Small-business owners are up against a lot. It can be difficult to come up with the funding required to take an idea and turn it into something profitable, especially in an economy that can often feel less stable than many of us might prefer.
But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea to start your own small business. In fact, the opposite is often true. If you have an idea and a plan you believe in, the future of your small business can be wide open.
Of course, there are a few considerations to keep in mind along the way, Chedva Ludmir tells Fast Company. Ludmir, who founded the consulting and coaching firm Consider Labs, regularly works with entrepreneurs, CEOs, and founders who want to scale their small business—and to do so thoughtfully and quickly.
Quick growth is possible—but why do you want it?
First and foremost, any small-business owner needs to ask themselves why they want to grow and at what rate. If the answer to the latter is as fast as possible, there are more questions to contemplate, Ludmir says.
“While for a startup, scaling quickly means grabbing more market share faster than competitors, and they often have the investor funds to back it,” she explains, “for a small business, it might wreak havoc on the profit and loss, let alone their work-life balance.”
The first step, according to Ludmir, is coming up with a plan for growth that’s thoughtful, which includes assessing your own “time leaks” during an average day.
She suggests asking yourself, “What is repetitive? What can be delegated to another team member or automated? What is contributing to the core differentiation of the business or to important customer and partner relationships, and what is not?”
Automation can be a game-changer in terms of implementing a system that helps growth, as well as “doing seasonal audits of the way you manage time, plan, and apply your marketing strategy,” Ludmir says. One of the key elements for small businesses that are attempting to grow—whether solo or with employees—is understanding that time is your main resource.
“Get in the habit of asking yourself questions or hiring consultants or coaches who will,” Ludmir advises. Coaches and consultants bring experience and perspective to the working relationship, as well as a degree of accountability that can be hard to replicate on your own.
The ability to work remotely has changed the game
Growing a small business in 2026 isn’t the same as it was 5 or 10 years ago—and in some ways, Ludmir points out, it’s not even the same as it was a year ago.
“I started my first business in 2008, and my first tech startup in 2015,” she says. “While people are people are people and business is business is business, there are so many capabilities and norms that created quantum leaps in scaling businesses, especially small businesses, during this time. First, the fact that working remotely is now not only acceptable, but is the norm, translates into a few important changes.”
Those changes are multifaceted. These days it’s possible to build most of your marketing strategy online, including social media, performance marketing, and SEO and AI engine optimization. “You can save so much [money] on travel and conferences and create meaningful business relationships and long-lasting trust remotely,” Ludmir says.
While that may not be true of every industry, “even in fields where you need trade shows, you can rely on online marketing and systems for a meaningful part of the business,” she says.
The rise of remote work also means more people work “fractionally—meaning there’s more talent available and you can hire excellent people flexibly, based on season needs and budgets of your business,” Ludmir points out.
She says that flexibility was a game changer in her previous business—a marketing and strategy agency for startups with a team made up entirely of freelancers. “We worked fully remote and asynchronously,” she says. “As a small-business owner, it allowed me to stretch and contract the team based on our client’s needs, as well as on side projects.”
AI can be helpful—to a point
It’s fair to say that a lot of small-business owners are considering or already implementing various AI tools into their business strategy and plans. To a degree, AI is enormously useful when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and scaling internal systems, shortening the cycle of creating new software and marketing. (“I am very much against AI slop and hallucinations,” Ludmir says, “but if you use it correctly, AI provides tangible shortcuts.”)
She does, however, offer a warning: “In my experience, AI is the most helpful and the least dangerous when you approach it from a manager’s perspective: guiding it, asking it, correcting it as needed, and also using it to ask you questions and challenge you, rather than expecting it to take over.”
It’s best to consider AI “as a very talented intern with good intentions but no experience, rather than a replacement,” she says.
With all of that in mind, the future of your small business is yours to make of what you will.