Forget Black Friday, it's micro-businesses needing help

This is the second time in three years they’ve folded. The tin embosser has stopped embossing, the pouch supplier is struggling, the wool mill is threatening to stop doing worsted yarn, and our attempts to sell into the US walked straight into Trump’s tariffs, only months after we began navigating the post-Brexit EU export rulebook.

But you would not know any of that if you scrolled our social media this weekend.

As I write, we are in London, filming tasteful nonsense in front of very expensive shops. We have been in Harrods, marvelling at tea that costs more than some people’s cars, and in Fortnum and Mason trying “sparkling tea” that tastes suspiciously like someone has carbonated the dregs of a well-stewed pot. Meanwhile, back in Tiree, our one poor employee is handling the deluge of orders our antics and this deep discount weekend are generating.

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Since Wonky went viral in April, Tiree Tea has been growing. For anyone who missed it: Wonky is a lamb born on my croft with a serious crick in her neck. Millions of people watched her recovery on social media. She is now extremely petted, extremely cheeky, and has her own merch line, including a Christmas jumper. The sales graph is heading in the right direction, we have more customers who care about what we do, and this weekend we are offering a decent discount because when you are working to scale, you need volume.

We mainly sell online and via social media, and that means the algorithms expect you to join in. If you sit Black Friday and Cyber Monday out completely, the risk is that attention drifts elsewhere and the platforms stop showing your posts to people who might actually want to buy your tea. It is a flawed system, but it is the system we are working in.

So are these mega-sale weekends bad for small businesses, or are they a necessary part of the job now? I wish the answer were simple.

A lot of small businesses have started to opt out of the Black Friday circus entirely. They run Green Friday or Fair Friday campaigns instead, or shut the website for the day in protest. I understand why. When everybody is shouting about 50% off, there is a fear that small firms will undercut themselves, train customers to wait for sales and end up with the worst of both worlds: stressful peaks, quieter troughs and no spare cash at the end of it.

At the same time, if you sell online, these few days can be the moment when customers are actually looking for what you do. For us, with a viral lamb in the rear-view mirror and a shipping container in Tiree that costs money to fill, this weekend is an opportunity to move stock, bring new people in and show existing customers a bit of appreciation. That matters, especially when the cost of doing business is as high as it is in the islands.

The problem is not really Black Friday. The problem is that the wider system expects micro-businesses in places like Tiree to operate like multinationals while giving us nothing like the same infrastructure or support.

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Transport sits near the top of that list. Around two-thirds of Highlands and Islands firms see insufficient transport links as a risk to their business. Anyone who has watched a ferry cancel at the last minute, or tried to send goods through a chain of lorries, ferries and couriers, will understand why transport does not feel like a background detail. Every cancelled sailing can mean missed sales, spoiled stock or a review from a customer in the central belt who cannot understand why their parcel has taken an extra few days.

Broadband is another quiet pressure, although rather loud in Tiree recently. Rural firms are still contending with patchy speeds, blackspots and higher costs. Customers expect you to operate like any other e-commerce business, but the reality behind the scenes can look more like someone in a kitchen, refreshing a screen that they are ready to launch through the nearest window.

Then there is the basic cost of having a life. Households in remote rural Scotland need between 10% and 40% more income to reach a minimum acceptable living standard than their counterparts in urban Britain. That extra cost filters straight into business. If your home energy bills, food, fuel and travel are all more expensive, your margins are thinner before you even start. A micro business is not a separate entity; it sits inside those household economics.

Housing and childcare are constant headaches. If you cannot find childcare or secure housing, your business options narrow dramatically. This is the Highlands and Islands in a nutshell. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if the ferry is unreliable, the broadband is patchy and there is nowhere for you or your staff to live, you are constrained before you even start.

And that is where Scotland’s business support ecosystem begins to fray. Business Gateway and Highlands and Islands Enterprise do valuable work. The problem is that the system around them is not built for the smallest players. Micro businesses make up around 94% of all Scottish SMEs. In other words, micro is not a niche. It is normal. Yet much of the support landscape is organised around growth businesses, the ones expected to scale, export and create dozens of jobs. If you are a one-person business or a family operation, you tend to meet advice that does not quite fit and funding schemes that you will never be eligible for.

In the islands, that gap looks even sharper. Most of our enterprises are micro. They do not want to become multinationals. They want to survive, pay people properly and maybe expand a little.

None of this is complicated policy theory. Rural and micro businesses need small, place-based interventions that reflect how we actually operate. Affordable childcare. Decent broadband. Reliable transport. These are not glamorous announcements. They are extremely practical.

Which brings me back to Black Friday.

Is this weekend a bad thing for small businesses? Sometimes. If you are pushed into discounts you cannot afford, if you are trying to match multinational warehouses, if your staff are exhausted and your margins vanish, it is hard to defend. For many rural and island firms though, the issue is not Black Friday and Cyber Monday themselves. It is that we are expected to compete on the same terms as companies with reliable infrastructure, affordable operating costs and access to support that actually fits.

For now, we will keep doing what we can. We will drink silly sparkling tea in London, film our silly videos and send great tea to as many places as possible. We will cross our fingers for the embosser, the ferries and the broadband, and we will be grateful for every order that lets us pay our staff and our suppliers.

In the long run, I would rather businesses like ours were not hanging from an unpredictable algorithm, a fragile ferry timetable and one frenzied weekend in November. A steadier landscape would let micro-businesses find a peg that is a bit less shoogly.