Things Small Businesses Need
This article lists things that small businesses need. It's good as far as it goes.
However, it overlooks one critical need: small businesses need places to do business. This is a huge barrier in municipalities that do not provide suitable locations. So let's look at some possible solutions ...
* Home businesses. This is the low-hanging fruit. It costs literally nothing to acknowledge, allow, and encourage small businesses to function at home.
- This has side benefits like reducing traffic and making it easier for elderly or disabled people to work.
- The key here is small. Most home businesses fit in one room (a corner of the living room, a home office, a porch) or maybe two (an office and a craft room, a lobby and a salon). Occasionally you find things that take up a garage, an attic, or a basement. The effect on neighborhood traffic is negligible because people rarely if ever drive cross-town for these businesses. Either it's online (an eBay vendor, a writer, an artist, etc.) or it's handling only a few customers a day at most. There is neither the space nor the business capacity for more. A successful home business may outgrow that space and need to move elsewhere. Your job as a municipality is to ensure they have somewhere to go, so they don't either die out or start to cause problems.
* The next step is a small storefront in a busier neighborhood. Options include food carts, food trucks, booths at street fairs, small permanent stands, and stalls in an a craft/antique mall or similar. All of these are smaller than the minimum storefront in most modern buildings. An exception is malls, which often have a range of sizes from the giant anchors down to tiny things no bigger than a bedroom, plus the kiosks.
These two are the bottom rungs on the ladder. If you don't enable these and make them easy to find and afford, you will have little or no luck growing your local economy.
Moving up to larger buildings, there are several possibilities.
* Check your local strip malls. Are they full, partly full, or empty? If they're full with a waiting list, you're understocked. Analyze what is needed and find someone to build more of that. If they are full or close to it, you're fine. If they are partly full or empty, troubleshoot.
- You may have small businesses in need of space, but not that kind of space. Find out what they do need. Can you retrofit to meet those needs?
- You may have small businesses in need of just such space, but they can't afford it or access it for some other reason. What can you do to remove those barriers? Since a common problem is space that is too big and thus too expensive, consider subdividing it somehow. This is what drove some places to become basically small business barns: a big building holding many small private stalls selling anything from collectible milk bottles to crocheted doll clothes.
- You may have a shortage of small businesses. You'll need to cultivate them.
* Check your vacant real estate. If you have many lots or buildings standing empty, imagine new uses for them, or make them available to entrepreneurs to do something creative with.
- Empty lots can become pocket parks or community gardens to lift spirits and make the neighborhood nicer (thus more valuable). They can also become farmer's markets or flea markets, generating economic activity. These have a very low cost-of-entry, making them ideal for small businesses.
- Abandoned parking lots can become skate dots. You don't need expensive ramps. You can literally just drop in some concrete benches and solid-cast porch steps and it'll attract the street-style skaters. Another option at modest expense is to make a painted-game playground. A few thousand dollars for stencils and paint will do it, or save money by making your own stencils (or even painting random things so kids will invent their own games) and just buy the paint. A food truck park can make quite a lot of money. It's nice to have picnic tables, toilets, and a place to wash hands but that's not essential. Add the trucks first, and if it proves wildly popular, let it pay for its own improvements. This small business park cleverly combines food trucks with other vendors.
- Large empty buildings are often that way because 1) a big business moved out and/or 2) nobody can afford to rent them. To cultivate small businesses, there are two good options. One is a full-blown business incubator with office equipment, light industrial equipment, mentors, and other assets that members can use. Another is simply subdividing the interior into spaces small enough for your local entrepreneurs to afford. You can do this with non-loadbearing walls to make small offices, or just put up portable racks to make vendor stalls like antique malls do. Have you got an empty restaurant? Make a community kitchen or commercial kitchen rentable by the hour to promote small culinary businesses. Have you got an empty school or motel? These work well for tutors, music teachers, or other lessons. Bundle them together and it's not only more affordable for service providers, it's more convenient for students to have so much opportunity in one place.
* Check the status of food trucks, food carts, and other portable food and beverage vendors. If your town doesn't already encourage these, fix your regulations to do so, because these are valuable.
- These are small, agile, popular, and profitable businesses. The more successful ones may grow to become sit-down restaurants.
- Also, if your town is too small to support many restaurants, food trucks give you more variety because they can travel to locations or events all around your area.
- A food truck park in an area with few or no restaurants can be tremendously valuable. They can sell fresh produce in food deserts.
