It’s National Small Business Week, and it got us thinking.
Small businesses are – very literally – building up our cities.
Yes there are huge construction companies that are building tall skyscrapers in cities across America. That’s necessary work and it provides very real commercial real estate solutions.
But in our opinion – it’s those smaller, local shops that really form neighborhoods and bring communities together.
The restaurant down the street that your family frequents at least a few times a month, the candle store on the corner where you can buy a handcrafted, heartfelt gift, the event space where you gather with family and friends for a special occasion.
We thought about our finished work… those small to midsized projects like our restaurant builds, our neighborhood gyms, our preschools – and we realized how many contributions small businesses make to our communities.
The work we complete is largely thanks to other small businesses – small subcontractors are the glue that bring our projects together.
This on-the-ground talent comes from local small businesses made up of hard-working craftsmen who use their hands, and some tools, to build. Their specialized knowledge and talent are exceptional and they’ll blow you away with their ability to problem solve with unusual construction issues.
On top of that, they are vested in the outcome of the project since it’s almost always in the town where they live, and they get to bring their friends later to a place they worked on.
But it’s not just the folks in the field.
The good people at the office are helping the craftsmen do their best work. They’re making sure the invisible work on the back end gets done, and it shows in not just the final product but the process too. The invoicing, the material orders, the accounting – that’s the kind of stuff that can either hold up a project or make the operation run like a well-oiled machine.
What’s even more amazing is this… at a large corporation, you have departments for these things. You’ve got a department handling client service, another handling billing, another doing the estimating.
But at a small business – defined most often as a company with less than 500 employees (although most we work with have fewer than that) – everyone pitches in.
Don’t know how to set up your computer? We look it up. Not sure how to how to market your business? We figure it out. Google is our friend. Anyone who works for a small business knows – we all wear many, many hats.
According to the U.S. Small Business Association, “more than half of Americans either own or work for a small business, and small businesses create about two-thirds of new jobs in the U.S. each year.”
That’s pretty amazing!
We’re supporting families, driving our economy forward, and building up our cities to boot.
One small business at a time, we’re building up America.
And we’re damn proud to be part of it.
