can help your business, that can keep you on track or get you thinking differently about your next steps. In the following pages, I hope you'll find the advice, knowledge, and encouragement to follow in Mr. Hotchkiss's footsteps. Because when you do, it's not just you who benefits—our communities and country do too.
1 The Small Business: You Are a Very Big Part of America
YOU'VE JUST PICKED UP this book and you're wondering if it's worth reading. The way I figure it, I have roughly 60 seconds before you decide, one way or the other. So, allow me to make that task unusually easy for you.
If you're a small-business owner, you are most likely working yourself to exhaustion on most days (and weekends). You have basically no time for your family, and you feel bad about that. But you're trying to support your family and community through your business.
The problem is that you've plowed your savings into your business and also may be close to maxing out your credit cards. You may not even be paying yourself a salary at this point, because you put yourself last in line. You care so very deeply about your employees and others who look to you to make this business carry on.
And you have secret doubts. How can I work any harder? What can I do differently? Would somebody who knows about small-business success please give me some advice that I can believe in, advice that can help me? Or should I maybe throw in the towel at this point?
If this does not sound like your situation, then maybe you don't need to read this book. But if my description sounds anything like the situation you're in, then this book may very well be the thing that changes the direction of your business.
We're in Your Corner
You may put on a strong and confident face to your family and employees, but I know the challenges you're facing as a small-business owner. I've started and run two successful small businesses, one when I was 15 years old painting houses and another in my thirties in the Silicon Valley around electronic payments. While I don't own a small business anymore, I run a big one. I'm the President and CEO of Deluxe, a Trusted Payments and Business Technology™ company that has been around for more than a century helping businesses succeed. Nearly 6,000 employees and their families look to me and my team for their livelihood, and millions of investors have trusted that their savings will grow by investing in our stock.
Your great-great-grandparents and every generation since has purchased checks from us, because we've been around since 1915. In fact, the founder of this company, W.R. Hotchkiss, invented the checkbook, making Deluxe the original payment company.
I wrote this book because Deluxe has an extremely unusual vantage point into the workings of small businesses. It's true, we provide services to literally thousands of some of the largest businesses on the planet. But we have more than four million customers, and millions of them are small businesses. They call us every day, not just to order more checks, but also to find out how we can help to grow their businesses. In fact, you might say that small businesses are our bread and butter.
We've evolved from being a check printer into providing many of the services that small businesses need to survive and thrive. Here's a short list of some of the services we offer to small businesses:
Incorporation and business licensing services
Checks and forms
Logo design
Trademark filing
Designing, building, and hosting your website
Marketing—both online and in print
Promotional products
Retail packaging
Payroll solutions
Online payments
Merchant services (credit card acceptance and processing)
The list goes on. But here's what I want you to understand right from the start: this is NOT a book about promoting Deluxe products and services, like some long sales pitch. We have a great set of products and services, and you should check them out. There, that's my pitch.
But the truth is, you have bigger fish to fry at the moment. You're trying to keep your business afloat and the many other challenges that small businesses face.
This book is about how small businesses can successfully navigate big challenges.
If I'm able to help you through those challenges, I figure that you'll have gotten your money's worth from this book, and then some.
Seismic Events
On one level, we're still recovering from something of epic proportions with COVID. The world has had cases of deadly influenza before, in addition to plagues and such. Even so, the speed with which the coronavirus spread across the world has no precedent, with never-before-seen impact on small business.
So without any warning, you may have been having your best year ever, and the next month was your worst month ever. With no end in sight. Now your business may be recovering well, or still struggling for survival.
I don't need to recount all the COVID upheavals and lessons, but I want to point something out: if the only challenges small businesses faced were COVID or macroeconomic events, there might not be a need for this book. But there are so many other major challenges—which I call seismic events—that you also have to contend with. How many of these have happened to you?
One or more big-box stores moved into town, and they slashed prices. In some cases, they can sell a product for less than you pay for the same product, wholesale.
Amazon now sells just about everything, and there too it's almost impossible to match some of the prices. You know that in some cases your product is superior to the no-name item someone may buy on Amazon, but it's hard for customers to know the difference.
When Washington, DC gets into a trade war with some country, the prices of raw materials can skyrocket. You sometimes see those roller-coaster prices in what you must buy.
On a local level, one or more major employers downsized big time, or closed altogether, sending shockwaves throughout the community.
Whether you have a 100 percent online business or yours is in a physical storefront, you're up against a bunch of competitors who are undercutting your prices or otherwise taking market share.
It's never been easy to start and run a business, but just one of these seismic events can put you out of business, never mind being in a situation where you're dealing with more than one.
I've written this book with these factors in mind. We're going to discuss several ways to counteract these pressures.
The Small Business Revolution
Deluxe has been a household name for generations, and we have been working with small businesses since day one back in 1915. Even so, you may not have heard about the Small Business Revolution.
It started
