{"id":658,"date":"2020-11-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/?p=658"},"modified":"2020-11-18T20:33:49","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T00:33:49","slug":"021-factors-affecting-the-us-small-business-economy-in-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/021-factors-affecting-the-us-small-business-economy-in-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Factors Affecting the US Small Business Economy in 2021 &#8211; November 16, 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/riE5LqfF_K4?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;start=8&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Factors Affecting the US Small Business Economy in 2021<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/web.w3cinc.com\/\">W3C Web Services<\/a>&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/redirect?q=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.w3cinc.com%2F&amp;redir_token=QUFFLUhqbjBtZXhQX3JtdVA5aVVCcVFUQlUybXRQeVlRUXxBQ3Jtc0tuS3J6UktDb2hpOHozUVFraF9ub1g3bHhDWndGTnhMM0s1NGZWdFRSUUhVaUV2M3NNWjJRWEYxU2N3Wl9RUXlEVHBHTXZnMk5kekFLQW5EZ0gxSjZ5YzZZQXZoYmRWX3NhZm5NM2NkWnJKVnllYXh3RQ%3D%3D&amp;v=LeZV2Kwx2do&amp;event=video_description\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/web.w3cinc.com\/<\/a>) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. This week, among other news, Ray covers the new Web analytics tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(If you\u2019re reading this in a podcast directory\/app, please visit https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to discuss this episode, please <a href=\"#reply-title\">click here to leave a comment<\/a> down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to <a href=\"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/contact\/\">contact me here<\/a> about any other questions or comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">In this Cast<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/w3cinc.com\/about-w3-consulting\/about-ray\/\" rel=\"noopener\">Ray Sidney-Smith<\/a>, Host<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Show Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.apple.com\/mac\/\">Mac &#8211; Apple<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2020\/11\/12\/21562771\/paypal-cryptocurrency-buy-sell-bitcoin-ethereum-litecoin-us-users\">PayPal will now let all users in the US buy and sell cryptocurrencies &#8211; The Verge<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/daveywinder\/2020\/11\/15\/google-chrome-update-gets-serious-homeland-security-cisa-confirms-attacks-underway\/?sh=4d6c50e1f08c\">Google Chrome Update Gets Serious: Homeland Security (CISA) Confirms Attacks Underway<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.komando.com\/security-privacy\/facebook-passwords-stolen\/764272\/\">Facebook security warning: Thousands of passwords stolen<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/google-web-stories-plugin-for-wordpress-gets-first-big-update\/387560\/#close\">Google Web Stories Plugin for WordPress Gets First Big Update<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/huge-asian-trade-pact-signed-002503549.html\">World&#8217;s largest free trade agreement signed in coup for China<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/markets.businessinsider.com\/news\/stocks\/ecommerce-companies-stocks-thrive-post-pandemic-world-stifel-says-2020-11-1029793553\">These 6 ecommerce companies will continue to thrive in a post-pandemic world, Stifel says | Markets Insider<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/27ecc074-50c2-4898-8ee7-b4d8d2d3581e\">DoorDash reports surge in lockdown revenue in IPO filing | Financial Times<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/pandemic-speeds-americans-embrace-of-digital-commerce-11605436200?mod=flipboard\">Pandemic Speeds Americans\u2019 Embrace of Digital Commerce &#8211; WSJ<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_zfzOoQ0Uo4\">Brands shift marketing strategies amid global crises &#8211; YouTube <\/a>(VIDEO)<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.webandbeyond.community\/\">Join us in Web and Beyond Community<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Raw Text Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<span><a onclick=\"read_toggle(1271544527, 'Read More', 'Read Less'); return false;\" class=\"read-link\" id=\"readlink1271544527\" style=\"readlink\" href=\"#\">Read More<\/a><\/span>\n<div class=\"read_div\" id=\"read1271544527\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  0:09<br \/>\nHello, and welcome to web and beyond live. This is November 16 2020. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith. I am president of W three consulting. And I&#8217;m managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress and web hosting, as well as domain registration services and other web related services for small business. Each week, I come to you with news about digital marketing and productivity and cybersecurity and all kinds of other technology fun, that affects small business and my commentary on it. And some announcements about things that we&#8217;re doing at WCC, as well as w three c web services. So today, what I wanted to do was I wanted to talk about Apple a little bit, they&#8217;re bringing arm chip based computers to the market and its third chip iteration and how that&#8217;s going to affect small businesses, kind of my commentary on those thoughts, their pay pal is going to help you buy cryptocurrency, or that is consumers buying cryptocurrency and what that really means for small business in that sense. We have Google updating the web stories plugin, which you know, I&#8217;m very bullish on and very excited about. And then I wanted to end our conversation today with really, what factors are going to impact the US Small Business economy in 2021. So we have an action packed show for you today. And so let&#8217;s get into the topics. First and foremost, Mack is the Mac lineup, that is Apple&#8217;s lineup of Mac computers, had three new Macs announced last week. And apple in their event called One more thing, they announced the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro 13 inch, and a new Mac Mini in two varieties. And so what we have here now are three new devices that are containing what they call the apple m one chip based on the apple silicon concept, apple, silicon is the arm based chip that they are calling it. And arm is just a type of chip, that type of architecture that that&#8217;s they&#8217;re using, in essence, Apple has gone through from the PC, the whatever was the PC version to the Intel chip to now, the M one or Apple silicon chips, they&#8217;ve gone through multiple iterations of this, the only reason I&#8217;m bringing this up is because we really do have to pay attention to cost in small business. And what we&#8217;re seeing is Apple&#8217;s movement of the chips is actually bringing down the cost on some of these devices ever so slightly for entry level computers. And with more and more people who are working from home or working in hybrid environments, they&#8217;re working remotely in some way shape or form, these chips actually provide a potential, you know, both power savings and in terms of wattage, and then also increase in processing power, that potentially this could be good for some small businesses. So I&#8217;ve always been a fan of buying the cheapest hard, not the cheapest, but the most affordable hardware for small businesses, which tend to be Chrome OS operating platform along with Android devices. And that still tends to be my recommendation purely because the hardware is very inexpensive. And to the the operating systems on on which it&#8217;s running are Google and if you are running any web based software, which what small business isn&#8217;t today, you are basically capable of connecting all of those pieces within that ecosystem fairly easily. Now, of course, if you are a Microsoft shop, and you are using all Microsoft products, then it probably makes more sense to go with a Windows operating system so that you have the greatest connectivity and integration between those systems. But you know, if you&#8217;re using Google workspace, formerly known as G Suite, you&#8217;re fully capable of running those on any system, whether that&#8217;s Apple based, you know, Mac OS, or the Windows based or Chrome OS operating systems. That being the case, Apple&#8217;s making a pretty interesting play here. With regard to that, I just wanted to bring it to people&#8217;s attention that if you are interested in going ahead and buying one of these devices, my kind of go to experts have been saying the MacBook Air is a phenomenal computer to go at. And it&#8217;s starting at 999 for the baseline model, and it&#8217;s available all of the new models are available as of 1117, which is tomorrow. For those of you who are watching live, it&#8217;s for those who are watching the podcast. That&#8217;s today because that&#8217;s when you&#8217;re downloading the podcast. But the the processing power on these things is amazing. And I&#8217;m really curious to see I will probably be buying myself a Mac Mini to use as a test computer and so we&#8217;ll go from there. Next up, I wanted to just let everybody know that PayPal of all companies is stepping out there into the market and letting folks know that they will be supporting the bond Have cryptocurrency in the very near future.<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  5:04<br \/>\nWhat this really means is that we will now be seeing the proliferation of cryptocurrency among consumers. Now to date, we really haven&#8217;t seen a lot of people purchasing cryptocurrency. So it&#8217;s not like it&#8217;s everybody under the, you know, you know, under the sun is attempting to buy this. But now what you can see here is PayPal will be giving this functionality directly within the application. As of the time of this recording, I did the update in my own application I haven&#8217;t yet seen, I tried to push an update of the paper application on my own Android device. And I did not see an update yet for this capability. But it&#8217;s supposedly out there in the wild. But in essence, for those of you who are not aware, cryptocurrency is basically a form of digital currency. And there are a wide variety of them there are there are hundreds, if not thousands of different types of cryptocurrency. And several of them are now available in point of sale systems. So that small businesses like yourself can actually receive those cryptocurrencies as payment. Now, of course, there&#8217;s volatility and paying those, it&#8217;s like taking a foreign currency, that is a fiat currency, in any way, shape, or form in the US, that&#8217;s stable, because you know, US dollar paid today&#8217;s is worth the US dollar paid tomorrow. But if you&#8217;re taking, say, a, a