3C President & Small Business Advisor Jake Ward joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss small business sentiment amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Let's shift to something maybe a little bit more optimistic, right? Let's get back to small businesses and how they're dealing with all this. Because we do have a new survey out from Google in conjunction with 3C, a nonprofit membership organization representing digitally empowered small businesses, and an interesting new piece from that survey showing that 74% of small businesses expect to be back to business as usual within six months as these restrictions of occupancy and everything that we've seen in the lockdown get lifted here.

And for more on that, I want to bring on 3C's President and a Small Business Advisor Jake Ward joins us now for more on this. And Jake, I mean, I guess that would be reason for optimism here. Almost 3/4 of businesses saying that they can get back to business as usual.

JAKE WARD: I think some of that, Zack, is that there is an inherent optimism and determination that comes with running a small business. And that these are folks that feel that they can control their own destiny to a degree. I also that what we're seeing more and more of is that there is almost this digital safety net of tools and services that are available for small businesses today, like at no other time in history, that enable a mom and pop store on Main Street to go online for 60 or 90 days and weather the storm, while they prepare to come back and further integrate sort of a new normal. Restricted access to those tools would be a real problem in any other time, and now, it's more vital than ever.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I would be interested to get your thoughts, too, and push back a little bit when we think about small businesses using digital tools. You can talk about that, like Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads and analytics data here. We've been talking a lot about some of these restaurant businesses that have been hit.

They get to keep their doors open by maybe going to a DoorDash or a Grubhub and getting help of delivering things digitally. But there is also the added cost, and the issue is of how much of their revenue is going to some of these bigger tech giants. I mean, is that maybe a longer term worry when we think about how, yes, they are getting a boost from e-commerce, but maybe a larger percent of their sales are not staying within their walls?

JAKE WARD: I'm not sure that I'd say they're even getting a boost from e-commerce. I say, it's more of a lifeline. What you are seeing with restaurants, who unquestionably have been hardest hit, it's one of the only types of industries where we pay extra for the ambiance and the experience going to a place.

It's not just the food, and I certainly have sympathy for these restaurants. But they've also been able to use CRM's that manage their customers to manage expectations on when they're opening, when their new menus are coming out, how they can deliver service and food in a timely manner. Here in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, many of our restaurants had to close their doors for several weeks. And as they began to ramp back up, they weren't using DoorDash and UberEats. What they were using is their own waiters and waitresses to deliver food to keep those folks open and to use tools, like online advertising and CRM's, rather than a larger tech companies using delivery services.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I guess when you look at the small businesses impacted through this, the other thing that stood out from the survey, small businesses without a preexisting e-commerce presence were twice as likely to temporarily stopped operating during the crisis. Of course, a lot of the PPP funding we're discussing here is to help also similar be a lifeline to keep businesses afloat, until they get to the other side. When you do look at what the other side looks like, do you think that-- we've been talking a lot about how this has accelerated as a catalyst. A lot of these businesses that may have been offline shifting to online revenue streams here. Are you seeing that play out similarly across the country in businesses that might not have even been thinking about e-commerce, now permanently top of mind?

JAKE WARD: There's no question that as sort of digital digitally powered economy, we're moving in this direction anyway. This is a clarifying moment. It's an unfortunate one. It is uncertain and tragic in a lot of instances. For business, however, it's just an acceleration of a natural course of events, right? The integration of e-commerce into businesses that could have done their delivery services and goods and been sort of mom and pop mainstream stores, in any other time in history, are now expected to have an online presence to have some level of e-commerce integration into their inventory management.

It's really the only way to survive in a digital economy. I don't think there's any reason to believe that the normal we knew six months ago is attainable really anywhere, but some proximity of it seems reasonable. Many small businesses are going to learn from this experience from their ability to move quickly, and to make good decisions, and frankly, to stay in business, and begin using digital tools and services at a higher rate. We actually found something like 80% of small businesses are more interested now in learning about digital tools, and fully half are investing time, and energy, and money into expanding their digital footprint during the crisis.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, yeah, just a very interesting piece of this to come out and something to watch moving forward. But Jake Ward, 3C President and Small Business Advisor, I appreciate you taking the time.

JAKE WARD: Thanks, Zack.