The best advice from Yelp’s 2024 Local Business Summit 

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road, but you don’t need to do it solo. Wherever you are in your business journey, you can learn from those who’ve come before you: mentors and inspirational leaders like Kogi BBQ’s Roy Choi, Drybar’s Alli Webb, and Salt & Straw’s Kim Malek.

At Yelp’s 2024 Local Business Summit, these founders joined a diverse group of small business owners, executives, and industry experts to share words of wisdom on everything from hiring to branding with the next generation.

Below, find their best pieces of advice for elevating your small business. 

Business growth 

“You have to take success like you take failure and like you take hardship and hard times. It can’t be the end of whoever it is that you were. Like all the dualities of life, if you only hear the positive comments, and you don’t hear the criticism, you may not be able to evolve or grow.”
—Roy Choi, co-owner, co-founder, and chef at Kogi BBQ
In Conversation with Roy Choi

“Growth doesn’t mean mass sameness. We treat every single store and every single market like it’s our first. We have a saying that we want to offer full face attention to people. We want to earn every single right to grow. We look ourselves in the eyes and ask: ‘Why are we doing this? What’s in it for the community? What’s in it for our guests? What’s in it for our team?’ And that’s where our growth decisions come from.”
—Kim Malek, owner of Salt & Straw
Building a Trusted Brand with Authenticity 

Feedback and reviews 

“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten was ‘feedback is a gift.’ As humans, we don’t always want to hear about the things that we’re not doing well. You don’t want to hear the bad, but if you can allow yourself to get past your ego, of [thinking about your business as] this thing you hold so near and dear to your heart, it’s advantageous in so many ways.”
—Alli Webb, founder of Drybar
In Conversation with Alli Webb

“Every human wants to be listened to. It’s one of the most powerful marketing things you can do: admitting you made a mistake, rectifying it, or thanking someone for feedback, and then going after it. Demonstrating listening is one of the best and most important things you can do, no matter how big your business is.”
—Mark Reader, chief marketing officer at Rentokil Terminix
Building a Trusted Brand with Authenticity 

“If you want to make a culture of reviews in your company, you gotta talk about them all the time. We talk about reviews when we answer the phone, like ‘Hey, we’re a 5-star company. Our goals are to deliver 5-star service.’ When we step through the front door, it’s like, ‘I’m here to give you 5-star service.’ You plant those seeds all along.”
—Josh Campbell, owner of Rescue Air and Plumbing
Amplifying the Impact of Your Review Strategy on Yelp

Social media and branding

 “As a small business, you have to be careful of just hopping on trends for trends’ sake. It’s super easy to feel like you have to be doing every single trend to stay relevant, but if you are smaller, it’s more important to establish yourself as a brand with a very specific and clear message. Then from there, [you can start] paying attention to trends and grabbing at the ones that work.”
—Miriam Fried, owner of MF Strong
Capitalizing on Trends in Pop Culture & Social Media

“We have to move away from the ‘slice and dice’ approach of creating one piece of content and thinking it’s gonna work across all of your platforms. The behaviors [on each platform] are different. The way people are consuming content on those platforms is different. We need to be thinking about creating content that’s platform specific and showing up where your audience actually is.”
—Ben Hennes, chief commercial officer and co-owner of Happylucky
Building a Trusted Brand with Authenticity 

Hiring and management

“Stay outcome focused [while hiring]. Set standards for what you’re looking for, and then clearly communicate those standards to potential candidates for the job or new hires so they’ll know what they’re being measured for. [If you have] a performance indicator for each job and a good communication cadence set up… they’re gonna feel more confident in their role. They’re gonna want to do a better job for you.”
—Shane Langwell, owner of Nomad Krav Maga
Top 100 Local Businesses Roundtable

“Once people are hired, the biggest challenge for us is starting off a relationship of trust. It’s a service industry job, and I recognize that. We [work hard to] create a situation where our employees are respected, they’re trusted, and [they know] we are trustworthy and that they can talk to us like we’re normal human beings. Bring your full self if you’re having a tough time. Let me know about it. I’m gonna respect that information and respect where you’re at in your life right now.”
—Dan Moranville, CEO of Chicago Pet Sitters
Top 100 Local Businesses Roundtable

Finance 

“A common pitfall is [that] people don’t look at the finances because it can be daunting. You spend time on what you are really good at and what you enjoy, and you don’t want to spend time staring at zeroes and ones. But it’s very important to have some sort of budget—it could be very high level, back of the napkin math, but it’s very important to look at the inflows and outflows of the business. Make sure you find your baseline, so when things happen, you’re able to navigate.”
—Jamaal Brown, VP of finance at Justworks
Establishing Financial Strength for Stability & Growth

“Time is money. It’s literally true. Having [financing allows you to] pause and take a break. Because [our business] was bootstrapped, we were going full tilt. Every decision had to be instantaneous—instead of giving ourselves a little bit of running room or extra capital to take a break, take a step back, go to the test kitchen… and maybe look at other ways of producing. There are more efficient ways to do it, and if we took a little bit more time, we could have done that from the beginning.”
—Vincent Berretta, co-owner of Tres Lecheria
Establishing Financial Strength for Stability & Growth