Marketing
What main street can teach Silicon Valley about building loyalty
If Silicon Valley spent half as much time studying Main Street as Main Street spends studying its customers, we’d build technology that feels a lot more like a community.
January 2, 2026 by Andrew Helms — CEO – USA, SumUp
Innovation gets the spotlight. But loyalty keeps the lights on.
Every founder talks about growth, it's practically engraved in our minds to constantly think about users, scale and disruption. Yet, the most successful business owners I've met aren't chasing exponential graphs. They're focused on something harder to measure: trust.
Walk down any Main Street and you'll see it in action. The barbershop that remembers your name. The café that knows your order. The restaurant owner who checks in just to say thanks. These aren't grand gestures. They're small, repeated acts of attention — and they create a kind of loyalty no rewards program can buy.
Somewhere along the way, Silicon Valley lost sight of that.
The human side of growth
I've spent time in both worlds, from global corporations where success is measured in market share to small shops where it's measured in regulars. The difference isn't ambition. It's proximity. Small business owners live inside their customer base. When sales dip, they feel it immediately. When someone new walks in, it's personal.
That closeness builds a different kind of intelligence. Owners don't need dashboards to tell them what's working — they watch, they listen, they adapt. And when you operate that way long enough, loyalty stops being a metric. It becomes muscle memory. You can't automate care. You have to practice it.
A few years ago, at my wedding, a local restaurant owner I knew showed up with trays of food. He wasn't hired; he just wanted to be part of the celebration. It was a reminder that commerce can turn into connection when people genuinely care about one another.
That's the heartbeat of small business — not transactions, but trust. Silicon Valley often designs for scale and speed. Main Street builds for a sense of belonging.
Empathy as a business strategy
Empathy is more than an abstract value; it's a matter of survival when you've experienced the struggles of closing a register late at night or the anxiety of affording rent after a slow month. That's why so many great small-business owners make decisions differently. They hire people who treat the work like it's their own. They solve problems head on instead of through forms or tickets.
The lesson for modern leaders? Hire for empathy. Train for understanding. Technology can scale speed, but it can't scale sincerity. The best loyalty program is remembering someone's story.
When big starts acting small
I don't believe big tech is the villain here. It just grew too fast to stay close to its customers. But there's a shift happening: a hunger for authenticity, for products and services that feel human again. People want to spend money in ways that strengthen their communities. They want to know who's behind the counter. They want to feel part of something local, tangible, and real.
That's the future of loyalty, not gamified points or predictive models, but shared values. The companies that figure this out will earn not just customers but advocates. And the playbook has been sitting in plain sight for decades, on every Main Street in America.
A simple equation
Care more, charge fairly, answer the phone, remember names. It's not complicated. It's human.
If Silicon Valley spent half as much time studying Main Street as Main Street spends studying its customers, we'd build technology that feels a lot more like a community.
At the end of the day, loyalty isn't something you engineer. It's something you earn.
About Andrew Helms
Andrew Helms is the CEO – USA at SumUp, a global financial technology company, where he leads the US strategy focused on empowering small and mid-sized businesses with an integrated payments and loyalty POS ecosystem and exceptional, US-based, bilingual customer service. An accomplished leader in Fintech, CPG, retail, and corporate strategy, Andrew is known for his data-driven approach, having previously helped scale Home Chef to a billion-dollar business through new product development and retail strategy.
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