Small Businesses Need Our help
We’ve been robbed.
Worse than that, we’ve helped the thieves load up the trucks.
Packed to the brim of those trucks are countless souls. The souls of small, locally-owned businesses. The employees. The charm. The customer service. The time and care and quality. The raison d’être.
And we’ve replaced that soul—that uniquely human element that feeds a community—with efficiency, speed, data, scalability, and the culture of Silicon Valley and New York City.
Look, let’s talk about this honestly. We’ve all sat down in front of our TVs on Friday nights for 17 years now and watched a handful of billionaires rake small business owners over the coals in exchange for some free marketing and maybe, just maybe, an investment.
Shark Tank brought the cut-and-dry, “money doesn’t care about your feelings” culture right into our living rooms and made us feel like we were part of the drama. More than that, it made us feel like WE got to make decisions with Mark Cuban and Mr. Wonderful’s cash. “Oh no way. No one’s gonna buy that” and “Hmmm I’d do $100,000 at 33% with a 10% royalty in perpetuity.” I KNOW those words came flying out of your mouth. They did mine as well.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Shark Tank is not the villain here. It’s a TV show. Shark Tank isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.
At some point, Americans decided on a more sterile, passionless, financier-style viewing of small business. No longer was someone’s small business a boon both for the owner and the community where they built the business; now it’s an INVESTMENT. A money-making machine. Yes, that’s what we’ve seen in recent decades, all across this country—a change in how we view small businesses. Now they’re not something we run and take pride in, they’re something we own. Something we tinker with and try to make perfect. They’re an “income-generating asset.” Oooh. How fancy. Big words. “Generating.” Tres chic.
All the while, private equity began infiltrating our towns, buying up homes and businesses. At first, it looked like a good deal. “Hey, did you hear Kim and Mark sold the shop? Yeah. They can retire down to Fort Lauderdale now.”
But then the shop closed down after 6 months and got replaced with a Chase Bank branch or a Starbucks. Nothing wrong with those businesses. I’m a customer of both. But a locally owned business just lost its life all so Boring Men Capital, LLC out of Big City, USA could squeeze out a few extra pennies from a community they couldn’t give two rips about.
And the bloodbath isn’t reserved for Mom & Pop shops. Private equity has brought hyper-efficiency and banker-style asset management to even the most memorable buildings lining our busiest streets. Pardon my French, but what the HELL happened to McDonalds and Pizza Hut? Have you seen the abominations lately? Once charming, character-rich buildings with recognizable shapes and colors reduced to…beige boxes or, in the case of Pizza Hut, a store front in a strip mall??
Private equity took our architecture! They took our Pizza Hut building! They took our lunchtime pizza buffet!
And why?
So the investors—the shareholders—can get a few bucks more. Your McDonald’s is now a square, brown box because it makes the bank happier. Seriously. If something happens and that McDonald’s has to close, the bank wants the building move-in-ready. So, it took away the custom architecture and design and replaced it with a rectangular yawn. Asset protection. Risk mitigation. Optimizing the ROI.
“Well, Adam,” you may be saying, “that’s the whole goal of a business—to increase the value of the shareholder’s equity. That’s what Milton Friedman told us.”
PUUUHHTT. I spit on that take. Not only is the Friedman Doctrine simplistic, and morally bankrupt, it’s been the cheap scapegoat for corporate executives for 50 years. Need to justify laying off 5,000 people to increase the EPS? Why, the Friedman Principle says I must! Pumping toxic sludge into the waterways and paying the fine because that’s cheaper than being a responsible corporate citizen? Friedman!
Enough about Friedman. He’s dead some twenty years, so I doubt he’s going to read this and be able to defend himself. Let’s be fair to the good doctor.
What I’m talking about goes deeper than Friedman. It goes deeper than Mark Cuban and McDonald’s bland exterior.
I’m talking about soul.
Soul, man.
Where have the souls of our businesses gone? We spend so much time being efficient, collecting data, optimizing X for Y, and creating dashboards full of metrics. We implement AI tools and solutions to save time and effort, and in some cases just to keep up with the Joneses.
But what about the mission? What about the communities and customers we’re serving? When did they stop being the priority? We spend so much time tweaking the business and making sure it runs smoothly and doesn’t spend a single unnecessary nickel that we’ve gotten away from what the purpose of a business is.
A business exists to serve people. At some ultimate level, every business exists to make the lives of its customers better, safer, or more fulfilling. That’s it. And, yes, to provide a living for the owners and employees. Absolutely.
Small business is not big business, and we can’t ask it to be. The minute we start running our small businesses like a Fortune 500 firm, we lose something—we sacrifice the humanity present in our businesses. We lose focus.
Do we need to be efficient? Of course. Does well-understood data help us operate better? Duh. Can technology make our business more successful? Sure!
But to what end? At what point are we just playing a video game and running up a score? Are we setting targets because we want to see the numbers improve or do we really care what the stories and the people BEHIND those numbers are?
If you want more from your business or the businesses in your community, I invite you to follow along and be part of Let The Robots Starve. We’re going to bring soul back to locally-owned businesses that serve local communities.
Now, can we please save our hometowns?
Adam Tidrow is a serial entrepreneur, expert in American business and economic history, and scholar whose work focuses primarily on local economic development in the American Rust Belt. His newest project, Let The Robots Starve, is an advocacy movement aimed at restoring the soul of locally-owned businesses that serve local communities. He is currently performing research for his forthcoming book, Baptism By Fire.
