Becky’s email newsletter

School entrepreneurship classes that don’t involve real businesses aren’t really entrepreneurship, are they? I loved the real-world projects Natalie Clark told me about in Stafford, Kansas, pop 1,200.  Their entrepreneurship classes are held at the SEED Center in a storefront downtown. Actually, it’s in an unused space in the front of the mortuary, a great…

Let’s look at the tale of two small town concerts.  One happened at an agritourism business. They brought in a couple of professional musicians for performances out at the farm. The musicians were reasonably well known, with some previous exposure on TV shows you’ve heard of. But turnout wasn’t that great, and a friend of…

Remember last week, we talked about how you don’t need to get all your ducks in a row to start a business? That started because someone told my nephew it’s hard to go into business.  Stop telling people it’s hard to go into business. It’s never been easier to start a business. You have access…

My nephew and I were talking about starting your own business. He said it’s hard to start a business. He thinks this because his adviser in college told him that it’s hard to go into business, much harder than “it used to be” when she was younger.  I disagree. It’s only hard to go into…

I’m not an expert on small towns. I’m an expert for small towns.  Each small town is different. You are the expert on your small town.  I spend a lot of time researching different small towns out there and what works in them. I read a lot of books, articles and studies, always looking for…

Do you keep an inventory of empty buildings in your town? Are you sure you got them all?   Lots of different groups do inventories of empty buildings: bankers, economic developers, chambers of commerce. There’s lots of reasons to do these inventories. It’s not just “move in ready” properties. You also want to keep track of…

Another week, another list of the “6 characteristics of successful small towns.” Seems like these pop up every so often, but I can’t say I like them.  This one had the usual things like a willingness to invest in projects, forward-thinking leaders and a shared vision.  My problem withers lists is that they are about…

George asked me for my top 5 “quick hit” fundraisers for small towns. I asked him what the goal was, because I said if you need to raise money to start a project, you’re probably starting too big.  In one of the small towns that George works with, the concrete planters downtown don’t have any…

One advantage Deb and I have when we tour your town is that we are not from there. We look at your worst long-term problem properties, and we think about how we could use them now. We’re not hung up on what this place used to be, or the environmental issues that keep it from selling,…

Whenever I speak about Idea Friendly, I ask people to write down their big goal or dream for their town. We make it a hashtag, because you might want to start spreading your dream online. So it looks like this: #IFourtown. So “IF” and the name of your town. An audience member in Tennessee said…

A couple of weeks ago, I shared our schedule of webinar topics for the rest of the year and asked for your feedback and stories. The most popular topic you wrote to me about was retaining our young people.  Your answers sort of fell into two categories. On one hand, some of you suggested specific…

Professor Brian Whitacre teaches a class in Rural Economic Development at Oklahoma State University. He assigned his student teams each a county in Oklahoma, had them map the assets, figure location quotients and pull factors and things like that. But he also wanted to get at what would make their assigned small towns better places….