- Do you have a business park or a large single employer? A rotating set of food trucks or carts in its parking lot (which is usually way bigger than needed) can offer more variety than a cafeteria or vending village.
* Check your fine art galleries and craft stores.
- Do you have at least one community store selling whatever your local creatives make? If not, that's a good place to start. If so, check whether it is overloaded, at or near capacity, or partly empty. If it needs more space, make sure that's available; it might be time to divide, for instance 2D art in a new location and 3D art in the old one. Or maybe they'd like to develop it into a full-service art center with an art supply store, an art gallery, lesson rooms, and rentable studios. If it's under-capacity, see if a smaller storefront might be more affordable.
- What's the representation of women, people of color, the poor, the disabled, and other disadvantaged groups both in the art itself and the artists? Reach out to the underrepresented groups and explore ways to increase their access to venues where they can sell their work. In a large town or small city, there may be enough market to support a women's art gallery or an African craft store, etc. If you boost their ability to do more business, you simultaneously lower poverty and raise your economic activity.
- Does your town have cheap artist space? Artists often struggle to afford living and work space. Some areas have converted old warehouses or factories into loft apartments with studios for this reason. If you have such a place, protect it from encroachment by other interests. If you don't have any, look to see if you have the base buildings to create some. In smaller towns with a low-rise downtown, live-work buildings are an excellent option because the ground floor is usually big enough for a retail area, a mini-office, and an art studio with living space above. Stacked apartments are particularly valuable because an art store with three 1-bedroom apartments above it can hold 3-6 artists; more if those are 2-3 bedroom apartments in a long narrow building. If your downtown has many 2-story buildings, explore whether you could extend some upwards; older buildings are often designed for that.
* Check the status of busking and other entertainment in your town.
- Do you have busk stops, soapbox stages, park amphitheaters, plazas, or other public venues free or cheap for performers to use? While building a venue may require a higher budget, there are signs and stencils which are both affordable and effective. Consider investing in a few portable busk stop shelters to deploy like porta-potties at public events. You can always upgrade facilities to permanent stages if they are popular.
- Are your regulations, if any, busker-friendly? If not, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Liverpool wrote a brilliant guidebook that you can just copy for free and adapt to your local needs.
- Remember that people have a right to work for a living, we all share the public space, buskers boost local economies, and if you give them an acceptable place to perform then they're much less likely to pick somewhere annoying.
- A vibrant performing arts community will attract tourists, who will then spend money at other local businesses. If you see this happening, take steps to capture the flow. Consider a park, plaza, or pedestrian promenade designed for performing arts, surrounded by small local businesses. Chainstores are worse than useless here as they funnel money out of your town.
* Check your downtown and any other dense, walkable areas. You might find a lively cluster near a college, community center, city park, or transit hub for instance.
- If you have two or more of these features, try to connect them with a business street, or a pedestrian promenade with vehicle access in the back. Make sure the two ends, and preferably also the middle, have mass-transit access.
- Do you have any small, freestanding buildings? These used to be common for things like print shops. If you don't have any, consider whether it might be worth adding a few for diversity.
- Do you have any live-work buildings? These have a commercial space like a store, office, or workshop on the ground floor with one or more apartments above.
- If you don't already have some mixed-use zoning, make some of that. Shuttling people from place to place for every little thing just clogs your roads. The more they can do at home or close to home, the less you have to pay for lots of roads.
* Take advantage of seasonality. Some businesses operate only or primarily in certain seasons. If you can pair up two or more who work in different seasons, they can use the same property, it will cost each of them less, and that property will be working more than idle.
- Provide multipurpose food stands. Good combinations include summer ice cream/winter hot soup or summer cold smoothies / winter hot beverages.
- Look for a smallish empty building with a good-sized parking lot. Put the cash register and any fragile merchandise indoors, and the outdoor merchandise in the parking lot. A great combination is spring-summer garden plants / fall Halloween-Thanksgiving decorations / winter Christmas trees and holiday decorations.
* What is the range of sizes in commercial property available to entrepreneurs in this area? You want it to go from tiny to at least medium. Depending on your locale, larger businesses may reside elsewhere, or they may be mixed in here as anchors. Some towns have a cluster of larger businesses like car lots, carpet stores, lumberyards, and garden centers.
* Does your town have accessible business space? Many don't have much, which contributes to unemployment in people with disabilities. ADA standards make building or renovating so much more expensive that it kills a lot of projects.
