Governor Christie joined with many others in New Jersey and across the nation to promote Small Business Saturday this past weekend. If you haven’t heard, it was an effort to help support small business in through their local communities. Finally, the slow pokes responsible for measuring growth in the country have come across the undeniable fact that small business is one of the main elements responsible for pumping jobs and money back into our economy.

Frankly, this is the first show of support from the government that had a chance of having a positive influence on small businesses everywhere in this great nation of ours. As small business owners, I’m sure you are all quite aware of how ineffective tax cuts and other such forms of so-called small business support from the government have been. This ‘movement’, as it has been called by some local New Jersey residents, is a great way to fill the gap between Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the busiest online ordering day of the year). Turning it into a traditional day of spending at the small businesses in your local community is as good a use of Holiday spending as its counterparts.

Highlighting one town in particular in New Jersey, Maplewood really went out of its way to embrace this new promotion. Maplewood Mayor Vic DeLuca and the Maplewood Village Alliance manager Julie Doran knows that for every $100 you spend locally, about $70 goes back into the local economy. With that little fact fueling their fires, they helped to launch the promotion in a big way for their town.

Said Doran, “Small Business Saturday recognizes the importance of small businesses to the overall economy and local communities. It’s a day to support the small, independently owned businesses we can’t live without and to raise awareness about the importance of small businesses to our communities.”

Since the numbers are not in yet to really gauge how successful this promotion was, we need you to tell us. Did your business benefit from incredible gains on that day? Let us know and we’ll showcase you in our follow up report on the results of Small Business Saturday.