What's a K Shaped Economy?

©iStock/Pavio Stavnichuk

Small businesses are a powerful and influential piece of the economy.  In fact, 99.9% of all businesses in the U.S. qualify as small businesses, collectively employing almost half (47.3%) of the nation’s private workforce.

Unfortunately, they’ve also been one of the hardest-hit sectors of the economy amid the pandemic.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) talks about the K-shaped recovery, where some industries see more improvement compared to others that stagnate in the aftermath of a recession.

Read on to learn more.  The good news?  Despite the continued hardships, the global entrepreneurial spirit endures.

WEF says:  "Even in the face of a global pandemic, the perseverance of such metrics prove that the innovative American spirit is unwavering, and spells better days to come for small business recovery."

You might also take a look at the visual, "Mapped:  The State of Small Business Recovery in America."

The Wider the Reach, the Bigger the Market Share

©iStock/jokerpro

More than just publishing a website in another language, global marketing also has to do with building a customer engagement strategy and then zeroing in on which channels and types of content will effectively reach those customers.

To know if your business is ready for global (online) expansion, discover which five questions you need to ask. 

What's the True Cost of An eCommerce Shipment (Landed Cost) Once It Reaches a Customer's Doorstep?

©2021 Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global®.  All rights reserved.

Are you running a global business?  Have questions about the global supply chain?  Run an e-commerce business and wonder how duties and taxes affect you or your customers?  

Find the answers to these questions plus more along with what the true cost of an e-commerce shipment is (landed cost) once it reaches a customer's doorstep.  

Join our wegginar® on Wednesday, May 5th at 11AM CT to hear Kat Sun, Head of Operations at Passport Shipping and Kaitlin Mogentale, Founder of Pulp Pantry talk about "What to Expect When You're Expecting (To Go International).

All business owners operating in the B2B and B2C space who run an e-commerce business should attend.

To learn more and to register (no charge thanks to our generous sponsors), visit:  Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global®.

Today in Global Small Business: Finding Answers To Your Questions About International Travel

©iStock/Akabel

What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Finding answers to your questions about international travel.
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention:  Find your destination to determine whether you can travel there or not.
• Canada will require using a vaccine passport for entry.
• Quote of the week:  "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." – T. S. Eliot
• Seven (7) countries are planning for international travel. 
• Where can you fly right now?

What God Can Do

©Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

"Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world." – Virgil A. Kraft 

Shoppable Pins Brought to You By Pinterest on a Worldwide Basis

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Shopify’s Pinterest app, which launched last year in the US and Canada, is now available in 27 additional countries.  The Pinterest app for Shopify stores lets merchants upload their product catalogues and convert their products into pins.  Users can then buy products featured in a merchant’s pins without ever having to leave Pinterest.

This gives 1.7 million merchants the ability to turn products from their e-commerce store into shoppable pins.

What Are You Best in the World At? Have You Found Your Personal Hedgehog?

Everyone Needs to Go At Ventilator Speed

©iStock/TAO EDGE

A Time Magazine article says that every company is a tech company now.  The disruption is just beginning.  For example, "March 2020, as businesses across the world sent non-essential workers home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a 2.6 million-sq.-ft. General Motors plant in Kokomo, Ind., sat idle. At the same time, ventilators—the breathing machines essential to keeping critically ill COVID-19 patients alive—were in frighteningly short supply. And so within a week of pausing the plant’s operations, GM CEO Mary Barra launched it back into action, quickly transforming a dormant engineering building into an assembly line that delivered 30,000 ventilators in five months."

Barra says that approach, incubated in the crisis of the pandemic, is now a permanent cultural shift that has already led to faster timetables for GM’s bet-the-company push to sell only electric vehicles by 2035. “Now as we approach different projects, we say, ‘You know, we’ve got to go at ventilator speed because we know we have the capability to do that,’” Barra says.

Read the entire article here.  We are in the midst of a reset.

The Backbone of Our Economy: Global Small Businesses

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Global small businesses are vital to the USA recovery from the global pandemic yet micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) can power an even stronger recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, due to their innovative and opportunity-seeking nature, but they need more support.

Such support should be aligned with the priorities of the post-COVID-19 social and economic recovery, said the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Acting Secretary-General Isabelle Durant.

Read on to find out how supporting small businesses is critical for COVID-19 recovery.

Today in Global Small Business: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) or All Things Crypto

©iStock/Marina Funt

What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Fungible (adj.) — able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable.
• Speculative crypto art market takes off.  Why?  "Our digital lives are surrounded by countless digital objects. NFTs are a way to imbue such objects with financial value. When that happens they take on a new level of significance and importance."
• Lindsay Lohan sold a photo of herself for $17K – and then tweeted about it.
• Quote of the week:  "Billionaire Mark Cuban is selling a motivational quote as a NFT for $1,700. " – Markets Insider, March 13, 2021
• Shark Tank celebrity and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban sold a tokenized version of one of his tweets for $952.  The sale was made via the Valuables platform. 
• A clip of LeBron James blocking a shot sold for $100K last month.

Coca Cola Is One

©2021 Laurel J. Delaney (all photos).  All rights reserved.

"There are good examples of companies – Coca-Cola is one – that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come." – Mark Zuckerberg

Embracing the Love-Hate Relationship of Remote Work

©iStock/asiandelight

A May survey from Intermedia showed that 57% of surveyed owners of small and midsized businessessaid they likely would keep increased remote working options long term for their workers.

Embracing remote work has been a love-hate relationship for many global small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners. Yet, even before the pandemic hit, Global Workplace Analytics had estimated that by 2025, 70% of workers will work remotely at least five days per month. 

What are the lessons for lenders?  Find out here.