Deb Brown and I will be speaking at the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) Annual Conference in Dallas on September 17, 2023.

As co-founders of SaveYour.Town, Deb and I have dedicated ourselves to helping rural communities thrive. We understand the challenges and unique opportunities that rural community builders and entrepreneurs face, and we strive to empower them to bring their ideas to life. That is why we are excited to present our interactive workshop, Bringing Your Ideas to Life: Idea Friendly Workshop for Rural Revitalizations on Sunday, September 17 at 3:45 PM.

In this workshop, we will guide you through a dynamic and engaging experience designed to spark your creativity and provide you with practical steps you can put into action right away back in your own communities.

We believe that rural areas have incredible potential. By nurturing an idea-friendly environment, we can create the towns we most want to live in.

During this interactive workshop, you will have the opportunity to connect with fellow economic developers, share your challenges, and collaborate on innovative solutions. Our goal is to inspire you and equip you with practical strategies that can be applied immediately.

Whether you are a long-standing economic developer, a local entrepreneur, or a community leader, this workshop is designed to give you the tools and knowledge necessary to turn your vision into reality.

Mark your calendars for September 17-20, 2023, and join us at the International Economic Development Council Annual Conference in Dallas.

This innovative Annual Conference will explore, modernize, and grow successful industry strategies and practices by focusing on each of IEDC’s five strategic initiatives:

• Leadership Development
• Workforce & Talent Development
• Supporting Entrepreneurship
• Fostering Economic Opportunity & Diversity
• Economic Transformation

Learn more about the IEDC conference here.

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The challenge of rural entrepreneurship

Rural entrepreneurs and small town businesses face extra challenges including online competition, limited workforce and even finding a usable building. Today, creative entrepreneurs are using new innovative business models to overcome these challenges and start businesses that reshape their communities for the better.

What you’ll learn – Start Smaller in Your Small Town

Photo by Becky McCray

At SmallBizSurvival.com from Nov 13-19, 2023, you’ll discover articles, short videos, audios and more free resources focused on how smaller small businesses can succeed. Learn the Innovative Rural Business Models and uncover hidden opportunities, like business inside a business and more.

Contributors Becky McCray and Deb Brown will share their own entrepreneurial experiences, stories from international rural entrepreneurs and their materials from SaveYour.Town and Building Possibility.

Find this and other Global Entrepreneurship Week events listed on the official calendar at GenGlobal.

Once we get going, you can see all our stories tagged with Global Entrepreneurship Week here.

Share your own story

You can add your own story, too. What have you learned about rural small business? What’s working in your own business and your own community? What have you learned to avoid?

Leave a comment or use our contact form to share, and I’ll reach out to follow up.

This is global. Stories from anywhere rural are welcome.

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She has spoken at events in the USA, Canada, Australia and UK.

Small Town Speaker Becky McCray presents the keynote speech to the North Carolina Rural Conference, organized by the NC Rural Center. Photo by Jose Alvarez.

I help you shape a brighter future for your town no matter what the negative people do, giving you practical steps you can put into action right away.
My advice is based on my real world experience as a lifelong entrepreneur and cattle rancher. I don’t just talk about rural issues; I live them.

Using my real-world perspective as a small business owner, I deliver concrete take-aways that you can use today to shape the future of your town without getting beaten down by circumstances or others’ negativity. Audiences feel energized and hopeful because they know how they can make a difference in their community starting now despite everything going on in the world.

You get down-to-earth advice based on my experience as a life-long rural entrepreneur and cattle rancher, including the “get your hands dirty” aspects that others gloss over.

My programs on my Idea Friendly method, rural trends, downtowns, economic development and community development have given practical ideas to audiences at over 250 events. Rural and small town conferences, economic development organizations, councils of government and chambers of commerce in the US, UK, Canada and Australia have chosen me to boost optimism, change thinking and unleash immediate action.

Not holding a conference? Just want me to visit your town?

Turn a visit from me into change for your town.

When you invite me to your town, it’s not about me. My impartial approach keeps the group focused. We get out and walk through your downtown to all work together on practical steps you can use right now.

