What Small Business Leaders Have Been Building on This Past Year

By Kekeletso Nkele, small.news Assistant

(small.news) — For the small.news Anniversary, we caught up with some of the small business leaders across the globe who have been changing the small business industry. From rebuilding earthquake-affected communities in Turkey to reshaping how we measure small business growth in the United States, here’s what they’ve been building.

1. Adnan Akdemir, CEO, AFM Venture Funds — 100.Yıl Köyü

Since writing for small.news, Adnan Akdemir has been focused on 100.Yıl Köyü (“Centennial Village”), a collaborative civil initiative that completed permanent housing for around 1,000 earthquake survivors on the Hatay Mustafa Kemal University campus in 2025. The project is a partnership between volunteer Turkish businesspeople, the Jandarma Asayiş Vakfı (JAV Foundation), the university, and local NGOs. With housing complete, the current focus is helping residents settle back into normal life. Most occupants are doctors at the region’s only remaining hospital or university professors, so job security is not an issue—the priority now is helping their families integrate into the city’s ongoing rebuilding projects.

One of the year’s largest contributions came from a Hong Kong–based hotel chain, which pledged $2 million—raised by donating $10 from every room booked—to help fund the project’s third funded phase.

100.Yıl Köyü received the Global Impact Award from the Young Presidents’ Organization, a global network of 38,000 members, recognizing the work of the 11 volunteers who brought different parts of society together around one cause — resulting in one of the fastest, largest civil-led housing recovery efforts globally.

Akdemir has also helped form a separate international group supporting Amazon tribes by building a school in the heart of the jungle — aiming to create a knowledge-exchange hub for accumulated Amazon expertise, designed to benefit native tribes without disrupting their way of life. The group will soon look for support from the Silver Lining community to help bring locally sourced Amazon products—coffee, honey, and açaí—to market.

“Small business is the main source of livelihood for any society,” Akdemir said. “What happens to small businesses affects every part of that society. Local small businesses have to be supported if we want recovery in any situation.”

His advice to small business owners?

“Your actions matter as you grow your business. Having the right principles from the beginning isn’t easy, but it makes your venture much stronger in the long run. When I started my small cinema business in the 1990s, I was the only one with clean books, correct employee contracts, and transparent ticket reporting. My competitors laughed at every meeting—they said I was crazy to operate that way. Twenty years later, my company was the only one to attract international private equity investment, the only one to IPO, and I sold the majority stake to a strategic buyer on my own terms—while all the competition disappeared.”

2. Sabaa Quao, President, PlusCo Venture Studio — Arima, Nobellum, Cannes Young Lions

Since writing for small.news, Sabaa Quao has spent the past couple of years collaborating directly with AI and fintech startups, building a venture studio model focused on solutions for marketing, advertising, growth, and innovation teams. Working with early-stage startups, he notes, is by default working with small businesses—companies under intense pressure, under-resourced, and building on the kind of asymmetric expertise that can create entirely new categories of business.

This year, much of that work centered on Arima, a Canadian startup that has built synthetic models of the Canadian, American, German, and UK populations, along with tools that make synthetic data accessible and useful. As more companies look to combine their own customer data with synthetic datasets to answer practical questions—where to open a new location, who their best customers are—Quao sees Arima as part of a broader shift: a small business helping other businesses make use of an entirely new type of data, the way the digital era once leveled the playing field for smaller companies.

Quao has mentored more than 25 young people and small business owners over his career, and says the relationship has become reciprocal—his mentees, along with students at the guest lectures he gives at business and creative schools, keep him current on stable-coins, blockchain, and new business activity across the Gulf region and Africa.

Right now, he is most excited about a workshop he recently delivered to a cohort of startups through Nobellum, a female-led social and technology enterprise that has supported more than 120 Black startups and founders. The session focused less on specific AI tools and more on strategic approaches to using AI as the companies—all past their first $100K in revenue—push toward their next stage of growth.

Quao has served as Digital Co-Chair of Young Lions in Canada for the past two years and sat on the Innovation Jury at Cannes Lions 2026. Registration for the Canadian competition does not open until January, but he is flagging it early: the competition gives people under 30 in marketing, advertising, and design a chance to test themselves on a global stage, and Canadian teams have consistently contributed to the country’s standing at the festival.

On what people misunderstand about supporting small businesses, he said, “I don’t think people understand how unrelenting startup life is. Startups, as a subset of small business, work with extraordinary intensity, deep focus, and borderline impatience when the pace around them slows for whatever reason. I have consistently underestimated how slowly traditional companies move.”

His advice to small business owners?

“In the early stages of major technology shifts, size becomes less decisive. Incumbents and upstarts suddenly find themselves competing on a much more level playing field. The AI era is creating one of those moments now, but the window will not stay this wide open indefinitely. You can complain about what AI is doing to your industry, or you can use this moment to build something better. That opportunity is not limited to technology companies. Some of the most important AI-era businesses may come from non-tech companies that understand their industries, customers, and problems better than the technology companies do.”

3. Alexandra Rosen, Global Head of GoDaddy Small Business Research Lab

Since writing for small.news, Alexandra Rosen and her team have focused on making the smallest businesses in the economy more visible—looking not just at whether they’re growing, but at who is starting them, where, what people hope to achieve by working for themselves, and the broader impact these businesses have.

GoDaddy released research called “What Small Businesses Tell Us About the Economy That Wall Street Can’t”, which found that digital small and microbusiness activity closely tracks small business formation in public records and on Main Street—particularly among businesses with five or fewer employees and a physical presence. The research also found small business activity is more closely tied to labor statistics like job creation and unemployment than to stock market performance, and can offer an early signal of broader economic trends several quarters out.

