Tech is Dooming Small Business: Saving Mom and Pop

Image courtesy of Luca Bravo on Unsplash Have problems with your website? Is coding a challenge? Confused about how to post effectively to social media? Yeah, me too. As a premature participant in the Big Quit, in 2019, I embraced the risk and launched my photography business. What was a hobby became enticing: people were hiring me for sessions and I felt energized. I believed I could live the life of a creative denied to me in my youth by the “artists starve” mantra. Yeah. Notice the date I launched. I booked my first high-paying photography session for March 2020. Do I need to relive the moment that lucrative contract died from Covid? Portraiture, head shots, food and restaurant clients disappeared. You were there. You remember. I kept a few product and art clients who would mail me the pieces – which I would wipe down before and after. But my entrepreneurial hopes were KN95 masked and dashed. To survive, I revived my copyrighting business. Although I’d like nothing more than to become George R. R. Martin (minus the girth and hat), I had long-supported my writing hobby with copyrighting side gigs. A business plan here. An employee manual or ghost-written article there. I passed the word around my network and picked up a few nibbles. But the world is not the one of the early 90s. I submitted an article to a new client, and he asked: “Did you incorporate our keywords?” Keywords? You bet your backlink I learned about keywords. I had to learn SEO. I came to incorporate relationship branding and marketing. Every social media platform was a new battle. What the hell is an API Key? And then, when I wrote webpage content for an enthusiastic and satisfied client, she asked me to create her website. (That’s what I get for doing a good job.) Sure, I had fumbled around and Wixed my way through my site. After years of avoidance, I had to familiarize myself with various website platforms and venture into coding. I had dodged the tech quagmire for so long. When I needed one damn credit to earn my degree, I took a summer-term HTML class at Emerson. The professor, a talented code expert, leaned over my work and commented: “You’re really good at this! Have you considered designing websites?” I groaned. “I start law school next August. My plan is to hire someone like you to handle all this crap.” That moment replays in my mind every damn time I am battling a Z-Index. Big damn mouth on me. But I realized most professionals and entrepreneurs think that same thing: that their budget will cover hiring for these tasks. Or that they will have the time and energy to handle these tasks. Who could have predicted that a copyrighter, a master of persuasion and killer of the comma splice, would need to become tech-savvy? Madness. How many skills do I need to master to keep funding my 401k? Seriously. When I launched my first website for my law office, I hired someone. My interest level to create a website – even my own – was zero. Yet, when the contractor presented her finished product, the branding was so far off from my luxury style, I paid her and never used the site. I mean, really – lime green and yellow? With clip art characters? I’m pretty convinced she was a devotee of Timothy Leary. I’m a Dennis Leary girl. Without the time or inclination, I hired website guru number two. She correctly branded the site, ensured it loaded it quickly, embedded the important links, and made it look great. But every sentence contained a misspelled word and grammatical errors. (After I provided the copy, she rewrote it. Because, yeah… she thought it sounded hip. Thank you, Miley Cyrus. Please don’t write a legal brief or business plan anytime soon.) As a small business owner, you have limited time. A talented copyrighter is not enough. You need more than a tech savvy web developer and a marketing specialist. You need a Jill-of-all-trades who can write, capture your brand identity, structure your site, embed links, and respect analytics…. I’ve been trying to be Jill for three years. And I struggle. My small-business owners experience that same struggle when they hire five people to get one webpage published. And hire another three to post to social media. It’s a wallet blood-bath and most small business owners default to “I’ll do what I can when I can.” You not only have to earn your street MBA but also have to graduate with journalism, programing, social media management, and psychology degrees. It’s unrealistic. A dear friend and her husband own a small business. They hired a Millennial web developer two years ago. They still don’t have a website (which is promised in excuse-email after excuse email) and they rely on Yelp reviews and social media to promote their business. It’s not a good look. But what can they do? The budget doesn’t permit hiring a team of people. Some digging (also known as research) provided me with insight into the state of small business marketing efforts: Corporations who boast market success can afford teams to accomplish all that needs to be accomplished in our tech-dependent world. Where does that leave mom-and-pop entrepreneurs? The local mechanic relies on word-of-mouth and his kid occasionally helping him post to Instagram while the big-box mechanic, with the flashy website, runs him out of business? Seems like a danger to competition. Worse, whether we want to avoid discussing it, those who can code and who grew up in the tech-world are Quiet Quitting. Or can’t form a coherent sentence. (Honestly, I fired a Gen Z employee when I found her taking a selfie while at her desk. She can quiet quit on someone else’s dime.) And if you hire an older marketing guru, they deem current initiatives fluff: What’s a backlink? You don’t need QR codes or a bit.ly. Let’s run