Small Business (General)

The default industry pack — DEFAULT_INDUSTRY_SLUG. Any client whose vertical hasn't been matched to a dedicated pack inherits this one. Promote a vertical out of small-business when Brik has 3+ clients in it OR seasonality / regulation / terminology diverges meaningfully OR strategy docs repeat 60%+ across engagements.

Structured data lives in content-system/industries/small-business.ts. This page is the narrative companion. Keep them in sync.

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1. Industry Overview

"Small business" is not a vertical — it's a fallback. The pack covers the surface area that's true for most service-based small businesses regardless of industry: a local-first audience, a thin marketing budget, a license-and-insurance regulatory floor, and conversion economics dominated by review velocity, response time, and repeat-customer LTV.

When a client onboards into Brik without a vertical match, this pack supplies the defaults. Clients always override during the Intel tab. The pack's job is to be broadly safe — to avoid suggesting things that would mislead any specific vertical — rather than to be optimal for any one of them. The moment specificity hurts (e.g., a wellness studio inheriting "Get a Free Quote" CTAs that read transactional, not therapeutic), graduate the vertical to its own pack.

2. Default Affinities

When a client hasn't yet picked traits in the portal, these are the pack's starting affinities. Clients always override.

The defaults aim at the median professional service business — confident enough to feel competent, warm enough to feel approachable, modern enough to not look outdated. Verticals that need a different posture (luxury beauty, anxiety-sensitive wellness, gravitas-heavy legal) consistently override these and are good candidates for graduation.

3. Common Customer Pain Points

Cross-vertical patterns that reliably show up regardless of what the small business actually does.

• Trust and legitimacy — is this business real, licensed, and reviewed?
• Pricing opacity — "call for quote" friction; customers want ranges or transparent pricing.
• Scheduling friction — phone-only booking, slow web response.
• Service-area confusion — do they come to me or do I come to them?
• Comparison shopping — customers typically get 2–3 quotes and read 3+ review platforms before choosing.
• Response time — leads go cold within hours; slow replies kill conversion.
• Quality anxiety — will the work be done right, on time, for the quoted price?
• Decision fatigue — too many options, inconsistent credentials, unclear differentiation.

The first three (trust / pricing opacity / scheduling friction) are the conversion bottlenecks for nearly every service business. Sites that don't address them in the hero+services+contact triangle typically underperform on lead quality regardless of traffic volume.

4. Seasonality

Cross-vertical seasonality patterns. Specific verticals override (dental Q1 surge, wellness Q1 + Q4, restaurants Q2 + Q4, etc.) — these defaults are the median.

5. Competitive Landscape

Six recurring competitor types, with the moats and weaknesses Brik clients can lean on or against.

• Direct local competitors — moat: Proximity, word-of-mouth, local reviews. · weakness: Similar offerings create commoditization pressure.
• Franchise / chain encroachment (Mosquito Joe, Mr. Handyman, Anytime Fitness, Massage Envy, H&R Block) — moat: Bigger ad budgets, brand trust, convenience. · weakness: Lower personalization, less community embeddedness, slower local decision-making.
• Marketplace aggregators (Yelp, Thumbtack, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, TaskRabbit, Bark) — moat: Intercept bottom-of-funnel searches. Sell leads. · weakness: Race-to-bottom pricing; eroding lead quality; customer loyalty stays with the platform, not the business.
• Platform disruptors (DoorDash, UberEats, Airbnb, ClassPass, Rover) — moat: Change how customers discover and compare. · weakness: Take a significant cut; commoditize the experience.
• Solopreneur informal competition — moat: Nextdoor/Facebook groups; price. · weakness: Unlicensed, uninsured, inconsistent quality — positioning opportunity for licensed businesses.
• DIY / self-service alternatives (YouTube tutorials, AI tools, Big-box retail) — moat: Free or near-free; customer self-sufficiency. · weakness: Doesn't work for complex, urgent, or high-stakes needs.

The pack's strategic default: lean on what aggregators commoditize away — relationship, accountability, quality, and local embeddedness. The same logic that distinguishes an independent dental practice from a DSO applies cross-vertical against Yelp / Thumbtack / Angi / DoorDash and the franchise / chain wave.

6. Listings Requirements

Required (every small business): Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook Business Page.

Optional (most benefit, none mandatory): Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Nextdoor.

Conditional — vertical-specific aggregators that materially affect discovery. Match to vertical at intake; populate only when the client lives in that lane.

