I started painting when I was 15. Word-of-mouth referrals helped power my early career before spending two decades in finance and marketing. I ultimately went back to the work that makes me happiest: design, painting and restoration.

I knew that consumer marketing had changed during my years in corporate America, but I didn’t think that would matter to a local contractor. I was wrong. After 10 years relying only on referrals, I decided to invest in low-cost digital marketing tools, and in less than a year, the power of data and technology has helped my Freehold-based business take off like a rocket.

But now I understand that Congress is considering legislation called the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), and that this well-intended effort to help consumers could so severely restrict how businesses process customers’ data. These tools that have worked so brilliantly for me will no longer work. I’m not happy about it, and I hope that U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, a senior member of the committee hearing the bill, will listen to my concerns.

My first digital investment was a simple website. It describes our work and has a contact form for potential clients to connect. But my favorite tool is Google Business Profile — the combination of maps, reviews, and other business information that appears in the top-right corner of your screen when you search online for a local business.

The Profile provides my business basics, like links to my website. Even better, I can post valuable articles so people can learn about painting techniques and restoring furniture to understand what we do. Best of all, it offers customer reviews and photos.

In eight months, over two dozen clients have come through my Profile door. No paid advertising or email marketing; just new customers responding to real customers’ reviews and photos. It’s remarkable and free — so long as Congress doesn’t kill it by passing APRA, which has been endorsed by powerful congressional committee chairs who could bring it up for a vote at any moment.

The bill would restrict businesses from collecting or processing consumers’ data for any purpose other than providing the specific product or service a customer requested. This may be a good way to stop spam emails and texts, but it also stops me from engaging in common marketing practices like emailing last year’s customers with ideas for improving their home or letting them know I’m available between jobs.

It would also make it much harder to improve my website or Profile, because it would prohibit Google and my website company from collecting and processing anonymous data about things like which blog posts bring customers to my contact form.

I earn money by improving people’s homes, but I’m really in the relationship business, and relationships revolve around data. Before the internet, data-driven marketing was when a salesperson wrote down a customer’s name and information and sent them a postcard. Today, a restaurant owner can learn from anonymous data that hundreds of people in a nearby town are visiting their website, so maybe they should open a second location. If small businesses and our digital partners can’t collect and process this kind of data, our growth will be severely stunted.

As a small-business owner with clients and digital visitors from several states, I support a national privacy law and one set of data rules. But they must be the right rules, like those in New Jersey’s new privacy law, which provides strong consumer protections but still permits me to use my customers’ data in traditional “business relationship” ways. It permits small businesses to collect and process anonymous data so we can know which parts of our website or online Profile are working well.

As the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Pallone has great influence over the proposed APRA and any other data laws that Congress might pass. I hope he looks to New Jersey for guidance about the best rules for collecting and processing data and helps ensure that a national privacy law — which we need — works for both consumers and small businesses.