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Entrepreneur's September 2026 issue profiles nine small businesses from its America's Favorite Mom & Pop list, focusing on how they designed their storefront signs to reflect their identity. Owners of shops like Latinx with Plants, Staci's Sandwich Joint, and Dead People's Stuff explain the reasoning behind their sign choices, from cultural symbolism to clean, glowing storefronts meant to draw in passersby.
PwC research cited by an Entrepreneur contributor finds that three-quarters of business owners feel deep regret within a year of exiting their company, despite gaining significant wealth. The piece argues the problem isn't financial but personal: many founders never build a plan for identity and purpose after the sale, leaving them adrift once the business that defined them is gone.
As companies scale past a few dozen employees, payroll grows more complex, with multiple locations, changing tax withholdings and varying overtime rules straining manual review processes. New AI-driven payroll systems are shifting from after-the-fact corrections to continuous monitoring that flags pay-rate, overtime and compliance issues during the pay cycle rather than after it closes.
An Entrepreneur analysis describes how a manufacturing launch team once built a manual tracker and weekly reconciliation process to patch unreliable information flow between departments. Even after the underlying system improved and the original problem was solved, staff kept maintaining both the new process and the old workaround because removing it felt riskier than continuing it.
A recent guide highlights six website-building platforms—including Wix, Weebly and Sitey—as affordable options for small businesses that can't hire a professional designer. The list emphasizes free or low-cost tools offering drag-and-drop design, mobile-responsive templates, SEO features and, in some cases, personalized domain names.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that hiring managers should stop overweighting resume signals like big-name employers, large budgets or big teams when evaluating marketing leader candidates. Instead, they say the key question is what a candidate actually diagnosed and improved in past roles, and whether they can quickly assess what a specific business needs marketing to do within their first weeks on the job. The piece also stresses that strong marketing leaders should help shape a company's value proposition, not just communicate it after the fact.
A longtime search marketer who began in the field in 1998 has published guidance urging entrepreneurs to rethink growth strategy around AI-driven search and creator collaborations. The advice centers on mapping customer questions before choosing marketing channels, then using that map to guide content, creator briefs and measurement of AI-search visibility. It also stresses partnering with creators who hold genuine audience trust rather than simply the largest followings.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that as companies grow, CEOs can no longer stay close to every decision the way they could when the business was small. Instead, leaders must build teams capable of making sound judgment calls independently, shifting their own focus toward long-term strategy rather than day-to-day execution.
A contributor to Entrepreneur argues that many companies, especially in B2B SaaS, mistakenly treat marketing spend as a vending machine that should instantly dispense leads for every dollar spent. Instead, the piece proposes viewing marketing like an investment account, where some efforts pay off immediately and others build trust and recall over time, eventually compounding into inbound demand.
AI tools now let non-engineers build custom software in a fraction of the time it once took, shifting the classic 'build vs. buy' debate from a question of technical capability to one of strategic risk. An Entrepreneur contributor argues that while AI has made building nearly frictionless, companies still take on ongoing burdens like reliability, maintenance and security that vendors traditionally absorbed.
Zac Choi, founder of Big Context & Company and previously of String AI (acquired by a telecom partner), is building tools to make corporate data usable by AI agents rather than human users. He argues most companies' data infrastructure was designed for predictable human queries, not the scale and unpredictability of AI-driven work, leaving businesses unprepared to deploy AI effectively.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that the popular notion of 'reaching your full potential' is misguided, since potential simply means the capacity to become something rather than a fixed, ideal endpoint. The piece suggests that setting a defined vision of potential actually limits growth, since no one can predict what future versions of themselves might be capable of.