What this is, why it exists, and what you can expect to read here.
Welcome, and thanks for being here early. Small Business Happenings is a new publication about the people who run small businesses in this country: the good weeks and the hard ones, and the changes coming at them that are easy to miss when you are busy actually running the place. I am Dave Lertola, and I write it.
Why I started this
I run a marketing agency, which means I spend most of my week on the phone and in meetings with small business owners. Contractors, clinics, shops, studios, the person who fixes your air conditioning in July. After enough of those conversations you start hearing the same things: the same quiet wins, the same worries, the same tool or rule or cost that just changed and nobody warned them about. An owner buried inside one business cannot always see the pattern. I have the odd luck of seeing a lot of them at once, and I wanted somewhere to write it down.
What you will find here
Two kinds of writing, mostly. The first is news and trends: the shifts in costs, tools, platforms, and rules that land on small businesses first, explained in plain language so you can tell what actually matters for your shop and what is just noise. The second is founder profiles, real conversations with owners who found something that works, told honestly, with the messy parts left in. Fewer highlight reels, more of what really happened.
Come along
The first stories are being written now. If you want them when they go up, along with the occasional note from me, put your name on the list. No spam, and you can leave whenever you want. And if you are an owner with a story worth telling, or you just want to point me at something happening in your corner of the small business world, I would like to hear it.
Glad you are here. Let's get into it.