euro, or you&#8217;re taking you on payment, those things are obviously going to be you know, traded differently, and therefore, there&#8217;s going to be a currency exchange value that&#8217;s going to impact your business. The same thing applies with cryptocurrencies. So just be mindful of that fact that when you purchase cryptocurrencies, if an audience you know, an audience member of viewers decides that they want to buy with cryptocurrency, you do have to then convert it back into fiat currency, US dollars, or otherwise. And that is going to impact your bottom line in some way, shape or form. And also take into account the, the normal tax implications of that. So we just have to be mindful of that. But I think this is a huge win for cryptocurrency that they are getting people to support the, the concept of it and and we will see what happens going forward in terms of government regulation on cryptocurrency, we see some of that lightweight, with the SEC. And now we&#8217;re gonna see more and more Come come about. And we&#8217;ll see what the Commerce Department says we&#8217;ll see what the all of the various, you know, government authorities say about that, in regard to either embracing or rejecting the notion of cryptocurrency, but PayPal is now accepting it. And that means people can buy and in essence trade in cryptocurrency much easier than they were capable of before. Okay, two quick notes. You know how I love cybersecurity, and I know, you probably are sick of me talking about cybersecurity. But I&#8217;m going to tell you about these things anyway, because they&#8217;re so so important. Um, the first item is that Google Chrome recently received an update. And if it did not, you will go up to the little three dots icon in the top right hand corner of your system, you will go down to help. And then about Google Chrome. So go to three dots icon, which is your more options or Options menu, you go down to help. And then about Chrome, in that you will get a little prompt that says, your systems are up to date. Great, you&#8217;re good to go. Thumbs up, if you get a notice that you have to update please, please update, please tell everybody you know, to update right now, Cisco, which is the the Homeland Security Agency, which is for cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, they made an announcement that an essence, Google Chrome instances, you know, the software that has not been update, or basically getting, you know, are currently being attacked by people. And again, you need to patch it, so that you can go ahead and get yourself secure in that sense. So please, if you have, they&#8217;re using Google Chrome, which you&#8217;re likely doing, please go ahead and update your Google Chrome so that you don&#8217;t don&#8217;t become susceptible and your business doesn&#8217;t become susceptible to that. So that means making sure that if you have employees, if you have vendors, if you have customers, let them know, also to update Google Chrome so that they can make you more secure by them being more secure. We&#8217;re all more secure when we&#8217;re all secure. Okay,<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  9:32<br \/>\nnext up, Facebook had a password leak, somehow there have been some social media accounts that were stolen. And and so this is this is allowing login credentials for Facebook to be leaked out into the dark web. And so if you have not changed your password in a while, this is just a reminder to go out there and change your password. So you can I will provide a link in the system that you can actually Let&#8217;s see, do they provide a system for telling you whether or not your password has been? I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m sorry. No, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a way for you to find out whether your your name was in the hack. I mean, I guess you can go to have I been pawned. But the reality is, is that now&#8217;s a good time to go ahead and change your password, just like take this as an opportunity to go change your password and Facebook. And also, I mean, it&#8217;s also a really good time to set up two factor authentication or multi factor authentication on Facebook. And what that means is going out there and making sure that you have a another factor that could be a one time password application authenticator like Google Authenticator, Microsoft authenticator, LastPass authenticator, that goes ahead and says to you, hey, when you go to login, use this code, and then I&#8217;ll let you in so that hackers can&#8217;t use just your username and password, your email address and password to get into your Facebook account, or phone number and password. Because those are usually you know, your email address and your phone number. So frequently known by so many people, that you really don&#8217;t want to use that as the primary mechanism for being able to log into Facebook, you should use that multi factor authentication that they give to you. Okay, so next up is my kind of favorite news of the day, although we&#8217;re going to talk about other topics. But my favorite news today is that Google has put out their first major release of the Google Web stories plugin for WordPress. In essence, what they&#8217;re doing is providing three quick wins for the system. And what they&#8217;ve done is they have rolled out the ability to support gifts or gifts, depending upon how you pronounce it. Both are acceptable. But gifts are