The secret I’ve been keeping

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 Rural Jobs Creation Strategies because I want to make more connections between the people in your town, even between unlikely groups of people. I want to see your people connected to the resources that they need to help them succeed and prosper. 

I talk about Gathering Your Crowd because I want to see more and more people participating in your town in a meaningful way. 

It all adds up to making your town more Idea Friendly. But when I talk about Idea Friendly, people think it’s going to be all squishy and about feelings and uncomfortable. If you know me personally, you know I’m the opposite of all that. I’m rational and linear and practical to the core. 

It’s my rational linear brain that helps me see that your town is not going to spend another minute in the past. Every minute of the rest of your town’s existence will be spent in the future. What are you doing to get ready? 

That’s a huge and daunting question. It seems like the kind of question that would bring up way too many possible answers and too many unknowns to be practical. We can’t even begin to guess what the questions and problems of the whole future are going to be.  

The practical answer is to make your town more open to new ideas. That’s where the solutions are going to come from: new ideas. 

How do you make your town more open to new ideas? You generate more participation by more people (Gather Your Crowd), you create more jobs (Build Connections) and you encourage more innovative business models (Take Small Steps). 

Despite the vague-feeling name of “Idea Friendly,” the method of preparing your town for the future is practical and do-able. Gather Your Crowd. Build Connections. Take Small Steps. Apply it over and over to everything you’re doing. 

Find ways to add the overlay of Idea Friendly to each project. Ask yourself, “How can we make this start a public conversation and draw in new people?” “How could we build more connections with this event?” “How could we break this into small steps so more people could play a meaningful part?” 

That’s it. The secret and practical reality of Idea Friendly is preparing your town for the future. 

Your next chance to join us and shape your town’s future is Downtown After 5: Bringing Life and Activity to Your Downtown After Hours. 
 
Keep shaping the future of your town, 
Becky

PS –  Now that I look at my signature sign off, maybe the future thing wasn’t really a secret after all.