The pandemic ingenuity of small businesses

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Happy Friday! Michal Lev-Ram here in the sunny Bay Area, filling in for Alan.

One of my favorite pandemic-era moments—for all of the horrible lows, there have also been some highs—was purchasing toilet paper from the sports bar down the street. I live in Palo Alto’s downtown area, and this was early on, when securing enough TP was a major headache. There were lines at our local Costco and every major grocery store. Meanwhile, the owner of our go-to for beer and basketball had a huge inventory of rolls on hand, and no customers allowed to sit inside or outside for drinks, let alone use the bathroom. So she got creative: At the height of the initial lockdown, she constructed several impressive pyramids made from toilet paper rolls, and displayed them in her windows. I bought three, and yes, a to-go drink too.

Why am I telling you this? We focus a lot on the leaders of large corporations and well-capitalized startups in this newsletter, and the ways in which they have responded to the pandemic. But the ingenuity, and the hardships, of the leaders of small businesses are just as notable. Perhaps even more so, because they have even fewer resources to draw from. Prior to the pandemic, many of them weren’t even digitized in any meaningful way, making it hard to pivot to e-commerce, or just to accept credit card payments.

And here’s the other reason I’m telling you this: Our latest Coins2Day Brainstorm podcast episode is dedicated to this topic. (It’s Alan’s second-favorite podcast, after Leadership Next.)

For the episode, I got to talk to April Underwood, a long-time product exec in Silicon Valley who has come up with a creative way to help some of these small businesses. It’s called Nearby, and it’s basically an online marketplace, but just for local businesses. Instead of standing up their own online shop, smaller stores can aggregate their products on one, hyperlocal storefront. Nearby currently has a pilot running in Oakland, where you can buy local spice mixes or graphic T-shirts or, yes, toilet paper (it’s recycled, sold by a zero-waste café and store called MudLab).

The health of these local businesses can actually help big businesses too. For the same episode, I also talked to Mary Kay Bowman, head of global seller product and solutions for Visa. She shared that, globally, 82% small businesses have made some kind of shift to modernize their operations during the pandemic. Obviously, the more these local businesses accept credit cards to process their transactions, the more Visa benefits.

Many small businesses are still in a world of hurt. In my area, there are more empty storefronts that I can remember seeing anytime over the last few decades. Indeed, a recent survey from the Federal Reserve Bank shows that about a third of small businesses in the U.S. Say they won’t survive 2021 without additional government assistance.

But we can all do our part. So this weekend, walk down the street. Look in some store windows. You might find something you really need.

Michal Lev-Ram
@mlevram
[email protected]

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The news in this edition of CEO Daily was curated and written by Phil Wahba. The newsletter was edited by Karen Yuan.