going to be now added into the integration using tenor as its background functionality. So now you&#8217;re able to go ahead and you know, add gifts to your web stories. Now, if if you have not heard me before, talk about this web stories, in essence, is a plugin that is being provided to WordPress installations, those WordPress installations now will give you the ability to create stories akin to Snapchat stories, Instagram stories, Facebook stories, LinkedIn stories, they are a function that is now available in Google inside of the Google discovery space, Google News and other places around Google, this is very, very powerful. It puts a full screen environment in front of the user and walks them through whatever you&#8217;re presenting, it&#8217;s being indexed by Google and otherwise. So this is just very, very powerful. This is the time to get in, and to get seen by Google in a way that other folks are not getting seen. So Jeff&#8217;s are being supported. They&#8217;re also adding some new typography the new typefaces into the system. So that&#8217;s really nice of them to add some more typefaces in partnership with a writer. And then last, but not least, which I think is the biggest piece of this is they&#8217;re adding video captions, so you need to put it into the VTT format, which is the type of closed captioning format, the system needs, and those not closed caption, but video captions, but the video captions need that format, so put it into the VTT format. And then you can upload that into the system. And now it will apply the text of video inside those stories. Now, this is important for multiple reasons, right? What have I always said, well, what&#8217;s good for web accessibility is good for Google.<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  13:24<br \/>\nAnd what&#8217;s good for Google is good for your small business. So the reality is, is that if you want to drive more traffic, you need to on Earth, all of the other content coming out of that video, so that Google is able to index that and bring more people to you. So if you&#8217;re your text, the captions include part of the script the transcript of your video, and that is promoting more content, you need to be able to more keywords that is or key phrases, you want to make sure that that rich content is being fed into Google and video captions is the next iteration to be able to do that. And I&#8217;m really, really excited to see them bring that to it, which means that you can now do so audiograms, as well as video grams and bringing those video captions to audio grams and video games or just short audio snippets or video snippets, both have a visual image associated with the audiogram might just show moving waveform. The video obviously has whatever the subject of the video is on screen. And and it provides now a capability for you to put this text into the Google algorithm. And not many people are doing this. So you should definitely get in on the action. So I know that I&#8217;ve been working on doing more and more with Google Web stories across a wide variety of of websites that we have. And now we&#8217;ll be trying it on w three consultants website to see how it all works. But I&#8217;m very excited and I think that people should really pay attention. All right, with that, that takes us along to kind of the kind of the biggest piece of what I wanted to talk about today. Which is that over the Over the weekend, basically, China and a bunch of other countries signed what is called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with the RCP. Now I&#8217;ve been paying attention to the RCP since about 2018. And we&#8217;ve been kind of slowly but surely wondering what was going to happen with regard to this, along with the current administration. And, in essence, the 15 nations in the Asia, Asia Pacific region, have now basically signed on to this free trade agreement. So the Trump administration, you know, when they first came into power, went ahead and removed the United States from the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, and that I think, was part of the US, China, China trade wars, and presumably a perspective, the idea behind how do you<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  15:59<br \/>\ndeal with kind of the two big superpower economies in the world, right by global GDP, China in the US, and China, of course, is outpacing the United States and it will become the largest, you know, global economic economy very soon. That being the case, the United States still has quite a bit of power and leverage, and you know, we have the largest military in the world. And so there are pieces of this that need to be kind of worked out. I think this was a huge loss for not just the Trump administration. But for the United States. And more specifically for us small businesses. In essence, the RCP provides small businesses within the economic region, that is the 10 Southeast Asian company countries that include China, Japan, South Korea, as well as New Zealand and Australia. So that, in essence, those countries really make up about 30% of global GDP. And, and it cannot be understated how powerful this really formalizing of what was already happening comes to be. So just a couple of notes here, I think that what&#8217;s going to happen is that just as a factor of coming into 2021, small businesses really need to take note that if you&#8217;re doing any international trade, you will probably be impacted in