- One way to get around this is for the town to subsidize just those parts of construction or renovation, like providing a free ADA bathroom or dressing room or grab bars. A cluster of accessible businesses in the same area will attract seniors, families with young children, and people with disabilities. You might therefore locate it near where those people congregate such as a senior community, elementary school, or hospital.
- Another way is to improve efficiency by making one whole building a business hub for disabled workers, rather than trying to retrofit your entire 100+ year old downtown. Pick one of your nice buildings for this, not a dump, to help people feel welcome and valued. If you need to modify it, which is likely, make the new additions match the historic features. But don't assume it's inaccessible because it's old -- check the side and back doors, which often had a smooth concrete or brick ramp for delivery carts. Some historic elevators are gorgeous and just need refurbishing. You'll need an occupational therapist, a guide to accommodations, and a storeroom full of workplace adaptive equipment. This will not only reduce local poverty and activate unemployed citizens, it will also give you valuable disabled employees to show that life with a disability can be fulfilling.
- Connect your ADA small business building(s) with the local health care system and offer every newly disabled person free access for an appropriate time in their recovery process, to help them adapt an old job or find a new career. This reduces the chance of losing workers to disability.
* Has your town historically disenfranchised people of color or other groups? If so, you can counterbalance that by giving them discounted access to space, or even free space. Those businesses which grow will enrich the local economy. This has a pleasant side effect of reducing poverty and unemployment in this population, enabling them to pay more taxes into your coffers.
- Does your local bank own a lot of foreclosed properties they can't unload? Consider donating those to qualifying entrepreneurs as a tax write-off.
- Does your municipality pick up abandoned or failing properties? Consider offering these free to people willing to move in and start a business. Some towns are already offering free property to attract new residents.
* Does your chamber of commerce have a clear path laid out for businesses to grow? An entrepreneur should be able to walk in there and get a listing of both the regulations applying to different sizes and the range of storefronts available to rent or buy at each size step. Regulations should be lighter on the smallest sizes to encourage people to try out an idea, then if it works and gets bigger, more official things start to apply. Make a set of "How do I ...?" brochures or webpages to explain what people need to do in growing a business. Make the permitting process work for them.
However, it overlooks one critical need: small businesses need places to do business. This is a huge barrier in municipalities that do not provide suitable locations. So let's look at some possible solutions ...
* Home businesses. This is the low-hanging fruit. It costs literally nothing to acknowledge, allow, and encourage small businesses to function at home.
- This has side benefits like reducing traffic and making it easier for elderly or disabled people to work.
- The key here is small. Most home businesses fit in one room (a corner of the living room, a home office, a porch) or maybe two (an office and a craft room, a lobby and a salon). Occasionally you find things that take up a garage, an attic, or a basement. The effect on neighborhood traffic is negligible because people rarely if ever drive cross-town for these businesses. Either it's online (an eBay vendor, a writer, an artist, etc.) or it's handling only a few customers a day at most. There is neither the space nor the business capacity for more. A successful home business may outgrow that space and need to move elsewhere. Your job as a municipality is to ensure they have somewhere to go, so they don't either die out or start to cause problems.
* The next step is a small storefront in a busier neighborhood. Options include food carts, food trucks, booths at street fairs, small permanent stands, and stalls in an a craft/antique mall or similar. All of these are smaller than the minimum storefront in most modern buildings. An exception is malls, which often have a range of sizes from the giant anchors down to tiny things no bigger than a bedroom, plus the kiosks.
These two are the bottom rungs on the ladder. If you don't enable these and make them easy to find and afford, you will have little or no luck growing your local economy.
Moving up to larger buildings, there are several possibilities.
* Check your local strip malls. Are they full, partly full, or empty? If they're full with a waiting list, you're understocked. Analyze what is needed and find someone to build more of that. If they are full or close to it, you're fine. If they are partly full or empty, troubleshoot.
- You may have small businesses in need of space, but not that kind of space. Find out what they do need. Can you retrofit to meet those needs?
- You may have small businesses in need of just such space, but they can't afford it or access it for some other reason. What can you do to remove those barriers? Since a common problem is space that is too big and thus too expensive, consider subdividing it somehow. This is what drove some places to become basically small business barns: a big building holding many small private stalls selling anything from collectible milk bottles to crocheted doll clothes.
