Editorial: Small Businesses Are Betting on Growth While Fighting Fires on Every Front
Taken at face value, Bank of Americaʼs new Business Owner Report reads like a victory lap. Seventy-four percent of small and mid-sized business owners expect revenue to increase next year, nearly 60 percent plan to expand, and 43 percent say theyʼll hire, while only 1 percent are even considering layoffs. In a year defined by tariff whiplash, tight credit, and election noise, that kind of optimism stands out.
Look under the hood, though, and the picture is more complicated. The same owners cheering for growth are also telling you their operating reality still hurts: 88 percent say theyʼre being hit by inflation, 75 percent are dealing with supply chain problems, and 61 percent report ongoing labor shortages that force them to work longer hours themselves. More than half of those feeling the squeeze have already raised prices, and many are still struggling to source key products and services. Main Street is pushing ahead, but itʼs doing so with one hand tied behind its back.
The coping strategy has two pillars: pass costs through to customers and lean harder on technology. Price increases remain the first line of defense, but theyʼre now paired with a quiet digital arms race. Seventy-seven percent of owners say theyʼve integrated AI into operations over the past five years, most commonly for marketing, content production, customer service, and inventory management.
Whatʼs striking is how far their optimism runs into the future. Roughly half expect local, national, and even global economies to improve over the next year, especially if tariffs stabilize, inflation cools, and rates come down. Ninety-one percent plan to adopt more digital tools, from accepting more forms of digital payments to tightening workflows and ramping up digital-first marketing and cybersecurity. Labor markets remain tight, wage pressures are real, and a majority are not focused on exits in the next five years.
Small businesses are choosing growth in spite of the conditions, not because of them. The next phase of support canʼt stop at cheap capital and generic tax credits. It has to include real moves on tariff stability, infrastructure for resilient supply chains, and practical help for small firms adopting AI safely and productively.
Small and mid-sized businesses are signaling what they want: room to hire, space to invest, and a stable enough backdrop to make their tech bets pay off. Theyʼve already decided to lean into 2026. The question now is whether the policy environment will lean with them or leave them to fight the same fires, just with fancier tools.
Case Study: How Canva Turned a Global Roadshow Into a Community-Powered Growth Engine
The Canva World Tour set out with a target of training one million people in 30 days, and it has become a masterclass in experiential marketing. By taking Canva out of product screens and into streets, campuses, fairs, and creator hubs across 40 cities, the company proved that creativity spreads faster through human connection than digital campaigns alone.
Hereʼs how Canva made it work:
Meet users where they are.
A bright-blue Brandwagon traveled coast to coast across the U.S., delivering hands-on workshops, design challenges, and pop-ups at campuses, fairs, and city centers, turning every stop into an interactive learning hub.
Design for collaboration, not demos.
Students, teachers, marketers, and creators built alongside Canvaʼs team. UCLA students flipped entire workflows, Dallas teachers learned Canva Code, and agency creatives workshopped real challenges in Times Square. Each stop collected workflow pain points, feature requests, and community “wishes.ˮ
Localize the experience.
From Manilaʼs campus takeovers to São Paulo workshops and Paris creator labs, each city had its own cultural energy, reinforcing Canvaʼs belief that creativity is universal, but community expression is local.
Make every touchpoint feel like Canva.
Rainbow Brandwagon stairs, “Imagination Stationˮ passports, interactive badges, and playful installations brought the productʼs values of accessibility, creativity, and collaboration into physical form.
Use experiences to fuel brand strategy.
Live conversations with creators surfaced challenges more valuable than surveys or focus groups. These insights fed directly into product vision, community programming, and AI-driven features.
What unites these moves is intent. Canva treats experiential marketing not as spectacle, but as a feedback engine that turns users into co-creators. The result is a community-centered playbook showing how brands can stay human in an AI-accelerated era.
Play of the Week: Use AI as a Draft Partner, Not a Finish Line
AI is incredible at wiping out the “blank pageˮ problem, but that dopamine hit is not the same as real productivity. Most of the time, AI gets you 70–90% of the way there and then quietly hands you the hardest part: the last 10–30% of judgment, editing, and error-checking. The trick is to design your workflow so AI clears shallow work and inertia, while you stay in charge of decisions that actually move the needle.
Define AI-safe tasks upfront: Route summaries, boilerplate emails, simple reports, and document reviews to AI. Keep the complex strategy, client
commitments, and anything reputationally sensitive in your human-only column.
Start with structure: Ask AI for outlines, key points, checklists, and alternative framings of your idea instead of full, finished drafts. Youʼll reduce hallucinations and make editing faster.
Time-box the last 10 percent: When AI generates a draft, set a hard limit (e.g., 15–20 minutes) to review, fact-check, and finalize. If itʼs taking longer, the task was too complex for AI and should be redone more manually.
Always bring subject-matter expertise: Only use AI in areas where you roughly know what “excellentˮ looks like. If you canʼt spot wrong numbers, broken logic, or bogus claims, youʼre gambling.
Treat AI like an intern: Give clear briefs, small-scoped tasks, and explicit constraints (“no made-up stats,ˮ “cite sources,ˮ “keep within 300 wordsˮ). Assume it will make mistakes and plan to review accordingly.
Measure real impact: Track how long tasks take with and without AI for a week. Keep only the workflows where AI consistently cuts total time or improves quality without increasing error rates.
Automate shallow, protect deep work: Use AI to clean your inbox, generate meeting notes, and draft first passes so you can protect blocks of
uninterrupted time for thinking, planning, and high-leverage projects.
Treat AI as a power tool that makes it easier to start and clear low-value work, not as an autopilot for your job. The people who win this wave arenʼt the ones who use AI the most; theyʼre the ones who decide, ruthlessly, where AI belongs in their day and where it doesnʼt.
Metric Benchmark
Closing Note
Small businesses are heading into 2026 with a strange mix of optimism and strain. They expect to grow, hire, and invest, even as they juggle tight labor markets, higher costs, and noisy promises about AI and “easyˮ marketing wins. Owners
who will actually convert this optimism into outcomes are doing three things well: using data to price and plan instead of guessing, treating AI as a draft partner rather than a finish line, and building a real community around their brands. The environment wonʼt magically get simpler, but the playbook is clear enough.
See you next week.
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