some way shape or form by this new economic deal. The reality factor is with the pandemic coming in, you know, kind of roiling, and really raging in the United States, uncontrolled. And with businesses really starting to feel the clamp on number of different factors, we&#8217;re gonna see, payrolls, of course, start to decline, as more and more businesses start to layoff people coming into the new year. This is really unfortunate, but it&#8217;s just kind of the writing&#8217;s on the wall, I see this in the, in my the readings around the various HR forums and the various HR experts that I&#8217;ve been talking to, I&#8217;ve really been saying that, you know, a lot of companies are just preparing themselves for these mass layoffs. Which means that some of the folks who were otherwise doing well in the economy through 2020, who are able to remotely work, who are able to continue to work even in in face of adversity, are going to start getting let go. And when that happens, some of the money that was being put into the economy that was paying into the economy, and keeping it kind of propped up, are going to be lost. And that is a huge, huge concern for me. So we have that pressure, on top of the fact that now, the Southeast Asian countries along with some of these other Pacific countries, Australia, New Zealand, are now going to be freely trading inside of their own economic zones. Of course, China is getting to play both sides of this, right? The Chinese economy is supposed to be communist, but really, they have these 1117 whatever it is, you know, economic regions, where they are allowed to basically act like capitalists and and work in these zones, while still, you know, reaping some of the rewards of, of shielding from their economy, what would otherwise be pressures that any other open, global capitalistic country has to pay for. So we&#8217;re seeing some of these problems here. In China, obviously, intellectual property is a major issue that&#8217;s coming to the fore. And it&#8217;s something that the Biden Harris administration is going to have to really deal with. So there are pressures in place that small business owners really need to pay attention to because these things just don&#8217;t stop at the borders. They&#8217;re going to impact us because all of this has to come down to supply chain, tariffs and and how those impact ultimately what our retail pricing is going to be on products, availability of services within the country because Because of lack of supply chain, and because of tariff based issues, so this is going to have a profound effect on us. And I feel like we have lost what is probably multiple major battles in what was the Chinese, China US trade war. And I think that&#8217;s a pressure that&#8217;s going to be on top of small business on top of the pandemic coming into this. And so, you know, aside from any politics, I just consider this to be a huge failure on the part of the Trump administration. And and and this is going to really impact SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises. And I&#8217;m really sad to see this happen at this point in time, of course, this was this was timed appropriately by the Chinese government, Xi Jinping is making a statement, this was a power play, to be able to make that statement. And I think it&#8217;s one well made, to all of us paying attention, that the economies of the world really need to come to the table and figure this out, you know, the French are working very closely with the Chinese government to be able to aggressively make some kind of pact, we&#8217;re seeing more and more of this, and I&#8217;m hoping what I&#8217;m hoping is that the Biden Harris administration, with regard to their green economy, plans can really make some inroads here, and, and really, you know, with some infrastructure bills, and otherwise, really figure out how to get small businesses engine, the Small Business engine, you know, kind of churning again, growing and grinding, again, because we really need to make sure that we are pushing forward. And that really requires a global reach, as opposed to this kind of, you know, very locked in perspective that we&#8217;re only going to, you know, do well, by focusing only on what&#8217;s happening domestically, we<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  21:43<br \/>\nreally need to have both eyes, both domestically and abroad. Okay, this brings us to the kind of next couple of pieces here, I&#8217;ve been noting, kind of two arguments happening among many of the major business powers that are out there. On one side, you have articles like this, where the stifle which is a major banking investment firm, they basically came out and said, that post pandemic, in essence, there are going to be certain ecommerce businesses that survive and thrive. And there are going to be those that don&#8217;t. And of course, they put their positioning on all the various businesses that are, are going to thrive in the in the post pandemic world as being those businesses that satisfy a couple of different things. So what they&#8217;re really talking about are stocks, and how the market will approach this, versus really the overall business industries. And I&#8217;ll kind of explain this a little bit further. But they note Amazon, of course, eBay, of course, Etsy. interesting choice for that, but they believe that Etsy is going to have an essence strong, you know, long term capabilities over the course of this post