Well, this idea actually stems from the original Small Business Saturday by American Express where they help promote shopping small the Saturday after Black Friday. Their initiative started back in 2011 as a marketing campaign and a way to give back to local businesses that want to offer local deals the day after Black Friday. Most of these businesses can’t afford to compete with the big-box retailers on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, so AMEX made a day just for them, and it’s grown organically from there.

As a small business, you can sign up and partner with AMEX to get Free marketing material and support. To me, as an entrepreneur and small business owner, this is incredible….

So I started thinking …..  why stop there? Why just one day per year? We wanted to take this to the next level by helping small local businesses in Philly EVERY Saturday, not just one day a year.  The reason behind this is because, here at Momentum, we truly believe in the American Dream. In fact, most of our services encompass helping small business entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are the backbone of this amazing country!

According to Fundera, small business accounts for 99.7% of all businesses in the US. Crazy right? The problem though, is that these business owners don’t have the time, money or resources to stay competitive in this digital era. The main problem they face is digital marketing. So, that being said, our goal is to highlight, film and promote a small local business in Philly every Saturday, completely for FREE. Not only do we aim to showcase what makes them unique, but we also help promote their business through our own digital and social platforms. If you follow us on Facebook or Instagram you can see our weekly posts. Our long term goal (Spoiler alert!!!) is to create a massive following on YouTube and Facebook to have this weekly channel where people look forward to and watch out show.

In 2015 I was working at Google as a consultant for a lot of small businesses, and what I realized was that most of these owners were amazing people with cool companies, but had NO idea how to perfect digital marketing. Consequently, this forced them to spend a lot of money on unsuccessful marketing campaigns. These people weren’t dumb, they just didn’t have time to learn digital marketing. Naturally, as a digital entrepreneur, I asked them about their other marketing and advertising initiatives. Having a small business myself, I was curious if I could help give some advice about their website, SEO, social media, and more.

However, this interfered with Google’s agenda and I felt conflicted because I love being able to help other people using my knowledge of digital marketing. After consulting a few people and having conversations with agency owners and entrepreneurs, I realized that I had what it takes to start my own company, a digital marketing agency where we provide this digital momentum for small businesses.

So, not long after I decided to follow my passion and skillset to leave Google and start this agency so that we could truly help the people who need it the most. From there Momentum was born. Having met so many people that previous year, it made starting out a bit easier. I already had a book of leads to call to offer my encompassing digital services and consulting.

Now, in order to grow the company we of course have to charge for our services, but a lot of small businesses couldn’t afford us and it was really discouraging. As I grew the agency (I started Momentum in August 2015) I realized I wanted to start an initiative to give back to small businesses for free. In doing so, I knew I would meet and help a lot of great people, while also spreading the name and awareness of Momentum.

So this year we decided to launch a non-profit initiative to dedicate 20% of our time and resources to what we call Small Business Saturday, so that we can help really cool local businesses completely for free.