FUTURIST SPEAKERS: HOW TO BE MORE RESILIENT

Take a tip from your favorite futurist speakers and friends at management consulting firm FutureProof Strategies: While the past couple years have been times of great change and upheaval, change can also be a powerful catalyst for growth and innovation.  Entrepreneurialism is still thriving. Technology is being used in innovative ways. People are getting more creative. And most importantly, a recovery is in sight.

Speaking of – we recently connected with freelance marketplace Fiverr.com to explore the many types of services that can help them rebound, transform, or even grow their business during these fast-changing times. As it turns out, they recently released their Small Business Needs Index, a look at the top things that small businesses are searching for on their platform, and you’d be surprised at some of the interesting themes that came out of it.  

When looking at services that businesses are increasingly searching for over the past several months, the data shows that five major global themes emerged. It is evident that these are areas where small businesses and entrepreneurs are focusing their efforts to rebuild, pivot and even start fresh.

• Creating a digital storefront
• Learning how to recover and build back a business
• Using their creativity to make money
• Finding ways to start something new
• Tapping into up and coming technologies

It’s clear that having a digital storefront is extremely important nowadays – for example, Fiverr saw a 302% increase in searches for Shopify store design help and 778% increase in searches for Amazon virtual assistants. But it’s also clear from the company’s search data that businesses are focused on recovery and building back traditional businesses as well. For instance, restaurants appear to be trying to save money and better serve their customers by building their own food delivery apps – searches for food delivery apps were up 177% on Fiverr. Additional topics including crowdfunding and bookkeeping were also way up in search results.

Best of all though, while 2020 was one of the toughest years for small businesses in recent history, we also saw more businesses created that same year than at any time in the past decade – a trend which seems to have only continued in 2021, and looks poised to continue this year well into 2022 and beyond.