Why Small Business Innovations Exists

Small Business Innovations was originally created to share what I had learned while pivoting my business during the COVID pandemic.

I had apprenticed as a dog trainer, but eventually fell into pet care as my primary business because of its scalability. Then COVID hit.

Suddenly, everyone was home. They didn't need someone to walk or check in on their dogs anymore. What they did need was someone to help train all of the new companions they were bringing home.

Almost overnight, my existing revenue disappeared and I had to figure out how to generate new business with essentially no marketing budget.

And I did.

That experience taught me how to generate leads, position an offer, and build revenue when resources were extremely limited.

I knew the strategies worked. But I had one big problem:

I couldn't prove they worked outside of dog training.

Putting the Ideas to the Test

After moving back to St. Petersburg following my father's heart attack in 2022, I found myself in another situation that required me to put those business skills to work.

Again, the strategies worked.

Then came the hurricanes.

Idalia, followed by Helene, flooded my home and once again forced me to rebuild. During that period, I also helped my now-wife turn her expertise as a speech-language pathologist into a business.

We started her speech therapy practice with organic marketing to generate the initial revenue. We worked out the pricing. We developed and implemented a marketing strategy. We built systems around what worked.

Then we hired.

And expanded.

The practice grew to include six additional team members and expanded into two new markets.

In 12 months, we increased revenue by roughly 700%.

At that point, I finally had the answer to the question that had bothered me when I first created SBI:

Did these ideas only work for me, or could they work across businesses and industries?

I had my case studies.

More Than Marketing

Small Business Innovations isn't meant to be another marketing agency.

In fact, marketing isn't even our primary motivation.

One of the hardest lessons I've learned from building businesses is that the things that create profit—and freedom—for an owner are often counterintuitive.

There are only so many hours in a day, a week, or a year.

So how do we get some of that time back?

How do we generate more revenue when we're already maxed out?

How do we turn more of that revenue into profit?

How do we grow without simply creating more work for ourselves?

Marketing might be the answer.

But so might pricing.

Or positioning.

Or automation.

Or hiring.

Or eliminating something that never should have been done in the first place.

There are only so many levers to pull.

Our job is to figure out which ones matter.