Starting a business is an act of courage. Running a business even more so.
But as any business owner will tell you, dealing with difficult customers or delayed shipments can feel like preschool play when pitted against the nightmare of operational minutiae. Try picking a business entity without falling down the hole of legal fine print. Or reading overtime laws without being defeated by jargon. Or even choosing a business credit card without getting overwhelmed by the acronyms and choices before you.
I should know. I co-managed a small independent business before trading it in to become Gusto’s Head of Content. These are the problems I want to help solve.
There are 30 million small businesses in the US today, employing roughly half of the country’s workers. Their success depends on a lot of things, not least of which is the ability to do what they’re best at—be it baking, selling furniture, or treating patients—without worrying about overtime laws and business credit cards. This mission guides everything we build at Gusto, and it’s also the mission that helped us build this site.
With that, I want to welcome you to Talk Shop, an information destination for small and independent businesses, accountants, and their teams. We’re here to break down the day-to-day complexity of being an entrepreneur—think taxes, HR, finance—so you can spend time on your business instead.
If you’ve visited these parts before, you’ll notice that we’re sporting a new look, a new name, and some new features.
First: the name.
In the last few years, we’ve learned that small businesses can’t succeed without the communities around them. We don’t just mean customers and employees. We mean other small businesses too. Business owners rely heavily on each other for recommendations, advice, support, and of course, commiseration.
That’s why we’ve changed our name from Framework to Talk Shop. We want our site to be a place of knowledge sharing and discussion—about topics that might seem boring from the outside but are crucial to business success. (And frankly, quite fascinating!) In the same vein, we made the decision to allow comments on all articles. We want to hear more from you, and facilitate conversations between you.
(That said, sometimes business matters are too sensitive to discuss on an open forum. Talk Shop also has a closed Facebook community where you can have those honest conversations.)
Relatedly, we’ve placed a greater emphasis on people and personalities in our design. You’ll see more faces behind our stories—author bios, profile photos, contact information—so you can be sure that the information you’re getting is reliable and coming from real people.
We’ve also made the site more accessible by giving you the ability to find what is most useful to you.
You’ll find a breakdown of our different sub-sites below. You can also find them by clicking on the dropdown under “More” on the top right.
- Talk Shop and Ask Gusto: These are our hubs for small business owners. You can search Ask Gusto—our repository of payroll, benefits, and HR-related Q&As—for up-to-date definitions of key terms and breakdowns of laws. On Talk Shop, we’ll continue to up the ante on advice, thought leadership, and recommendations from subject matter experts and business owners.
- Partner resources: We’ve revamped our destination for accountants—our trusted advisors that help small businesses succeed. We’ll publish more frequently, helping modern accountants grow their practices and better serve clients.
- Company news: Think of this as Gusto’s own blog. It’s a space for announcements, press releases, and opinions from us.
That’s it for now! We’ll stop talking so you can do more of it.
Go ahead, talk shop. We’re listening.
