We believe at our core that confidence is the rocket fuel small business owners collectively burn all day, every day, as they power our economy and nation forward. They may spend their busy days selling, servicing, administering and doing all the other tasks it takes to run a business, but inside blazes the heat of a Saturn V, pushing skyward, relentlessly ascending in opposition to the gravitational forces of business that often work against them. Confidence is a source of creativity, resourcefulness, and durability. When starting a business, it's often the only thing a small business owner can reliably bank on.
Confidence is also at the heart of insurance. Despite best efforts and precautions, things go wrong from time to time. The right insurance, therefore, humming along in the background as it does, helps keep the confidence fuel tanks full. But confidence is a complicated trait. It comes from many sources and presents itself in myriad ways. Every small business owner finds it, accounts for it, and harnesses it in different ways.
We wanted to know: what is the nature of small business confidence? So, we asked small business owners and we learned a few things.
Specifically, we inquired about how confidence is built (it has to come from somewhere), what shakes it (because it can be threatened), and how it’s defended (what keeps it alive and well). Taken together, these questions would provide insightful profiles of the nature of small business confidence. This endeavor has practical benefits, too, because the more we learn about why they do what they do, the better we can serve, support and communicate with our customers. Understanding small business is an evergreen pursuit for AP Intego.
Because it’s an abstract element often found deep within, asking small business owners in a traditional (read: boring) way to articulate the nature of their inner confidence wouldn’t be productive. So we made our survey short and fun, offered respondents the reward of their very own animal archetype based on their answers (yes we did!), and broke all sorts of standard research doctrine. We built and served the survey using Jebbit, a really cool declared data platform, and deployed through social media channels.
Want to know what happened? Check back soon for our next Nature of Confidence post!
