Why Small Business Saturday matters in Yorkshire – Michelle Ovens

This Small Business Saturday it is right that we take the time to thank these businesses for all they have done, and continue to do, to get us through the pandemic and beyond.

If we look back, way back, to when Small Business Saturday started, it was in response to the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009.

Make Small Business Saturday count and shop local in Yorkshire’s high streets and market towns like Otley – The Yorkshire Post says

While the campaign launched initially in the US, there was a real sense that the recovery, the return to growth and prosperity, would be driven by small businesses.

As the creators, the innovators, and the job makers, the six million small businesses across the UK would stimulate an exciting period of opportunity. And they did.

We could never have predicted the perfect storm of the last two years, for the economy and the whole nation.

Coming out of a crisis of unprecedented proportions, in our lifetimes at least, once more a solution of epic scale is going to be required. Once more, small businesses are going to be the engine room of prosperity and growth.

We cannot look at the world today and say ‘the crisis is over, time to get back to business’. Many challenges still remain for economies and communities.

Supply chains are more complicated and expensive, due to both the pandemic and Brexit.

Finance costs are up, thanks to (much needed) emergency lending at the height of the pandemic. Staffing shortages are causing businesses to close that are desperate to open their doors and welcome paying customers back in.

And, of course, there remain real and serious health concerns with high Covid rates taking out a lot of workers, and the spectre of the new Omicron variant on the horizon.

Once more, as we look forward with concern and uncertainty, it is to small businesses we turn. Local businesses are delivering to homes, adding on extra services to those isolating and vulnerable. Small businesses are working out ways to make Christmas magical once more with events, enthusiasm, and a dogged determinism to remain optimistic.

Indeed 70 per cent of small businesses feel more confident now about the future, versus 52 per cent in May, according to our research with American Express, Small Business Saturday’s founder and principal supporter in the UK.

Yorkshire’s small businesses are front and centre. Business like The Blind Badger Cocktail Company, in Maltby, which helped connect people forced apart in lockdown. Or Trust Electric Heating, in Garforth, which launched a new product to help vulnerable people control their heating costs in this same period.

It will be businesses like this that build the economy and communities of the future. And they will likely look a bit different than before. Businesses are leaner, more digital savvy and innovative. They are greener and more sustainable. These are all things that are good news and we should take a moment to celebrate them too.