Local Business Information and Resources

The way we do business in the US has changed dramatically since the days of the original 13 Colonies and it continues to do this as new technologies affect how we communicate and share information, and how we exchange money for products and services. In many ways, the globe has shrunk in that, we can now communicate and do business with people who are halfway around the world in real time.

How Business Has Changed

If you think about how the first European settlers communicated and did business, they were very limited compared to what US businesses can do today. Aside from the colonies’ businesses and trade being much controlled and heavily taxed by England, the new Americans were far away and isolated from civilisation they way they knew it. Simply getting a letter across the Atlantic would typically take months. If mail was the only way a businessman could organise business and trade, think of how long it would take to finalize a business deal and to obtain the product or service that was negotiated.

How Local Has Changed

Back then, a “local” business would have been one in the village or settlement that you lived. Trading even with a different colony meant traveling far distances given that travel between the colonies was done primarily by foot or horse and it meant going through dense forests that did not have regular trails established yet. Nowadays, “local” can still be about location and being in close physical proximity to something, but the landscape of “local” has changed.

Nowadays, people who live thousands of miles apart can work “together” every day. We do this with telephone and conference calls, Google hangouts, video meetings, online messaging, documents and apps that can be shared and worked on by multiple people at the same time, and so on. A majority of businesses in the US could no longer function without the internet even though just a few decades ago, dial up internet for email was a brand new thing that not that many people had tried yet. Nowadays, many people spend all of their waking hours tied or tapped into the internet somehow,often via their cell phones and devices we have in both public and private spaces.

To this end, “local” no longer has to mean that things are in the same location. Business Local Group is dedicated to providing information to businesses in different locations to help them learn about common business interests, information and ideas. We hope that new and established businesses alike will find this site relevant to their interests and needs.