local business experts

local business experts

Strategies for Local Business Success: Insights from Expert Practitioners

1. Introduction to Local Business Expertise

For decades, building a successful business has been much like preparing a form of local cuisine – known but not always easily made. It requires as much replication as innovation, while at the same time the successful result is a complex fusion that is hard to distill into its parts, no matter how much science is applied. Local business success has indeed been treated as an arcane art – some have knowledge, not always telling the same tale; some strike gold, somehow, but no one is quite sure how to determine best manners of success, nor how to craft skills in others beyond the local maker’s personal grasp. This is particularly so in the realms of retail and small business.

In a time when knowledge is the engine of global societies, inequalities and market success, a business’ competitiveness becomes quite the problem when it is built on information that is idiosyncratic, local, and that is not passed on beyond a few lucky souls. When that enterprise plays out in rural communities, then personal sadness and impoverishment too often play a part in the business tale. Successful local businesses provide the heart of all communities. They generate much of the employment and provide valuable and often special design and ethic in the service and good provisioning for their wider community. For local specialists (read ‘experts’) to lack that basic and core knowledge is thus their local and their global disadvantage.

2. Key Factors for Success in Local Business Operations

In these complex and dynamic business environments, numerous factors may substantially contribute to the success of small and medium local businesses. While the literature has investigated a large and diverse array of potential critical success factors of small and medium business performance over the years, for both stand-alone, venturing, or becoming hybrid enterprises, we raised the question about whether there are specific factors more directly related to performance success for small and medium business operating within the local domain and especially in the context of unsaturated or re-emerging business geolocations. This paper decided to explore in further depth how strategies and competences implemented and used by five experienced professionals in their successful local business practices have been operating and what has been mostly contributing to the success and growth of the operations in their businesses.

So, not a big enterprise that exploits global opportunities but preferably a small or medium one where the entrepreneur acting alone or engaging the effort of only a few more individuals is developing unique and potentially multifaceted practices directly in the same area, to supply local demand or a specialized segment of a local demand. Naturally aiming to serve more and more customers and thus generating entrepreneurship knowledge and other related spillovers that potentially give rise to other entrepreneurial activities and market innovations.

3. Innovative Marketing Approaches for Local Businesses

Perry Palmer opens the section on trendy marketing approaches by identifying the prime technique for bringing people to a restaurant: “mouthing on the food.” Palmer markets the Continental Cafe and Wolfgang’s, a highly successful bakery situated on a natural food by-way whose customers come from upscale Mountain Brook and the neighboring suburbs, fashionable Five Points and Southside, and downtown. The Cafe uses local radio, four-color newspaper inserts, and a weekly buzz sheet as its primary consumer education tools. Palmer uses tithing as the concept for deciding on what and who to underwrite. They invest 10 percent of their profits each year for the good of the environment, the community, and the employees. Investing tithing in activities that go to build community enhances the store’s visibility, and visibility contributes to sales. While turnover in the food service industry is currently 200 percent per year, the turnover rate at both the parochial school (which has expanded twice) and the neighboring school is about zero percent. In Perry’s words, “Marketing is community enhancement.” He believes that the loyalty is generated from being both visible and a contributor, examples of which are appearing on T-shirts worn by school children, newspaper stories that put the bakery in a good light, and the pleasure of large families who use their facility more than once per day.

4. Building Strong Community Relationships and Partnerships

Building strong community relationships and partnerships—active community engagement—can enrich existing customer relationships, attract new customers, and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers for the local store. Listening to the community is essential to understanding its concerns, feelings, and patterns. In the same way that store managers know their regular customers well, to build strong relationships with their wider communities, they must get to know the people who work within and influence the community, so that they understand the wider community well, too. Using the customer relationship model, community relationships include customers, potential customers, suppliers and vendors, staff and employees, public officials as well as local community organizations, social clubs, sports teams, schools, charitable groups, and religious groups such as churches and synagogues. These relationships must be built, nurtured, and maintained.

Our expert practitioners argue that, in terms of relationships and partnerships with the local community, it is now more important than ever to be clear on what your business stands for. Customers come to a store seeking an experience, a service, a product, or a solution to their problems. They want to have a relationship with the business, its employees, and managers. They feel good about knowing and dealing with a caring, locally owned and operated business. This especially affects gift and niche-type businesses, where the customers view its unique merchandise and the reason for its unique existence as important parts of the fabric of their community. The approach has the potential to attract new customers and influence these new customers to become often-repeating supporters. But there are many choices and sources for any given product, and customers expect the retailer to treat them and their needs as individuals. For the consumer, the store is a place where things happen, a place of discovery, interaction, exchange, resolution, experience, re-purchase or repair, and elicits a “sense of a store” that influences people.

5. Case Studies and Best Practices from Successful Local Businesses

This chapter presents the consultant’s observations from the site visits to the eight successful local retail and service businesses. This provides the in-depth interviews with these firms, including a short history of the business, things the owner believes he or she is doing personally to help the business be successful, the owner’s perception of how it is performing on the various retail success factors, interesting tactics the owner has employed to help the business, including creating special forms of value for the customers, building or maintaining a loyal customer base, and participating in business improvement programs and business associations. Anecdotal comments from a number of the site visit business owners and managers also add. There were several things in common that it seemed to do, how the owners perceived their businesses to be performing on key success factors, and some interesting tactics. Its perceptions from their client list, the business owners and managers had been successful in their efforts.

However, the exemplary businesses were by no means identical, other than being single-establishment, with the owner living in close proximity, local businesses. Most seemed to have found a pricing sweet spot, with good but not excessive prices, and they were attempting to build strong business relations because they liked their customers. It was striking how clearly the business owners and managers felt their small businesses outperformed the big box and online competitors. They liked the relative simplicity of being local businesses and entrepreneurs rejecting the corporate rat race, and also the strong control they felt over the business with only themselves to report to. Their strong community standing and control suggests that firms that possess these attributes would be good community partners. Roman expressed the same sentiment in his note, a unique perception about creating value for the customer and having a loyal customer base. These successful entrepreneurs. These businesses are a small sample of local business. Their notions about what makes them successful must be subjected to more rigorous testing, but it seems there is much information here for educators of local business owners and managers, as well as for the successful and less successful local business owners and managers themselves.