7. Regulatory Summary

Eight regulatory areas every small-business engagement must clear. Industry-specific licensing (HIPAA, GLBA, state bar, board) layers on top — when a vertical's regulatory profile gets specific enough that this list under-serves it, that's a graduation trigger.

8. Vocabulary — Avoid

Cross-industry guardrails. The term itself isn't always banned — the unsubstantiated claim is. "Best" with FTC-substantiated data is fine; "best" as a generic header is risky.

Term	Why
best	FTC requires substantiation for superiority claims. Unqualified "best" is legally risky and rarely earns trust.
#1	Same as "best" — unsubstantiated superiority claim.
leading	Same as "best" unless specific market-share data backs it.
expert	Requires credentials/licensure backing; misleading without them in regulated verticals.
guaranteed results	Prohibited in most regulated verticals (health, legal, finance). Creates legal exposure in unregulated ones.
review gating	Now largely prohibited on Google — do not design systems that filter reviews by sentiment before publishing.

9. CTA Defaults

Approved (mockup generators pick from these unless a client override exists):

• Get a Free Quote
• Request a Consultation
• Schedule a Visit
• Contact Us
• See Pricing
• Get Started

Rejected (never auto-generated; require explicit client opt-in to use):

• Click Here
• Submit
• Buy Now

The rejected list isn't about taste — Click Here and Submit are accessibility regressions (link / button labels with no semantic meaning); Buy Now is wrong for service businesses where there's no transactional purchase.

10. Page Compositions

Every required page archetype maps to a specific sequence of section blueprints from @brikdesigns/bds/blueprints-astro. Small-business sticks to the v0.1 shipped blueprint set so consumer scaffolds render with zero fallback components.

Stats sections are intentionally NOT in any composition by default — they render only when content generation emits a sectionType: 'stats' section explicitly. (See PR #217 for the rationale.)

11. Navigation IA

Default site-header shape for the catch-all.

Footer archetype: four_col_directory — enough structure to surface contact + hours + secondary links without over-weighting any one concern. Verticals with unique footer needs (compliance-heavy healthcare, anxiety-sensitive wellness) graduate to their own pack with a legal_heavy or cta_focused footer.

12. Brik Strategic POV

Three things that distinguish a Brik small-business engagement from a templated build, and that the pack defaults are designed to support.

Treat the catch-all as a deferral, not a destination

A client living in small-business for more than a quarter or two is usually a sign that their vertical should graduate. The pack's defaults are calibrated to be safe across many verticals, which means they're optimal for none of them. Watch for:

• 3+ clients in the same vertical — graduate
• Strategy docs repeating 60%+ across engagements — graduate
• Seasonality / regulation / terminology that diverges from the catch-all defaults in ways the resolver can't paper over — graduate

Graduation is cheap relative to the cost of the catch-all underserving a real vertical. See dental and real-estate-rv-mhc for the model — both started in this pack and earned their own.

Response time is the highest-leverage lever before redesign

Most small businesses lose more revenue to slow response than to bad websites. A 5-minute response is roughly 100x more likely to qualify a lead than a 30-minute one (Harvard Business Review study). Before recommending a redesign, audit:

• How leads are received (form → email? text? phone-only?)
• Who responds and within what window
• What the after-hours fallback is

Almost every Brik intake surfaces a fixable response-time problem. Designing the new site without addressing it leaves measurable revenue on the table.

Reviews are the trust signal

Cross-vertical, review velocity + diversity + response rate consistently outperform brand-spend on conversion. The pack's vocabulary preferred list bakes this in (review velocity, review diversity, response rate). Default into reputation management as Brik's recommended add-on for every engagement that doesn't already have a system.

Site audit extractors — none

The catch-all pack does not declare siteAudit extractors. Consumers running through small-business get the universal extractors only (services, key messages, proof points, social links). Verticals that benefit from structured field capture (membership plans, insurance accepted, appointment systems for dental; lot listings, amenities for real-estate-rv-mhc) are graduation candidates — adding a vertical's extractors is one of the highest-value things a dedicated pack ships.

See Dental → Site Audit Extractors for the canonical pattern.

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Related

• Content System overview
• Industries index
• Dental industry pack — reference for what graduation buys
• Atmospheres — small-business defaults to clean-bright (light + SaaS-leaning verticals) or minimal-clinical (light + service-business verticals)
• Voices — voice patterns the affinities point to