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Old Way economic development assumes that it takes a lot of time, money and work just to get into business. Entrepreneurs need to have all their ducks in a row. They need to have great credit, deep pockets, good connections, be clean and sober, have strong business skills, no criminal record and a solid support…
Do you give awards? Lots of economic development organizations, chambers and other groups give awards for entrepreneurs and businesses. That’s an opportunity to show that you value people. At SaveYour.Town, Deb and I have been thinking a lot about including everyone in your community fairly. For example, Norfolk County, Ontario, gives the usual kind of…
North Shore is a small town on the edge of the remote Salton Sea in California. It used to be a popular tourist destination. As the Salton Sea has grown more salty and polluted, tourism has gone away. About 3,500 people live there now and around 95% are Hispanic or Latino. Monique Lopez was one…
When I started as administrator for a city of 993 people (yes, we were a city under Oklahoma law), I was frustrated trying to make sense of the list of properties the municipal government owned. I sat down with the list, a town map and a highlighter, deciphered the legal descriptions from the list and…
When Deb and I were working on our Build Youth Entrepreneurship video, I saw way too many young entrepreneurship programs encouraging them to emulate business people I wouldn’t really want my niece or nephews to emulate. Shark Tanks. Pitch competitions. Billionaires as role models. The real models for young rural entrepreneurs are the successful business people…
Several conversations lately have centered on whether rural communities have something you could call culture. And if we do, how would you describe it? At the Dakota Resources virtual coffee we joined, Judy Larson said something like, “Our culture here in Lemmon affects how we do things, and new people have another culture.” You may…
Pew Research released a major rural vs urban study, and most of the positive trends for rural places are being overlooked in the headlines. I’m going to give you the bullet points here, and you can read more of my thoughts at SmallBizSurvival.com. Way more people prefer rural than prefer urban, and the gap is growing. Way more…
Rural trends are kind of my thing. Seems like everyone has a “top trends” article for 2022, but not many of them cover rural trends and small towns. We focus only on trends for rural and small towns. Want to skip ahead and see my trends for 2022? Watch the rural trends video here. Where do…
If you set up entrepreneur training, you want to reach as many potential entrepreneurs as you can. When only a handful sign up and even fewer show up and some drop out before the end, it’s discouraging. It’s just possible that some of the problem is in how the training is delivered. For formal training events like conferences, there are certain accessibility…
I’ve been thinking lately how many large challenges we face as a society that come down to not thinking from other people’s perspectives. Our communities could use more empathy. Doing business with each other can help us build empathy. Selling something requires us to think about other people. We have to think about what other people…
It’s possible to get so attached to the plan, that you can’t do anything else. Deb told me about a town that decided to rehab some old cabins in their park. They formed a committee that reported to the Parks and Recs committee that reported to the City Council, who made the final approvals. So…
When I toured the picopolitan small town of Rosalia, Washington, I met a painter who had a big corner building downtown. She said that she had moved to town anticipating that an arts scene would develop, and then she could be part of it. Since the arts scene hadn’t really developed, she felt fairly lonely as an…
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