What I’m learning studying 20 small businesses (series kickoff)

TL;DR: I run a marketing agency and I am finishing a PhD at the same time. The two are the same project. My doctoral research, which I call Growth Mapping, studies how small businesses actually grow when they cannot tell whether their marketing is making money. I am working with 20 real businesses to test it. This series is me sharing the work openly as it happens, anonymized and aggregate only, with no premature wins claimed. Follow along, or come be one of the 20.

I started Hiilite in 2014. For more than a decade I have sat across the table from small business owners who all ask a version of the same question. Is this working. Not the marketing in the abstract. Their marketing, their money, this month. And for most of them, nobody can answer it honestly.

That question is why I went back to school. It is why I am building what I am building. And it is what this series is about.

The lived problem I am studying

Here is the thing that bothers me, and has for years. A small business owner spends real money on marketing. They get a report. The report shows traffic, impressions, posts, maybe some rankings. It looks like progress. Then they ask the only question that matters, which is whether any of it turned a profit, and the report goes quiet. The marketing data and the money data live in two different places, and almost no one joins them.

So owners make decisions blind. They keep spending on things that might be losing money, or they cut things that were quietly working, because the dashboard never told them which was which. This is not a small problem. In Canada, small businesses make up 98.2% of all employer businesses (ISED, Key Small Business Statistics 2025). The overwhelming majority of the economy is people running on instinct because the tools built for big, well-funded companies do not fit them.

I am a practitioner who got tired of shrugging at that question. So I became a pracademic. I am a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan, and my research is built to answer it properly, not anecdotally.

What Growth Mapping is testing

Growth Mapping is the working name for my doctoral research and the thesis behind everything Hiilite is building. The short version is this. Growth is not a pile of deliverables. It is a loop. You sense where a business actually is from its real numbers, you seize the highest-leverage move, you transform by measuring what actually changed, and you run that loop again, tighter each time.

That structure is not something I invented. It borrows from dynamic-capabilities theory and from the growth-hacking literature, where the core idea is rapid, experiment-driven, data-led growth (Bohnsack & Liesner, 2019). It also leans on the discipline of business experimentation, where the point is to build a culture that tests its ideas instead of arguing about them (Thomke, HBR 2020). What I am adding is the part nobody fits to small businesses: tying every move to the owner’s real financials so the loop optimizes for profit, not vanity metrics.

What I am genuinely testing, and do not yet know, is whether this loop holds up outside a lab and outside my own clients. Does it actually help a 20-person business decide what to do next. Does grounding the recommendation in real money change the decision. That is the open question. I am not going to pretend I have the answer before the data does.

What I hope to learn from 20 real businesses

I am working with 20 small and medium businesses to study how growth decisions get made and what changes when you point a profitability-first loop at them. These are real companies with real numbers, real constraints, and real stakes.

A few of the things I am setting out to learn:

Where the money question actually breaks. At what point do owners lose the thread between marketing effort and profit, and what would it take to give it back to them.
Which moves travel and which do not. The growth tactics that get written up are built for unicorns. I want to know which ones survive contact with a 20-person business and which collapse.
Whether a tighter loop beats a bigger plan. Few sharp experiments grounded in real data, versus the big annual marketing plan that nobody revisits.
What “what to do next” looks like when it is bound to a specific business instead of generic best practice.

I want to be precise about what I do not have yet. This series is starting at the beginning of the work, not the end. I will not be posting findings I have not earned, results I cannot defend, or a tidy conclusion the research has not produced. When I share something, it will be because it is real.

A hard line on privacy

This matters enough to say plainly. The businesses in the study are participants in academic research, not case studies for my marketing. I will only ever share aggregate and anonymized patterns. No participant gets named, profiled, or made identifiable, and nothing a participant shares as part of the research gets repurposed to sell them or anyone else.

There is a firewall here on purpose. I am both the researcher and the founder of a company that could benefit commercially, and I take that tension seriously. The research data and the agency are kept separate, with participant consent and proper governance, exactly because that separation is what makes the work trustworthy. If you participate, your numbers are studied, never published.

What is coming in this series

I will publish as the work moves, roughly once I have something real to say rather than on a forced schedule. Expect posts on:

How I am setting up the study and the questions behind the design.
What surprised me about how small businesses actually make growth decisions.
The aggregate patterns as they emerge, stated honestly with their limits.
What I am getting wrong and changing as I go.
How the research and the platform we are building shape each other.

This is build-in-public in the real sense. You see the messy middle, not a polished after-the-fact story.

FAQ

Why do a PhD while running an agency? Because the problem I most wanted to solve, whether a small business can actually tell if its marketing is profitable, needed more than another agency opinion. It needed evidence. The agency gives me the lived problem and the real data; the research gives me the rigor to answer it instead of guessing.

What is Growth Mapping in one sentence? A profitability-first growth loop for small businesses: sense where you are from your real numbers, seize the highest-leverage move, measure what actually changed, and repeat. The full method is on the framework page and in the research hub.

Are you going to share my business’s results if I participate? No. Only aggregate, anonymized patterns are ever shared. No participant is named or made identifiable, and nothing you share for the research is used to sell to you. The researcher-and-vendor firewall exists precisely to protect that.

Have you found anything yet? The study is ongoing. I am starting this series at the beginning of the work, not the end, so there are no findings to report yet. When there are real, defensible patterns, I will share them with their limits stated.

Can my business be one of the 20? Maybe. If you are a small or medium business owner who wants to know whether your marketing is making money, book a call and we will talk about whether you are a fit.

About the author

William Walczak, MBA is the CEO of Hiilite Creative Group, the Kelowna marketing agency he founded in 2014, and a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan. His research, “Growth Mapping: A Mixed-Method Study of Growth Hacking,” is the foundation of the Hiilite platform. He was named CEO Monthly Marketing Strategy CEO of the Year (BC, 2023).

Connect: Hiilite profile · LinkedIn · Google Scholar

Follow the work. This is the start of an open series. Read the Growth Mapping framework to see the loop I am testing, explore the research hub to see the thinking behind it, or book a call if you want your business to be one of the 20.

Sources

Bohnsack, R. & Liesner, M. M. (2019). What the hack? A growth hacking taxonomy and practical applications for firms. Business Horizons. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2019.09.001
Thomke, S. (2020). Building a Culture of Experimentation. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Key Small Business Statistics 2025 (national figures as of December 2024). ised-isde.canada.ca