pandemic recovery. Netflix, that makes sense, peloton, and then wayfair, which is the furniture and home decor company. Now, I wanted to walk through these because I think it makes a lot of sense why they chose these, of course, Amazon is the Jeff Bezos company. And it has been really a mainstay of the pandemic conversation because of their delivery their distribution capabilities. So that makes sense that they would choose them as a stock that will do well subsequent to the to the pandemic, or the resolution of the pandemic. eBay, of course, makes a lot of sense, because they are also collecting together and all the volume that they have, has really helped to maintain the business in terms of stock. Etsy, of course, there are a lot of small crafts, people who are using the platform to be able to use it as an e commerce solution, as well as a marketplace to be able to get it out to the world. Netflix, of course, a lot of people are staying at home and working from home. And there&#8217;s an entertainment factor there as well. And then, of course, the last two are the most unique to me, because I think this is where it affects small business the most. So peloton has increased their business by increasing their ability to go into the home and in essence, create a fitness environment utilizing their own hardware and their digital platform on top of that. And so they&#8217;ve given this for you know, what would be presumably the luxury market. And I think that those businesses that are going to pivot in that space are going to do well. So the fitness studios, the yoga instructors, the polities instructors, the cycling studios, and otherwise, that can convert and do this kind of service at a reasonable rate for the everyday American is really going to do well. And and peloton really is leading the way in that way. So I just think that again, those who can convert to digital experience are going to see themselves both be able to survive during the pandemic and the various rolling Lock downs and other kinds of compliance issues. But then post pandemic, you then have the ability to bring people back to a retail environment if they want to. But really, then you have the ability to start marketing and expanding beyond your, say five mile radius of business to maybe 15, or 20, or even to your state or region. And with that capability, now people who would, this always happens, you know, you, you&#8217;re going to a gym, and then you moved, and you&#8217;re just outside of that range, and you no longer want to make that commute. Well, if you have this kind of digital experience available to your customers, you&#8217;re able to say, Hey, listen, even if you move away, you&#8217;ll still be able to support us in some small way, by staying a member through our virtual gym membership.<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  25:42<br \/>\nAnd these are the kinds of things that will help into 2021. And beyond, that now creates a new diverse income or revenue stream set. And, and that&#8217;s really going to help a lot of businesses, I think that you know, using the the virtual gym as a as a as an archetype, but there are a lot of verticals that can do this. And so be creative with the way in which you do this and use this time to test the various models for doing different types of virtual experience. And I think that&#8217;s going to be useful for a lot of businesses. The other side is wayfair. This is really for moving from service based businesses to the to the product based businesses. wayfair, of course, is utilizing this time to be able to, you know, help homeowners and and, you know, and and, and us folks who are basically looking to read redo their home, they&#8217;re trying to redesign their home make their home more livable, and more workable, since they&#8217;re doing some level of hybrid or remote work. And so that makes a lot of sense that people would be doing that. But the more important part is that wayfair has done a lot of work to basically put in their, their digital experience, their retail experiences, is just really locked in and makes it really nice, IKEA has done this also. And, and at the same time, they&#8217;ve also made sure that they&#8217;ve been able to get their distribution down, right, they&#8217;re primarily a ship to home kind of, of product business. And that is really lowered their, their overhead so they can make this kind of happen. You know, the things that I think about are that if you&#8217;re selling product, you really have to have really great customer service support, as well as potentially some kind of video or other kinds of pieces there to give people the opportunity to, in essence, structure, the experience that they&#8217;re having at home with your products. And I see the more businesses that are going to do that are going to do well. But that&#8217;s going to be a huge factor in 2020. Going into 2021. As more people do this, I wanted to note just two other things. And that is doordash has recently gone, you know, filed for their IPO. And with that initial public offering filing, they noted a bunch of really interesting things, which is that in the first nine months of the year, they posted $1.9 billion in revenues, which is just remarkable. So we have this closing in the on the market, right. And if we include the freelancers and other folks who are who are basically in that gig economy space together, and freelancers and gig economy, folks can be separated from each