Start Strong in 2025: Advice for Aspiring and Growing Small Businesses

The turn of a new year is a natural time to set intentions for the future. For entrepreneurs considering starting or growing small businesses, 2025 offers a fresh chance to seize opportunities, address challenges and build something meaningful. A bit of guidance from seasoned small business owners can make all the difference on that quest. With this in mind, the ICSC Small Business Center has curated insights from some of its favorite entrepreneurs. These successful business owners share their best advice for the year ahead, from identifying gaps in the market to honing networking skills and ensuring product marketability.

Here’s to a new year filled with growth, resilience and entrepreneurial success.

Creating Your Small Business

Look for the Holes in the Market

“You have to see what’s missing or what is an opportunity. I didn’t invent bears. Ray Kroc didn’t invent hamburgers. Howard Schultz didn’t invent coffee. We just all invented how to do it a better way, a way that apparently millions of people liked.”
—Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark

MORE FROM BUILD-A-BEAR WORKSHOP: Building a Legacy: Q&A with Build-A-Bear Workshop Founder Maxine Clark

Find the Pressing Need

“If you want to build a high-growth company, you look for a burning and frequent pain point for someone; if you find that one person, there’s probably more people like them.”
—Presso CEO Nishant Jain

MORE FROM PRESSO: There Are Dry Cleaning Vending Machines Now

Do Your Homework

“You have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of opening a business on your own. California is one of the worst states, we’ve learned, in terms of rules, regulations and taxes. Before opening a cafe, look at not only what you want to do but where you are, what is required and how much is it going to cost. We had another company that could give us the sustainability [of a safety net to fall back on], but a lot of people out there have only their savings and they have to be careful.”
—Avatar Coffee Roasters co-owner Kelly Makker

Make Sure Your Product Is Marketable Before Diving In

“You’ve got to get that first transaction done. You need to prove to yourself that [your concept] is marketable, that you have customers willing to pay for your product. If they don’t want it, they won’t buy it, no matter how great you think your product is.”
—Linda’s Bee Farm co-owner Seth Steward

Be Pragmatic

“The only reason you should start a business is because it will make money. If you’re trying to build something that brings more freedom for yourself and your family, you need to create a business that drives cash flow as profit drives cash flow.”
—Ablaze Financial founder and fractional CFO Amy Spandau

MORE FROM ABLAZE FINANCIAL: Practical Ways Aspiring Business Owners Can Overcome Financial Fears

Choose Your Landlord Wisely

“A lot of your success depends on your relationship with your landlord. When working with landlords, especially at the beginning, it’s so important that you have the support from them, the free rent from them, the [tenant-improvement dollars] from them. … In our first location, we got a lot of support from our landlord. In our second location, we got no support. In our third location, we got no support. And then we learned our lesson about picking our landlords a little more wisely and asking better questions.”
—Maman co-founder Elisa Marshall

Maintaining Your Small Business

Don’t Neglect Your Cybersecurity

More and more, the targets of hackers are small businesses, not large corporations. “Over the last six to seven years, there has been a major, major shift from bad actors. They really don’t go after extortion from the enterprise clients: IBM, Google, Facebook. Those guys aren’t going to pay it. When they attack them, it’s usually a political statement. They know the small and mid-tier companies absolutely will pay it because if they don’t pay it, they’re out of business.”
—Blue Chameleon Investigations director of cybersecurity Patrick Wright

MORE FROM BLUE CHAMELEON INVESTIGATIONS: 10 Steps to Cybersecurity for Small CRE Companies and Their Tenants

Surround Yourself with Trustworthy People

“You have to accept other people’s experience and advice, even though you don’t 100% agree with them, especially when you’re so convinced about something and then someone else that has the experience comes and tells you: ‘No, you might want to look at this a different way.’ The fact that you have to acknowledge that is not easy, but the secret to a successful business is having trust with the people you work with.”
—Wonderlosity CEO Ellie Greenberg

