Small Businesses Supercharging Southwest Michigan

Big businesses dominate the news cycle: Amazon’s buyout of Whole Foods, Apple without Steve Jobs, the perils and pluses of Facebook Live. Because of this, it’s sometimes too easy to forget about the small businesses; yet, they might be more influential than we give them credit for. A recent infographic in 269 Magazine shows that 99.6% of businesses in the state of Michigan are small businesses, and 49.8% of the Michigan workforce is employed by those businesses. I don’t know about you, but I was shocked at how high that number is, almost half of Michigan is tied to small businesses

With those kind of numbers, the amount of money flowing locally must be impressive too. In fact, according to local giant Quicken Loans, for every $100 spent at a small business, $70 stay within the local economy as opposed to $43 with non-local businesses. It’s pretty hard to beat a 70% retention rate, especially when you think about the human component of your local economy. That $70 is going into things like paying friends and family who work locally, maintaining the stores on main street that are unique to your town, and the local artists and artisans who sell to those stores. Plus, it’s been shown that multiple small business bring more local jobs with them than one large chain store. So those businesses are helping build robust local economies and a diverse range of jobs.

Really what this all comes down to is, shopping local is great! You can confidently support the people and town you love when you know that you’re part of what is keeping southwest Michigan so interesting. And for our part, we’re proud to be one of the small businesses employing half of the Calhoun county and Michigan workforce.

If you want to learn more about small businesses in Southwest Michigan check out:

"Small Business in Southwest Michigan" 269 Magazine, Issue 9: May/June 2017

“Small Business Saturday & How it Impacts your Local Economy” Zing by Quicken Loans, 23 November 2016