- You may have a shortage of small businesses. You'll need to cultivate them.
* Check your vacant real estate. If you have many lots or buildings standing empty, imagine new uses for them, or make them available to entrepreneurs to do something creative with.
- Empty lots can become pocket parks or community gardens to lift spirits and make the neighborhood nicer (thus more valuable). They can also become farmer's markets or flea markets, generating economic activity. These have a very low cost-of-entry, making them ideal for small businesses.
- Abandoned parking lots can become skate dots. You don't need expensive ramps. You can literally just drop in some concrete benches and solid-cast porch steps and it'll attract the street-style skaters. Another option at modest expense is to make a painted-game playground. A few thousand dollars for stencils and paint will do it, or save money by making your own stencils (or even painting random things so kids will invent their own games) and just buy the paint. A food truck park can make quite a lot of money. It's nice to have picnic tables, toilets, and a place to wash hands but that's not essential. Add the trucks first, and if it proves wildly popular, let it pay for its own improvements. This small business park cleverly combines food trucks with other vendors.
- Large empty buildings are often that way because 1) a big business moved out and/or 2) nobody can afford to rent them. To cultivate small businesses, there are two good options. One is a full-blown business incubator with office equipment, light industrial equipment, mentors, and other assets that members can use. Another is simply subdividing the interior into spaces small enough for your local entrepreneurs to afford. You can do this with non-loadbearing walls to make small offices, or just put up portable racks to make vendor stalls like antique malls do. Have you got an empty restaurant? Make a community kitchen or commercial kitchen rentable by the hour to promote small culinary businesses. Have you got an empty school or motel? These work well for tutors, music teachers, or other lessons. Bundle them together and it's not only more affordable for service providers, it's more convenient for students to have so much opportunity in one place.
* Check the status of food trucks, food carts, and other portable food and beverage vendors. If your town doesn't already encourage these, fix your regulations to do so, because these are valuable.
- These are small, agile, popular, and profitable businesses. The more successful ones may grow to become sit-down restaurants.
- Also, if your town is too small to support many restaurants, food trucks give you more variety because they can travel to locations or events all around your area.
- A food truck park in an area with few or no restaurants can be tremendously valuable. They can sell fresh produce in food deserts.
- Do you have a business park or a large single employer? A rotating set of food trucks or carts in its parking lot (which is usually way bigger than needed) can offer more variety than a cafeteria or vending village.
* Check your fine art galleries and craft stores.
- Do you have at least one community store selling whatever your local creatives make? If not, that's a good place to start. If so, check whether it is overloaded, at or near capacity, or partly empty. If it needs more space, make sure that's available; it might be time to divide, for instance 2D art in a new location and 3D art in the old one. Or maybe they'd like to develop it into a full-service art center with an art supply store, an art gallery, lesson rooms, and rentable studios. If it's under-capacity, see if a smaller storefront might be more affordable.
- What's the representation of women, people of color, the poor, the disabled, and other disadvantaged groups both in the art itself and the artists? Reach out to the underrepresented groups and explore ways to increase their access to venues where they can sell their work. In a large town or small city, there may be enough market to support a women's art gallery or an African craft store, etc. If you boost their ability to do more business, you simultaneously lower poverty and raise your economic activity.
- Does your town have cheap artist space? Artists often struggle to afford living and work space. Some areas have converted old warehouses or factories into loft apartments with studios for this reason. If you have such a place, protect it from encroachment by other interests. If you don't have any, look to see if you have the base buildings to create some. In smaller towns with a low-rise downtown, live-work buildings are an excellent option because the ground floor is usually big enough for a retail area, a mini-office, and an art studio with living space above. Stacked apartments are particularly valuable because an art store with three 1-bedroom apartments above it can hold 3-6 artists; more if those are 2-3 bedroom apartments in a long narrow building. If your downtown has many 2-story buildings, explore whether you could extend some upwards; older buildings are often designed for that.
* Check the status of busking and other entertainment in your town.
- Do you have busk stops, soapbox stages, park amphitheaters, plazas, or other public venues free or cheap for performers to use? While building a venue may require a higher budget, there are signs and stencils which are both affordable and effective. Consider investing in a few portable busk stop shelters to deploy like porta-potties at public events. You can always upgrade facilities to permanent stages if they are popular.
- Are your regulations, if any, busker-friendly? If not, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Liverpool wrote a brilliant guidebook that you can just copy for free and adapt to your local needs.