other as well. But still, these are solo folks who are using apps out there in the marketplace, to be able to either have a side hustle or a primary hustle. And and doordash kind of hinted at what I see is downward pressure on those freelancers on those gig economy workers, in the sense that they&#8217;re trying to go to, you know, driverless vehicles, they&#8217;re trying to go to this, this concept where they&#8217;re going to remove the gig worker from the gig economy. Uber has been trying this with their with their driverless vehicles for some time. The more and more I see this go down the path is that in essence, a lot of these big technology companies, the reason why they have made this strong argument that they are not employers is because ultimately, what they want to do is get rid of the gig worker, and just make this all technology so that the cars are going to drive themselves, the drones are going to deliver by themselves, there&#8217;s not going to really be a human involved in that process. Which means a lot of these folks who really from the last economic downturn into this one who were really making a living from these kinds of gig working opportunities are going to also be lost. So I see this really heightening, it&#8217;s going to really be concentrated in 2021, as more technology comes onto the market, where we&#8217;re not really there yet, in terms of driverless vehicles, you know, being out there in mass, but I see more and more of the gig economy workers becoming dependent upon these companies, and then near the end of 2021, or into 2022. I&#8217;m not sure when that&#8217;s going to happen, but as soon as more of them technology&#8217;s really come on to the market, that&#8217;s really gonna affect a lot of business owners, a lot of these freelancers and gig workers. And I&#8217;m a little bit nervous about those folks who are going to be impacted, which again, is going to hurt the economy. And so we need to be very mindful of that, especially since we&#8217;re already in a bad kind of position. To begin with, I&#8217;m going to close out with just the Wall Street Journal, had a really interesting article that was talking about how the pandemic is speeding the Americans embrace of digital commerce, and in essence, from health care, to vehicle purchases, to of course, eating out, and so on, so forth. The pandemic has provided this platform for folks to do more online that they otherwise weren&#8217;t doing in the first place. For example, I don&#8217;t know about you, but you know, getting a parent or older relative to video chat before the pandemic was probably not the easiest, you know, project. Now today, it seems to be the norm, it seems to be much more available to folks and people are willing to do it. And and I think that&#8217;s kind of happened across the board. Case in point very personal, you know, kind of vignette for me, I&#8217;ve been fairly reticent to use these online grocery shopping apps, to basically order groceries to be delivered at home. And of course, the pandemic has brought that to the kind of the brink now where I&#8217;m thinking, Okay, yes, that is something that we need to do in order to both be safe. But also it&#8217;s giving money to folks who need it, by by hiring these folks through the apps, were really capable of giving someone who needs the money, the cash. And so the the goal here is to be able to figure out which of these things are going to stay longer in the market than otherwise stifle. And in that Business Insider article seemed to be fairly bearish on the idea of, you know, kind of, they seem to be down on the concept that many of these e commerce components were going to last beyond the pandemic, and, and just major industries with these major stock, we&#8217;re going to go into last. I think that&#8217;s probably because a lot of these small business owners, in my perspective, are not embracing the digital experience. They&#8217;re just doing it as a stopgap measure. And what I really think they should be doing is thinking about it as a full future growth perspective that it&#8217;s a hybrid approach. If you have brick and mortar right now, I&#8217;m not saying that&#8217;s going to go away. But it certainly needs to be considered kind of seamlessly integrated with your digital and retail experience, which of course, helps digital marketing altogether, because you can drive more retail traffic, as well as online purchase traffic from the same web presence from the same<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  32:31<br \/>\ndigital marketing strategies. And so that&#8217;s really important on one level, but the the article on Wall Street Journal really was much more bullish in that same sense, they were really saying that some of these pieces are going to stick. You know, I&#8217;ve heard anecdotally from folks that they&#8217;re not going back to the grocery stores ever again, that they&#8217;re not going to purchase from retail or from big box stores in person anymore, which means that small businesses have the opportunity to be seen saying Google Shopping or an Amazon or other places, by pushing strategic ads in those places, or placing their products in those feeds, they get to be seen next to products of big box retail retailers. This is a very, very pivotal and powerful moment for small business owners who choose to do this stuff. So I just really, really push and urge people to think about how they&#8217;re going to be making