Rosen’s team is also exploring what they call the “Empowerment Economy.” It’s the idea that starting a business isn’t always about income or building a large company, but often about control, flexibility, or pursuing an idea someone cares about. Business ownership, she notes, continues to emerge in places that haven’t traditionally received much attention; there’s no single background, location, or path someone must follow to start a business.

One initiative that expanded this year: GoDaddy’s Most Entrepreneurial Cities research went international for its second year, measuring momentum in business growth rather than raw business counts. San Antonio ranked as America’s most active city for new business this year, with Fresno—the only California city in the rankings—also performing strongly. The goal, Rosen says, isn’t the ranking itself but showing business owners that their contributions matter wherever they are, and helping local leaders understand what’s happening in their communities.

Rosen is proud that business ownership is becoming harder to put in a single box, and of the Research Lab’s seven years surveying more than 70,000 small business owners—work that’s shown both what’s stayed consistent (their positivity and variety) and what’s changed, including how many now want to remain solo operators or keep their businesses as side ventures. Bringing that research to major financial news outlets through the Wall Street paper was, she says, a milestone in showing that small businesses shouldn’t be considered separately from larger companies when assessing economic performance.

Right now, the team is going both deeper—telling specific stories of different business owner types (makers and small-scale manufacturers, full-time versus portfolio operators, physical pop-ups versus online consultants, gig workers) while continuing to track their broader impact on local economies over time.

GoDaddy’s new TikTok channel, Everyday Economist, launched to make the Lab’s research more accessible to a wider audience. The team will also keep building out its Empowerment Economy work, examining how people’s motivations for starting businesses evolve alongside the technological and community trends shaping their world.

On what people misunderstand about supporting small businesses: “We cannot generalize small businesses into a single category. And collectively, they have a tremendously outsized impact. We tend to celebrate business ownership when a company raises a lot of money, hires hundreds of people or becomes very large. Those outcomes matter, but they are not the only outcomes that matter. For one person, success might mean hiring their first employee. For another, it could mean earning enough to work for themselves… Supporting small businesses starts with asking business owners what they are trying to achieve, rather than deciding what success should look like for them.”

Her advice to small business owners?

“There is no wrong time to start, just as there is no single right time. Don’t wait for perfect certainty. Our research repeatedly shows that starting a business rarely follows a perfectly ordered plan. People begin with an idea, test it, learn what works and adjust as they go… You have a lot of people supporting you, a lot of resources and networks available, and a lot of impact to make!”

4. CK Japheth, Founder, Innovation Village

Since writing for small.news, CK Japheth and his team have focused on turning the piece’s central idea (“Stop fixing entrepreneurs, fix the system) into operating infrastructure. That means connecting their regional Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) to MoTIV’s shared production facilities, the Kampala Innovation District, markets, and finance, so businesses can move from ideas and training to production, customers, and sustainable growth.

One major expansion this year has been growing the Makers Make pathway at MoTIV into the wider Kampala Innovation District—a model Japheth calls “Industrial Park 2.0.” Rather than building around a single large anchor factory, the model is designed around many small enterprises sharing productive infrastructure: business development, creative residency, industrial equipment, technical production support, workspace, markets, and finance combined in one place. The goal, he says, is a functioning business, not merely a certificate.

Japheth is especially proud of Karaa, an e-mobility company based at MoTIV that electrifies bicycles already in use. This year, Karaa expanded from Uganda into Kenya and Zambia through local distributors, is piloting battery-as-a-service for dairy collection and last-mile delivery, and secured support from Uganda’s Science, Technology and Innovation Secretariat for a semi-automated assembly line and battery software — local engineering moving from prototype to regional enterprise.

Right now, he’s most excited about proving the Industrial Park 2.0 model through the Kampala Innovation District, where more than 100 enterprises across seven sectors are already participating. The goal is to show that small businesses can share industrial-grade facilities while keeping ownership of their output, margins, intellectual property, and customers—and then replicate the model across Africa.

Two things Japheth would like to promote: Market by MoTIV, a curated monthly marketplace connecting local fashion, food, skincare, homeware, art, and product-design businesses to paying customers; and the Africa Creatives Alliance (ACA), a continental initiative building the institutional relationships, markets, capital, and infrastructure African creative businesses need to scale across borders. ACA’s flagship convening, the Africa Creative Economy Lens 2026, will take place in Gaborone, Botswana, under the theme “Building Sustainable Infrastructure for Africa’s Creative Economies,” bringing together more than 200 policymakers, investors, small business owners, and creative-economy leaders from over 20 countries. Japheth would welcome small.news helping amplify ACA, the Botswana convening, and the lessons that come out of it.

On what people misunderstand about supporting small businesses: “People often confuse small-business support with training. Africa’s deeper challenge is the missing middle between starting and scaling. At one end are training programmes, competitions and micro-finance. At the other are banks and investors looking for established, investment-ready businesses. In between are thousands of firms with skills, products and early customers, but without the compliant production facilities, equipment, working capital, standards, distribution, large contracts and operating systems needed to grow… True support must bridge learning to earning and prototype to industry.”

His advice to small business owners?

“Design value creation and value capture together. Be clear about whose problem you solve, what outcome you create and why it matters. Then be equally clear about who pays, how you earn, which partnerships enable delivery and why the revenue will repeat… Keep learning as deliberately as you keep building. A business only grows as far as its founder is growing.”

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