- Remember that people have a right to work for a living, we all share the public space, buskers boost local economies, and if you give them an acceptable place to perform then they're much less likely to pick somewhere annoying.
- A vibrant performing arts community will attract tourists, who will then spend money at other local businesses. If you see this happening, take steps to capture the flow. Consider a park, plaza, or pedestrian promenade designed for performing arts, surrounded by small local businesses. Chainstores are worse than useless here as they funnel money out of your town.
* Check your downtown and any other dense, walkable areas. You might find a lively cluster near a college, community center, city park, or transit hub for instance.
- If you have two or more of these features, try to connect them with a business street, or a pedestrian promenade with vehicle access in the back. Make sure the two ends, and preferably also the middle, have mass-transit access.
- Do you have any small, freestanding buildings? These used to be common for things like print shops. If you don't have any, consider whether it might be worth adding a few for diversity.
- Do you have any live-work buildings? These have a commercial space like a store, office, or workshop on the ground floor with one or more apartments above.
- If you don't already have some mixed-use zoning, make some of that. Shuttling people from place to place for every little thing just clogs your roads. The more they can do at home or close to home, the less you have to pay for lots of roads.
* Take advantage of seasonality. Some businesses operate only or primarily in certain seasons. If you can pair up two or more who work in different seasons, they can use the same property, it will cost each of them less, and that property will be working more than idle.
- Provide multipurpose food stands. Good combinations include summer ice cream/winter hot soup or summer cold smoothies / winter hot beverages.
- Look for a smallish empty building with a good-sized parking lot. Put the cash register and any fragile merchandise indoors, and the outdoor merchandise in the parking lot. A great combination is spring-summer garden plants / fall Halloween-Thanksgiving decorations / winter Christmas trees and holiday decorations.
* What is the range of sizes in commercial property available to entrepreneurs in this area? You want it to go from tiny to at least medium. Depending on your locale, larger businesses may reside elsewhere, or they may be mixed in here as anchors. Some towns have a cluster of larger businesses like car lots, carpet stores, lumberyards, and garden centers.
* Does your town have accessible business space? Many don't have much, which contributes to unemployment in people with disabilities. ADA standards make building or renovating so much more expensive that it kills a lot of projects.
- One way to get around this is for the town to subsidize just those parts of construction or renovation, like providing a free ADA bathroom or dressing room or grab bars. A cluster of accessible businesses in the same area will attract seniors, families with young children, and people with disabilities. You might therefore locate it near where those people congregate such as a senior community, elementary school, or hospital.
- Another way is to improve efficiency by making one whole building a business hub for disabled workers, rather than trying to retrofit your entire 100+ year old downtown. Pick one of your nice buildings for this, not a dump, to help people feel welcome and valued. If you need to modify it, which is likely, make the new additions match the historic features. But don't assume it's inaccessible because it's old -- check the side and back doors, which often had a smooth concrete or brick ramp for delivery carts. Some historic elevators are gorgeous and just need refurbishing. You'll need an occupational therapist, a guide to accommodations, and a storeroom full of workplace adaptive equipment. This will not only reduce local poverty and activate unemployed citizens, it will also give you valuable disabled employees to show that life with a disability can be fulfilling.
- Connect your ADA small business building(s) with the local health care system and offer every newly disabled person free access for an appropriate time in their recovery process, to help them adapt an old job or find a new career. This reduces the chance of losing workers to disability.
* Has your town historically disenfranchised people of color or other groups? If so, you can counterbalance that by giving them discounted access to space, or even free space. Those businesses which grow will enrich the local economy. This has a pleasant side effect of reducing poverty and unemployment in this population, enabling them to pay more taxes into your coffers.
- Does your local bank own a lot of foreclosed properties they can't unload? Consider donating those to qualifying entrepreneurs as a tax write-off.
- Does your municipality pick up abandoned or failing properties? Consider offering these free to people willing to move in and start a business. Some towns are already offering free property to attract new residents.
* Does your chamber of commerce have a clear path laid out for businesses to grow? An entrepreneur should be able to walk in there and get a listing of both the regulations applying to different sizes and the range of storefronts available to rent or buy at each size step. Regulations should be lighter on the smallest sizes to encourage people to try out an idea, then if it works and gets bigger, more official things start to apply. Make a set of "How do I ...?" brochures or webpages to explain what people need to do in growing a business. Make the permitting process work for them.