Small firms are hoarding cash. What not to cut

Three numbers came out this month that anyone running a small business in the UK will recognise without needing them explained.

Small business growth expectations in England have fallen to 24 per cent, the lowest level in 12 years. UK business creation has dropped to its lowest in a decade. And smaller firms have cut borrowing by 17.7 per cent while increasing savings.

That last one is the interesting one. It is not a story about firms going under. It is a story about firms battening down. Paying off the overdraft, holding cash, saying no to anything that looks like a commitment.

That instinct is usually right. The question is what gets cut first, because that decision tends to get made quickly and quietly, and it is rarely revisited.

The cut that feels sensible and is not

When money gets tight, marketing goes first. Within marketing, the website goes first, because it feels like a thing you already own rather than a thing that is working.

Here is the problem with that order of operations. In a cautious market, fewer people are buying, so a larger share of the ones who are buying come from search. They are not browsing. They have a specific problem, they are looking for someone to fix it, and they will compare three or four options in about five minutes on their phone.

In a busy year you can afford to be the third-best website in your town. In a quiet year you cannot, because there is less work going round and the people who are spending are being more careful about who they hand it to.

Cutting your web presence in a downturn saves a small fixed cost and removes you from the shortlist at exactly the moment the shortlist gets shorter.

What is actually worth protecting

Not everything. Most small businesses are paying for at least one marketing thing that has never brought them a job. Be ruthless with those. But three things earn their keep even in a bad year, and two of them are free.

Your Google Business Profile. Free. It is what shows in the map when someone searches for your trade near them, and it sits above the normal results. Claim it, pick the most specific category you can, set a tight service area, add ten photos of real jobs, and put a phone number on it. We audited our own recently and found we had never added a phone number, so this is not us being smug about it.

Reviews, and recent ones. Also free. A page of five-star reviews where the newest is from 2023 reads worse than three reviews from this month. Ask the same day the job finishes, send the direct link, and keep it to one tap.

A site that loads fast on mobile data and makes it obvious how to contact you. This is the one that costs money, and it is the one worth keeping.

The test that takes two minutes

Turn wifi off on your phone. Open your own website on mobile data. Count how long before you see something useful.

Over about three seconds and you are losing the people in a hurry, which in the trades is most of them. The usual causes, in the order they normally bite:

• Photos straight off a phone at five or six megabytes each. This alone is often half the problem, and resizing them costs nothing.
• A homepage slider nobody scrolls through.
• Cheap shared hosting that is slow before your site even starts loading.

Then check the phone number. It needs to be a proper tap-to-call link, and it wants to stay on screen while people scroll. If someone standing over a leak has to scroll back up to find your number, a fair few will just go back to Google and ring the next name on the list.

Run the site through Google PageSpeed Insights. It is free and it tells you exactly which of the above applies to you rather than leaving you guessing.

The other thing that changed this year

Demand for AI skills hit a record high in UK job adverts this year, with AI tools now mentioned in 9.4 per cent of them. That statistic is about hiring, but it points at something that matters more for small businesses: a growing number of people now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation before they ever open a search results page.

Those assistants read the same things a careful human would. Your opening hours in plain text. Your service area. What you actually do, written clearly rather than in marketing language. Prices, or at least a starting figure.

Sites that leave those out do not get recommended, and unlike a bad Google ranking, you will never see it happen. There is no report telling you that an assistant skipped you.

The honest bit about cash flow

We build pay-monthly websites, so we have an obvious interest in telling you not to cut your website. Take that into account.

What we would say regardless is that in a market where firms are cutting borrowing by nearly 18 per cent, the shape of a cost matters as much as its size. A four thousand pound build competes with a van, a quiet January, and materials for the next job. A small fixed monthly cost sits with the phone bill and does not need a decision.

And if you have got the cash spare and a developer you trust for the long term, a one-off build you own outright is a perfectly good option. It is just rarely the right cash flow shape when everyone around you is holding on to their money.

Where to start this week

If you do nothing else, do these three, in this order. All free.

1. Claim and fill in your Google Business Profile properly. About an hour.
2. Ask your last five customers for a review, same-day style, with the direct link.
3. Run the mobile data test above and fix whichever of the three causes applies.

None of that requires a new website. If, having done all three, the site itself is still the thing holding you back, that is when it is worth spending money, and not before.