“Shop Small”

If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “shop small,” you wouldn’t be alone. For as long as I can remember I’ve had people telling me that I should shop from small family run businesses. I didn’t truly understand the importance though, until my husband and I started a business of our own. To me, it was a cliche meant to guilt me into spending more money. But now… I get it.

Small Businesses are Close to Home.

The service our gutter cleaning company offers, isn’t comparable to what a huge brand could offer. Currently my husband does the vast majority of the jobs, and the ones he needs help with are done by one of his brothers. That means that we really know our customers. A couple weeks back, I overheard my husband asking a client of ours for an update on her husband's cancer. It’s not uncommon for him to stay late at a job site of a widow because she was lonely and needed someone to talk to. 

Customers are never a number on a spreadsheet to a small business. You are a friend of the family, someone we go to church with, a business owner in our community… We see you at dinner on a Friday night when we get away for a rare date night. My husband talked to you last month at the daddy-daughter dance. We aren’t strangers who show up, do mediocre work, and then you never see them again. 

Home has our Heart.

Hiring us is different from paying some big corporation. Every time we receive a call we do a little dance with our toddler. Every check my husband comes home with pays for groceries, rent, and other necessities for our family. If you ask my son what his daddy does for work, he will proudly tell you, “daddy cleans gutters”. 

Some may think it’s unprofessional to hear children in the background of a business call, or that I have our kids in the car when I stop by a house to make a quote… But those people simply aren’t our customers. We don’t have a big office we work out of. We don’t have an HR department or quarterly meetings with investors. It’s just us–a husband and wife laying awake at night talking about how we can grow our business–dreaming of what kind of a legacy we can leave to our children. And all this because you chose to shop small!