those kinds of pivots over the over the near term and over the long term, because you&#8217;ll be better off for it. And I&#8217;m noting here Robin&#8217;s asking about in a future episode episode to give us a link to the best practice example using Oh yeah, I&#8217;ll be happy to do that. Once I do have some web stories available on the website. I&#8217;ll be happy to show you those so you can see them in action. So yes, thank you for that. All right. That brings me to just some quick announcements. First and foremost, our next small business virtual roundtable will be on December 1, the topic will be preparing your business for 2021. And this is why I kind of wanted to touch base on this topic today. The next few weeks we have some other topics coming up and I wanted to let everybody know that 2021 is is going to hopefully be better than 2020 but we have some things that we need to do in order to make that happen. And so the Small Business virtual roundtable is a time for you to come together with other small business owners and have that conversation and kick around ideas and I&#8217;m looking forward to having that on December 1. If you go to WCC inc.com forward slash events, you will find the information for all of those so you can go to W three the number three w three c i NC comm forward slash events and find that there. Next up we also have the web beyond webinars that are beginning so twice monthly. I&#8217;m going to come to you with different topics around digital marketing productivity for small business, our first webinar, we had to actually rejigger the first webinar so the new first webinar is going to be November 19. That&#8217;s going to be on Google workspace for small business. And I&#8217;ll be covering how to use Google workspace, which is formerly known as G Suite. But there have been some modifications to the interface. And I wanted to walk people through kind of give an overview of what Google workspace is, and how small business owners can utilize it to their best effect. Then on December 3, I&#8217;ll be doing my annual small business digital marketing, kind of Year in Review year in preview. So what will small business digital marketing look like in 2021, and then we&#8217;ll close out the year with web and beyond webinar for 1217. And that&#8217;ll be lessons from a year going live, I&#8217;m gonna go talk to you about really what lessons I&#8217;ve learned from going live here on web and beyond live each week for a year. And so I look forward to talking to you all about that. Just so you know, I have launched a community called weapon beyond community. And of course, you can join me in that community by going to www dot web and beyond doc community. And so the community is available there. And you can post thoughts and questions and the community can dive in and help you answer those. I also want you to make a quick note that healthier healthcare.gov, the open enrollment is still open. So if you&#8217;re uninsured, and you want to ensure health coverage, for 2021, head over to healthcare.gov, to learn more. And so the ACA has provided this infrastructure, it is still going and and so if you need it, it is there for you. And I know that a lot of freelancers, small business owners, you know, gig workers, they need that. So go out there and let folks know that it&#8217;s available, because the current administration has not been telling many people that it is still there, but it is still there. And no matter what people need to be able to go into 2021 with greater certainty regarding their health. And it&#8217;s just important that we all support each other in this, this pandemic. And I just wanted to make note of that. So healthcare.gov and I think it&#8217;s through 1215 that it&#8217;s available for you to be able to establish yourself during open enrollment. All right, we&#8217;ve come to the end of our time together this week. And so thank you for joining me If you&#8217;ve enjoyed the live stream go ahead and click the thumbs up icon that helps new small business friends find us and so thank you for doing that. Like if a question or comment Feel free to leave a comment you can tweet at me at W three consulting i i man the Twitter account most of the time and so I&#8217;m always happy to respond there.<\/p>\n<p>Raymond Sidney-Smith  37:26<br \/>\nYou can always join us on Mondays at 11am. Eastern here unless otherwise noted on our social channels, but I&#8217;m usually here at 11am. Eastern to come to you and bring you a weapon beyond live. Thanks so much for joining me. For this weapon beyond live. I&#8217;m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of W three consulting and WCC web services. Have a great week ahead Marketing your Small Business on the web and beyond.<\/p>\n<p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Factors Affecting the US Small Business Economy in 2021 Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of&nbsp;W3C Web Services&nbsp;(https:\/\/web.w3cinc.com\/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"#WebandBeyondLive: Factors Affecting the US Small Business Economy in 2021","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,33],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/webandbeyondcast.com\/files\/2020\/11\/Web-and-Beyond-Live-v4.png?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9fCrw-aC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webandbeyondcast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}