Why did we build a site full of resources for small business founders?
Small Business Founder Origin
I’m not a programmer (sure, I’ve written some PHP and hacked at a bit of JavaScript), but I’ve always loved the tradition of launching your first successful program with the message: “Hello, World!”
I remember learning Flash back in the early 2000s. I think the first thing you did was make a red ball bounce—and honestly, I never made it much past that point.
This post marks the start of a new blog where I’ll share my thoughts on running a small business. One of my greatest joys in life is procrastinating on my own work by being a sounding board for other small business owners or executive directors of small nonprofits. I love it because I get to draw on my own experiences and learn from theirs. Win-win!
Topics for Small Business Founders
Smart Staffing and Team Growth
Every successful small business reaches a point where the founder can no longer wear every hat; Smart Staffing and Team Growth is about embracing this reality and building a team that can help the company excel. The content shares lessons on how to grow a small business through various strategies, including effective outsourcing options and putting trust in others to deliver for the company. By documenting mistakes, successes, and hard-won lessons from over a decade of team building, Small Business Founder provides practical techniques and tools to help entrepreneurs strategically expand their capacity.
Small Businesses Ideas
Our advice for small business is grounded in the understanding that running a small business is fundamentally different from a large corporation, as the small business founder often serves as the strategy team, operations manager, and salesperson simultaneously. The site focuses on providing real-world insights, actionable strategies, and repeatable systems to make ownership more manageable and rewarding. A key theme is the innovative application of technology, such as leveraging AI in products and services to simplify complex tasks and compete effectively without requiring large budgets.
Small Business Software
Selecting the right small business software centers on choosing a flexible, affordable, and easy-to-use core toolset that allows a lean team to streamline operations and enhance productivity. Small Business Founder provides insights into tools that work well together to form a highly efficient system. Key recommendations include using AirTable as the central source of truth and workflow engine, Zapier as the “glue” to connect various applications, and OpenAI as an invaluable assistant for analysis and content generation.
Operations and Process Improvement
Operations and Process Improvement is vital for small businesses that cannot afford to waste time or money on inefficient workflows. The philosophy here is to simplify processes by designing and documenting repeatable systems that boost productivity and reduce cost. A core strategy involves improving documentation for retrieval, which ensures that necessary information is easily accessible to the founder and team, allowing for smarter decisions and a significant reduction in time spent on unproductive or redundant tasks.
Marketing and Sales
When it comes to Marketing and Sales, small business owners need to stop overthinking Small Business SEO and focus on a human-centered approach. The content emphasizes creating clear, relevant, and trustworthy articles based on real experience that solve genuine problems for the target audience. Instead of trying to compete with massive corporations for broad keywords, the successful strategy involves targeting long-tail keywords and ensuring every page builds confidence and clearly answers the user’s intended search query.
LMS for Small Businesses
Because we also operate Endurance Learning, we have a lot of guidance specific to delivering training as a small business. This guidance focuses on leveraging learning technology to create effective internal training or client education programs without needing large instructional design teams. Drawing on their experience in the learning industry, the site promotes practical solutions, often integrated with automations, to develop high-quality content quickly. This includes using tools to generate structured, actionable lesson plans, making professional-grade training design accessible to small teams and enabling continuous learning.
Automations and Workflow
Automations are a great way for small business founders to buy back time without adding headcount. The site details how to construct a complete automation loop by connecting key software components, such as AirTable, Zapier, and OpenAI. By identifying and automating repetitive tasks that drain the team’s energy or rely on human memory (like tracking or classification), small businesses can achieve significant efficiency gains and scale their operations more effectively.
Affiliate Marketing
You’ll see an affiliate disclosure on almost every page of our site. We’ve made a conscious decision from the beginning of this site to see if we can use affiliate sites to help pay for our time and tech. I’m excited to see where this goes over time. I plan to write a more extensive article about my experience using affiliate marketing sites.
You’ll quickly see that we spend a lot of time talking about tools that don’t have affiliate programs. Google Workspace, Zapier, and OpenAI are common recommendations from us and we don’t see a penny. That’s ok. We’ll sign up for affiliate programs when we can but it won’t change what we write or recommend.
