B+W Business Insights
Notes on strategy, leadership, and the businesses rooted in the places they serve.
Let's begin with the word itself. Strategy, at its root, is the art of leadership — making decisions, planning, and problem solving. Tracing back to ancient Greece, strategia — or generalship — referred to the art of leading an army. That same work — making consequential decisions with limited information and finite resources — sits at the heart of running any business.
And yet the tools and frameworks built around this work have mostly served large corporations. Brown + Wheaten Strategy Lab serves a different audience — the small and mid-sized businesses, the founder-led firms, the community-rooted organizations where decisions get made directly and the consequences are personal.
The Lab's founding principles come from a career spent in corporate strategy and management consulting, working alongside leaders on enterprise-scale initiatives. The thinking shared here isn't separate from the work — it's where the work begins.
Fewer Shops, More Services: What Changed on Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Corridors
Retail fell 5% in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods from 2019 to 2023 while personal care grew 11%. What changed on the city’s commercial corridors, and what it means for the people who run them.
Your Customers Are Trying to Tell You Something
Most businesses have customers they rarely have to think about — the regulars, the steady accounts, the subscribers who renew without a prompt. In a tight economy, those customers are the most valuable early warning system a business has. Few businesses are treating it as one.
The Job You Know Too Well to Describe
You've been doing this job for years. Turns out that makes it harder to describe, not easier.
The Tariff Squeeze: Why Small Businesses Are Getting Pressed From Both Sides
If you've been following the conversations around tariffs, the pattern is familiar by now: costs go up, businesses pay more, more is coming. That's accurate. It's just not the whole story.
The 66% Problem: AI Adoption Without a Strategy
Three years into mass AI adoption, most businesses using it aren't getting anywhere. The gap isn't about tools — it's about strategy.
The K-Economy and Your Local Market
A "K-shaped economy" pulls businesses in opposite directions from the same starting point — and even strong businesses aren't immune, they just feel it later. Here's how to spot the shift before it reaches you.