Issue #009 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
I spent part of this week reading a holiday forecast that sounded almost too good to be true for small business, and then I found the catch a few paragraphs down. It’s not a reason to worry — it’s a reason to be specific about who you’re actually selling to this season. Here’s what the numbers say, and what to do with them before December gets away from you.
Trend to Watch: Small Businesses Are Set for a Record Holiday — But the Season Is Splitting in Two
A new QuickBooks holiday shopping survey of more than 6,000 consumers and 1,000 small business owners found shoppers plan to spend a record $118 billion directly at small businesses this season — 55% more than they reported spending there in 2024 — and 89% say supporting small business matters to them this year. That’s the good half. The other half: the report describes a widening “K-shaped economy,” where 30% of lower-income shoppers plan a strict budget this year versus 12% of higher-income shoppers, and 63% of lower-income shoppers plan to pay with debit while 67% of upper-income shoppers plan to pay with credit they’ll pay off monthly. Two very different holiday seasons are about to show up in the same storefront, and the business owners who notice that early are the ones who’ll actually capture their share of that $118 billion instead of just reading about it.
Opportunity of the Week: Build the One-Tap Social Storefront Before Black Friday
That same survey found 23% of shoppers now say social media storefronts are their preferred way to buy from a small business, up from just 16% two years ago — and a lot of small businesses are still posting product photos with a “DM to order” caption underneath instead of a real checkout. Offer a short, paid session to actually turn on native checkout — an Instagram Shop, a Facebook Shop, or a TikTok Shop — for a business that’s never set one up: connect the product catalog, tag items in existing posts, and test one real purchase start to finish before launch day. It’s a few hours of setup work that turns browsing into buying without the customer ever leaving the app, and almost nobody’s doing it for small businesses before the season actually starts.
Tool of the Week: Canva
If you’re facing down a holiday calendar full of sale graphics, product tags, and story templates, try Canva’s Bulk Create feature instead of building each one by hand. Upload a spreadsheet with your product names, prices, and discount codes in columns, map those columns onto a template you’ve already designed, and Canva generates a finished graphic for every row at once — twenty holiday posts in roughly the time it used to take to make two. It’s the difference between skipping social promotion because there’s no time for it, and actually having the content ready before the traffic from this week’s trend shows up.
Money Move: Nobody’s Posting the Last-Order-By Date
Every holiday season, a predictable wave of frustrated messages hits small business inboxes the week before Christmas — from customers who assumed their order would arrive in time and were never told otherwise. Almost no small business actually confirms its real carrier cutoff dates and posts them clearly across every sales channel: website, Instagram, Etsy, email signature. Offer a “holiday deadline audit”: check the real cutoff with whatever carrier or fulfillment method a business actually uses, write one clear line — “order by [date] for guaranteed delivery by the 25th” — and get it posted everywhere a customer might look before buying. It’s a one-afternoon service, it heads off a January full of refund requests, and with a record season on the way per this week’s data, there’s more order volume than usual riding on getting it right.
Resource Corner: I Will Teach You To Be Rich
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi builds its whole system around what he calls a conscious spending plan — deciding on purpose which categories you’ll spend generously on and where you’ll cut without guilt, instead of a budget that tries to restrict everything equally. That’s close to what this week’s “joy budget” data is describing on the consumer side, and it’s just as useful pointed at your own business: decide now what you’re actually willing to spend on this season — ads, inventory, your own time — and what you’re cutting instead, rather than finding out the hard way in January.
Forward Momentum
- Pull up your own sales channels this week and check: is there an actual way for someone to buy without leaving the app, or just a photo and a caption?
- Confirm the real shipping cutoff dates with your carrier or supplier, and post that one line everywhere a customer might check before they order.
- Try Canva’s Bulk Create on one holiday graphic set this week, even if it’s just five designs, and see how much time it actually saves you.
Final Thought
The headline this week is a record year for small business. The honest version is a record year for the small businesses that notice how differently their customers are shopping right now — and build for both halves of that, not just the one that looks like last year.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
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