The Backbone Series: Wisdom From Local Business Owners

From our founder

We’re introducing something new at Honisto. It’s called Backbone — a series built around short-form interviews with real local business owners. A new owner every episode, across many different industries. The name comes from the simple truth that small businesses are the backbone of our economy, and of the communities we live in.

There’s a lot of great information out there about running just about any kind of business, and a lot of people willing to share what they’ve learned. What we want to add is something specific: honest, validated answers from people you can actually name, in industries you can actually see, doing the work right now. Real owners, on the record.

Here’s how it works. We reach out to local business owners — barbers, gym owners, restaurant owners, real estate agents, plumbers, cleaners, landscapers — and visit them in person at their place of business to record a short interview. We ask the questions a lot of people are quietly trying to find answers to, and their responses become named, short-form video posts. Video versions live on Honisto’s Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Full recaps and written summaries live here on the blog under a new category called Backbone Series.

Three fundamental questions appear in every interview, no matter the industry:

• What’s the hardest thing about running this business?
• What’s the most rewarding part of running this business?
• What advice would you give someone thinking about starting a business like yours?

These three close out every video — same questions, same order, every time. Beyond them, we ask additional questions that vary by industry, by the specific owner, and by what our audience is asking us to dig into. That mix gives the series a consistent through-line, with room to explore what’s unique to each business.

As the catalog grows, you’ll hear the same anchor question answered by a plumber, a baker, a salon owner, and a real estate agent — all in one place. That’s the value we think doesn’t yet exist in one spot: validated answers, side by side, from people running real businesses.

We’re going short-form on purpose. Long-form interviews work well for plenty of audiences, and there are business owners who genuinely enjoy sitting for a longer conversation. What we’re optimizing for is something specific: a viewer who has 90 seconds between jobs or on a break, and a guest who can share something useful in the time it takes to grab a coffee. Short-form fits both ends of that exchange.

We’re grateful to every business owner willing to sit with us. They’re giving us their time, their honesty, and their wisdom — and we don’t take any of it lightly. We’re asking them in the first place for two reasons, both honest.

The first is for you. There’s nothing more useful than learning from someone who’s actually done what you’re trying to figure out. We want a place where you can watch real business owners — or read what they had to share — and get that information firsthand. Not from us. Not from a forum. From the people who are running the businesses you want to understand.

The second is for us. We want Honisto to become the brand that comes to mind for anything tied to local business — the directory you go to when you need to find a local business, the tools you run your business on, the content you turn to when you want to understand an industry. Honisto exists to help local businesses grow. That’s it. Everything we build is in service of that — including this.

— Franklin