Finances FYI Presented by JPMorgan Chase
By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase hosted “The Experience,” a networking event aimed at Seattle’s small business community. The event featured Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business Banking, which serves approximately 70,000 businesses across the United States.
The event comes on the heels of a new Chase survey showing that about half of small business owners nationwide have changed how they operate due to economic pressures stemming from COVID-19.
The survey, conducted nationally with a focus on six key markets—Seattle, Boston, Tampa, San Diego, Houston, and Chicago—found that 41% of businesses consider themselves in growth mode. These businesses are reinvesting in technology, prioritizing employee retention, and adapting supply chains, leading to stronger-than-expected revenue growth.
Conducted nationally, with in-depth analyses in Boston, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, Seattle and Tampa, the Chase survey reveals that despite a challenging environment, 41% of small businesses nationally identify as being in “growth mode.” These businesses are actively working to increase sales, looking to expand to new locations, and hiring more staff.
They’re also investing in technology—like digital payments and payroll software—prioritizing employee retention, and adapting their supply chains, resulting in revenue increases that exceed expectations. This proactive approach is particularly evident in cities like Chicago, Seattle, and Houston, where growth mode percentages are even higher at 70%, 58%, and 56%, respectively.
According to Walter, while many business owners feel uneasy about the current economy, many are choosing to innovate rather than retreat.
“First, this current financial uncertainty is very different from when we experienced COVID and its effect on the economy,” said Walter. “There is still an uneasy feeling regarding the economy but in a very different way. With COVID everything happened so fast, we went from everything is fine to everything being locked down, like overnight. This experience of uncertainty has been a very slow-moving evolution.”
“Second, this is a case where COVID and everything that we and small businesses and the economy went through was actually an asset,” Walter continued. “Because these businesses broadly learned how to pivot much faster than they ever had to before COVID and now they have that muscle in a way that they didn’t have before. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that clearly much of that uncertainty they may be feeling is self-inflicted whether you are for it or against it, it is something that we have done of our own choosing.”
In this evolving landscape, events like The Experience provide business owners with an opportunity to connect, share strategies, and support one another. Walter expressed optimism about the resilience of small businesses in adapting to economic uncertainty.
“I watch the ground. The media says people are feeling uneasy and they are not investing and everything is slowing down and worried about the uncertainty and that’s all true, but to what degree?” Walter said. “So, what I see is people definitely have a sense of uncertainty but they see, broadly speaking, demand holding up, broadly speaking it is still hard to get people, so they are holding on to employees. As long as employment stays strong, it’s pretty good for the economy.”
On the issue of tariffs, Walter acknowledged that impacts vary widely across industries, with some experiencing immediate effects and others adopting a “wait and see” approach.
Regardless of the economic turbulence, Walter underscored the resilience of the U.S. economy and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives recovery.
“None of these things go in straight line. Where I remain optimistic is, regardless of where this stuff ends up I think what the U.S. economy has proven over the last few years is, when I think about my career, I think about the mid-90s. We had dot com burst, the financial crisis and COVID, we had these punches that just kept coming, and the economy has proven that it is dynamic and resilient,” said Walter. “I think we have a lot of problems as a country, but one of them is not flexibility and dynamism.”
Chase has made it a priority to support minority, rural, and marginalized businesses by improving access to banking tools and resources—helping these communities build sustainability and economic strength.
“Here is what I love about entrepreneurship and small businesses in general, entrepreneurship can lift up communities in a sustainable way. Our goal is always to lift up marginal communities frankly regardless of color or background,” said Walter. “We work in rural communities, we work in Black communities, Hispanic communities, poor white communities, we work in all communities that we feel are overlooked and do not have the resources and obviously this has been true for Black communities in American.”
Walter also emphasized that entrepreneurship is key to building long-term economic opportunity.
“The reason I love entrepreneurship and small business is because it is sort of like the equivalent between owning and renting, you don’t build generational wealth by renting,” said Walter. “You build generational wealth by owning assets and that is true of small business as well.”
Finances FYI is presented by JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Chase is making a $30 billion commitment over the next five years to address some of the largest drivers of the racial wealth divide.
