in my town. It’s a small, organic, family-owned grocery store and deli. I’ve seen them trying to open for the past year. I happened to be passing by and was surprised to see that there were lights on inside. When I went in, the owners were milling about, ready to help me with anything I needed.

When I got home I looked them up on the internet and saw that Facebook had them listed as “temporarily closed” and they didn’t have a website. I messaged them to let them know about their Facebook status and the owner replied, “I had no idea, I can’t see what you see. Thanks!” He fixed the issue and hopefully it will help him get some foot traffic.

It got me thinking about what it takes to open a small business and the available resources. Having done this myself I can say with confidence I had no idea what I was doing and zero clue about the resources available to me. So I asked our slack community what resources they knew of and as always, they came through. Here’s what they offered:

SCORE

SCORE, the nation’s largest network of volunteer, expert business mentors, is dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground, grow and achieve their goals. Since 1964, we have provided education and mentorship to more than 11 million entrepreneurs.

Small Business Association 

Created in 1953, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) continues to help small business owners and entrepreneurs pursue the American dream. SBA is the only cabinet-level federal agency fully dedicated to small businesses and provides counseling, capital, and contracting expertise as the nation’s only go-to resource and voice for small businesses.

Hubspot (courses)

The set of free Hubspot courses covers topics like advertising, blogging, branding, lead generation, and SEO – to name a few.

Meltwater (courses)

Meltwater offers free online courses that will teach you about social media, social listening, influencer marketing, and more.

Growth Mentor

Growth Mentor will help pair you 1:1 with an accomplished growth marketing and startup mentor to assist you in building your business and offer support.

Google Primer

Primer is a free, fast, and easy way to learn new business and digital marketing skills. Primer works offline too, so you can take a lesson on business planning, management, sales, digital advertising, social media, content marketing, SEO, analytics, branding, and more whenever you have 5 minutes free – anytime, anywhere.

Online Communities

Communities like Slack, Discord, Twitter, and other social media can be invaluable for connecting with other small business owners who have been where you are. You can ask questions, learn from what others have done, share your knowledge as well.

In addition to these resources, I learned that a lot of agencies will help a small business get set up for free. You just have to ask!

Do you know a small business that could use these resources? Please share!

As the holidays are fast approaching, consider shopping from a small business. They will certainly appreciate your support!

What resources would you add to the list? Let me know in our Free Slack group Analytics for Marketers

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.