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The young woman scanning my groceries looked down quizzically at the corn muffins as she handed them to me to bag.  “They’re great,” I said, “if you like cornbread.” “I don’t think I’ve ever had cornbread,” she said.  I stopped, open-mouthed in surprise. I looked up at the next shoppers in line, who looked like they…

There’s a secret reason to why I talk about the Innovative Rural Business Models, Rural Jobs Creation Strategies and Gathering Your Crowd.  I talk about the Innovative Rural Business Models because I want more and more people to try more and more businesses and build more and more prosperity in your town.  I talk about…

Stores: “We’ll stay open later when enough people come downtown to make it worth our time.” Customers: “We’ll come downtown later when enough stores stay open late to make it worth our time.” When I posted this on my Facebook page, it touched off a whole lot of reaction. The comments were mostly from local businesses…

Every time I tell my friend Rob Hatch some new idea, he always asks, “What would that look like?” He wants to know how something would play out in the real world. When I explained Idea Friendly to him, of course he asked, “What would that look like?”  I came up with some comparisons of what…

Yes, I really do own a small town liquor store and a cattle ranch. It gives me a down-to-earth perspective. Besides that, I’ve been a city administrator for a town with a population under 1,000 and a nonprofit executive working the broad stretch of rural counties that no one else wanted. I’ve been an antiques…

Sometimes, when someone is telling me about their town, they’ll say it.  “We have nothing here! Nothing!”  It bothers me. Surely you have something good to work with?  Des Walsh is a friend of mine from Australia who has strong rural ties. He told me about a village that said they had nothing.  “Many years…

Deb Brown and I are getting ready to talk about how to fill up empty downtown buildings next week. And we’re up to the part about building owners who are a real pain in the neck. I’m sure you have some of these, too, so let’s talk about them.  Your fellow reader Rebecca Davis has…

Counting your empty buildings is the first step to filling them. And filling those empty buildings boosts the prosperity of your town: more businesses, more activity downtown, more people with jobs.  So how do you do that in a small rural town? We have a dozen ideas for you, all tested in small rural towns. …

You have this idea for a fun new event. You bring it up in the meeting, you’ve got ideas bouncing around, and people are excited. Then that one person who always likes to burst your bubble says it.  “What about liability?”  It’s like a stick they use to poke holes in all the best ideas. …

In the open discussion session at the RuralX Summit, I put forward the topic of serving multiple small towns. People from extension, regional banks, county-wide organizations and state-wide organizations all sat down to talk about the challenges and to make suggestions of what works when you have a lot of small towns to serve.  Here are…

Your small town is like a website; you may need to clear your cache to see the current version.  Your town is changing all the time. People move out, and people move in. People are born, and people die. Businesses start, and businesses stop. Staff turns over, and new people are working in different jobs….

I got asked to list a belief that holds back growth in rural areas. I said it was the idea that somehow we could go back to the way things used to be. You probably hear some variation of that one about twice a week. “I remember when this town was….” Or “We’ve always done…