MORE FROM WONDERLOSITY: Creating Immersive Stores

Connect with Other Small Businesses

“You don’t have to be on an island by yourself. I’m here 10 years because I’ve been willing to work with people and not look and think about my competition on a daily basis. If there’s another outdoor store moving in the area, fantastic. We can work together, we can partner, we can grow our audiences together, we’re stronger together than we are individually. I know sometimes that’s hard, especially when you see challenge, when you’re looking at the numbers every day and your revenue is struggling. When you start to see those challenges, you start to resource-guard, but that’s exactly when you should open up your arms because we all need each other as small business owners to survive.”
—River Rock Outfitter co-owner April Peterson

MORE FROM RIVER ROCK OUTFITTER: 2 Innovative Ways to Grow Your Target Audience

Remember You’re on a Journey

“It’s easy to become discouraged, but the longer we’ve been doing this, the more comfortable I’ve become with: We’ve been through hard times before; we’ll get through this, too. At Year 10, I am just getting more comfortable knowing that [ups and downs are] just part of it.”
—Fount co-founder Jackie Wachter

MORE FROM FOUNT: How Leather Bag Maker Fount Reached Its Audience

Expect to Work Long Hours

“Be prepared, especially in the first year, for [your business] to very much be your life. You can never sit back. You never coast. People always want change. People always want something new and exciting, and if you don’t give it to them, they’ll find it somewhere else.”
—Baltimore Pickleball Club co-owner Bonny Gothier

MORE FROM BALTIMORE PICKLEBALL CLUB: Landlords Craving Pickleball Can Learn from This Operator

Don’t Wait Too Long to Start

“I’ve always felt like people who want to do things find good reasons to talk themselves out of doing things. That’s something that I personally have done in the past, but if you just start tackling tasks instead of overthinking, you’d be surprised at what the outcome will be. It’s what we did. All anxieties and all concerns were pushed to the side and we just said: ‘Let’s do it.’ Every step we found out we needed to do, we just did it.”
—Doinks Burger Joint co-owner Bonn Rassavong

Growing Your Small Business

Be Your Own Biggest Fan

“You have to be your own biggest fan. That sounds crazy, but you have to believe in yourself, almost to an unhealthy degree. You have to be able to look at your product and be like: “This is awesome, despite what everyone says.” There were ladies that saw my product in my very first and second markets ever and went: “Oh, how funny. Do people wear these?” You have to know that what you’re doing is good and know that not everybody is going to understand it or care about it. If you do not believe in what you’re doing, then it’s going to be real tough.”
—Eponymous brand founder and CEO Brianna Cannon

MORE FROM BRIANNA CANNON: How Brianna Cannon Built a Nationwide Brand

Invest in Marketing

“You can have the best product in the world, but if people don’t know about it, you can’t sell it. You have to do marketing so people know what your product is. The best marketing that you can do is endorsements, whether that’s going to be social media influencers endorsing your product or the original endorsers, which are radio personalities. When people talk about your product, that’s the best marketing that you can do.”
—Beachwood Dental owner Dr. Paul Mikhli

Funding Your Small Business

Seek Out SBA Loans First

“Even though it takes longer for government loans to get approved, if you stay patient, it will be worth it. With a start-up business, you don’t want to pick up private loans because the interest rate is higher, even though they get back to you quicker and there’s less paperwork. And with bank loans, the repayment is higher. When you are starting a business, you don’t want to just jump in right away and have this burden on you.”
—Jasmine Beauty School owner Kevin La

MORE FROM JASMINE BEAUTY SCHOOL: How One Entrepreneur Secured Financing to Get His Business Through Rough Patches

Final Thoughts

“Success is a three-step process. 1: Show up. 2: Follow up. 3: Don’t give up. If you don’t start or show up, nothing’s going to ever happen in your life. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody has ideas. It’s the rare people who actually start. People have a very hard time following up on their goals. They start things over and over — one day they do yoga, now they do running, now they do cooking classes — but they have a very hard time sticking with things decade after decade, week after week, day after day. That’s why follow up is so important. Don’t give up. When you are an entrepreneur, you are almost definitely signing up for pain and suffering, and you have to do it and enjoy the pain and suffering. It’s not dissimilar to going to the gym or running. The pain is where all the growth happens. Pain is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s the thing that is associated with growth.”
—Mixology Clothing Co. CEO Jordan Edwards

MORE FROM MIXOLOGY: When, Why and How to Grow to Multiple Locations