By: Jeremiah Rayban LinkedIN

The start of MY Journey

Since around February of this year, I’ve been collaborating with Andy Ziegler on his company Tempest Risk Management —a company dedicated to small business consulting with an emphasis on emergency preparedness, and his latest startup, the Tempest Business Navigator. I’ve participated in a number of projects at Tempest, including the development of several products on the newly launched Tempest Navigator—a website offering several multi-purpose tools for prospective small business owners to smoothly start, grow, and ramp up their organizations. One project that I am particularly proud of was the development of a new virtual training course, Starting a Small Business. The thing that I didn't understand at first was the decision to offer this course completely free to anyone with a dream and drive. Andy's approach is to offer the basics for free to anyone, which helps to establish the company's brand and prove the quality of our paid products and services which are there to provide support at every stage of a business owners journey. Here is the graphic that we made for this course and the link if you would like to check it out https://www.tempestnavigator.com/tempest-navigator-basics

Small Business Superiority

I’m a firm believer in the centrality of small business to the American economy—while economists may eagerly wax poetic about the scale advantages and network effects which in theory cause megacorporation's to run in a dramatically more efficient manner than their smaller counterparts, they tend to neglect three crucial advantages that small companies and start-ups have. The first relates to the ease of innovation—while large, multilayered organizations may struggle to adapt new technologies effectively across departments, small businesses can quickly implement cutting edge products and services to accelerate their growth. The second pertains to local community service—outreach to small-scale organizations and less-connected individuals may require costs which outweigh the benefits of doing so for many billion dollar companies, but may be a much more meaningful and profitable endeavor for small and mid-sized companies. And finally, the bureaucratic bloat present within large corporations simply does not exist in small ones—it can’t, as smaller companies typically must make any measure possible to improve their bottom line numbers.

Small Business Success: First Hand

At Tempest, I’ve seen all of this first-hand in the work that Andy and the company do. Perhaps more so than any business I’ve interacted with before, Tempest utilizes AI tools with extraordinary effectiveness. While the company is in no way dependent on LLMs, it has harnessed AI to reduce the time spent by repetitive grunt work to an extreme minimum while employees can focus on idea generation and client meetings. I’ve also been amazed at how willing Tempest and its employees are to help with any business which hires them—with equal attention paid to nationwide conglomerates and nascent startup founders with little more than an idea and a dream. And of course, Tempest has absolutely no bureaucracy. Instead of webinars and circular email chains, Andy and the company always remain singularly focused on meeting client needs while improving the big picture performance of the company. You can learn more about Tempest in their prospect presentation below or by clicking this link.

The Future is Bright for Small Business

Thanks to companies like Tempest, starting a small business has never been easier at any time in American history. From the planning stage, to the production stage, to the deployment and refinement stages, countless resources stand at the ready to guide small business owners to success. In addition, AI tools in many ways level the playing field—while many small business owners may struggle to meet the prices of professional marketing consultants and social media managers, ChatGPT and other AI tools can provide advice to them at not only a tiny fraction of the cost but at a frequently genuinely higher quality. Tempest has mastered the art of building projects and a library of prompts to maximize the efficiency of their ChatGPT solution. I suspect that the coming decades will be something of a turning point as freer capital, freer resources, and freer intelligence lead to the rise of strong challengers against the old behemoth corporations. Regardless of the endless drama in the day-to-day news, from feuding billionaires to tariff hikes, small businesses around the nation should feel extraordinarily optimistic about the future.

To learn more about the free resources from the Tempest Business Navigator mentioned in this article, click this link

blog or the image below to explore the Business Navigator Resource Center.