I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about. As expected, “number chart go up” is always the desired outcome. Number chart go up is good because it makes other number charts go up, specifically stock ticker number.

One common refrain I’d hear everywhere I went whether they dealt in pizzas, coffee, coupons, computers, or software licenses went something like this (paraphrasing), “On average customers use our product once per month and if we can double that number then we’d have no more problems.” An over-simplification of course, but they’re desperate to move the number from one… to two.

It doesn’t take a business degree to figure that out that doubling your sales, downloads, or clicks is good for business. But sometimes the goals are much more modest. Let’s say it’s coffee. They know they have you hooked on a drug and you’ll make at least four weekly purchases a month, but if they could get all their customers to buy a fifth cup of coffee that month… that’s a measly five bucks for you and I the consumer, but that’s +20% revenue month-over-month for their store.

Putting this knowledge into the hands of consumers like us… Our five bucks feels meaningless and this feels like impotent advice on the purchasing power of the dollar, but I know it matters. Those five bucks can and will skew the averages and the people wearing Patagonia vests in mahogany-paneled board rooms will obsess over those charts.

Collectively we can influence the number chart. It could be a coordinated buying campaign or boycott, but I think it could be as simple as re-patronizing small businesses you already enjoy.

• Double your purchases from that shop you liked, even if it’s a little too expensive because you understand they deal in small volumes.
• Go to that local restaurant you like again, the one where the owner comes out and shakes everyone’s hand.
• Buy another online course with your company’s education budget from that online helpful person, even if you’ll never use it.
• Watch one more video, read one more post, like it, subscribe. And don’t block the ads.

And the inverse is also true…

• Make one less order from that big online retailer funneling dark money into our elections.
• Cancel your subscription to companies owned by race-baiting ketamine-addled nazis.
• Make one less post on the billionaire owned platform, delete the app, let your session expire.

And sometimes, you don’t even need to buy anything! Often, talking about the places you like has the biggest impact. Talking raises awareness, it puts good things and places in our collective consciousness. It won’t be instant, but hopefully we can reprogram our muscle memory to think of good company before giving money to bad company.

Bad companies pay a lot of ad-bucks to other bad companies to get into your field of view. Ads are why websites have gone to shit. It’s why Instagram has become unusable, not to mention that it’s become a giant multi-level marketing scam where it’s all influencers hustling their dropshipped garbage to each other instead of sharing cool photos with friends.

Become a free, one-off marketing department or brand ambassador for a restaurant, app, podcast, artist, game, band, or store that you think is good. No one is going to think “Damn, Dave keeps talking about these breakfast tacos at Dan’s Hamburgers in Austin, TX that are only available before 10:30 am, they must be complete shit.” They will be curious and figure it out for themselves and their lives will be forever changed until the day Dan’s gets swallowed up by Austin’s endless “progress”.

In the wake of a phalanx of tech billionaires shit-grinning behind an orange-hued fascist criminal who four years prior incited a coup in that same rotunda, some Europeans have began advocating for local technology solutions. And even though these European alternative sites post a slight existential threat to my family’s income, I love the initiative. I wish every continent, country, city, and state had similar efforts to drive money towards locally sourced alternatives. I’m guilty of it as well, but why we funnel so much money to five nearly identical technology companies boggles the mind.

Anyways. Consider doubling your business somewhere with. some place or someone that deserves it. And the smaller that business is, the even bigger impact you’ll have on the number chart.