Towns and counties from 700 to 70,000 population in the US and Canada have invited me to be part of shaping their future.

Learn more about Becky McCray, small town speaker

To find out what rural people felt were their biggest challenges, SaveYour.Town and SmallBizSurvival.com surveyed over 280 rural people in the fourth quarter of 2020. The results make up this fourth edition of the Survey of Rural Challenges.

Challenges stemming from the pandemic and economic crisis were ranked as less important than long-existing rural challenges.

Continuing challenges with losses in housing, business and population ranked as the highest rural community challenges. The ongoing lack of workers, stiff competition from online businesses, and marketing ranked as the highest challenge to rural small businesses.

Other preconception-changing results

Defying stereotyped media profiles of poverty, crime and drug abuse as the primary rural challenges, rural people ranked these lowest of all community challenges.

Although rural economic development often centers around jobs, it was one of the least-mentioned challenges in this survey.

For all the concern over small business lending, rural people say usable buildings are as hard or harder to find than loans.

Rural small business owners show little interest in business plan assistance, yet it remains a popular type of assistance offered to rural businesses.

More rural people said they needed an idea for a business to start than said they were worried their business would fail.

Rural Community Challenges ranked

The pandemic and economic crisis not only did not dominate the responses, but it also did not rank in the top ten challenges.

Housing, business and population losses continue to rank as the highest rural community challenges.

The top five rural community challenges in 2021 were:

1. Not enough good housing
2. Downtown is dead
3. Losing young people
4. Need new residents
5. Not enough volunteers

Small-town Business Challenges ranked

The lack of workers and difficulties with marketing continue to challenge rural small businesses.

Online competition continued to increase pressure on rural small businesses, climbing to the second-highest ranking challenge.

Despite the pandemic and economic crisis, rural business owners ranked the likelihood of business failure and the inability to find a business loan as some of the lowest of all listed challenges.

Crisis relief loan packages may have played a role in supporting small businesses in late 2020 as this survey was being conducted. On previous surveys, inability to find a business loan scored from the middle to low: ranging from sixth to ninth of the eleven listed challenges, before dropping to eleventh this time.

The top five challenges ranked by rural small businesses were:

1. Can’t find good employees
2. Online competition
3. Tried later hours without success
4. Marketing isn’t working
5. Need to sell my business

Get the in-depth report on the 2021 results of the Survey

See analysis of all four rounds of the Survey of Rural Challenges

Small towns face different challenges in 2020, but that doesn’t mean the old challenges have gone away. Photo by Deb Brown.

Seems like there have been a lot of coronavirus-related surveys this year. This survey is different: we’ve been asking for and listening to your rural challenges since 2015.

Of course rural challenges are different this year with COVID-19. That doesn’t mean all your other challenges disappeared, but it might mean your priorities have changed. We’d like your help to get an updated view of the challenges to your community and your business, and what’s working well or not so much.

The survey is open to rural people globally: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or any other country. If you live or work in small towns, we’d love to hear from you.

Why your answers matter

Every small town has its own set of assets, issues and opportunities. You get a chance to tell us your community challenges and your assets, as well as what projects and ideas you’re trying.

Small Biz Survival and SaveYour.Town use the results to create practical steps that help you shape a better future for your town. Other organizations like government agencies and regional utilities use the results to better serve rural people. Your responses also get shared in articles and media stories without ever identifying you personally.

Tell others about the Survey

The more people who answer the survey, the better.

You can share this survey to your friends, followers, subscribers, readers, or organizations you belong to. You can put it in your newsletter, on social media, on your website or anywhere else you think rural people will be likely to find it. You can share this link:

https://saveyour.town/survey2020

The survey will close to new responses on December 31, 2020.

Get the survey results

Results will be posted on our Survey of Rural Challenges page. You can also sign up for our newsletters to get all the updates.

Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium hosted by Oklahoma State University. It’s an online event on October 13, 2020.

What is the Symposium about?

The Symposium is meant to raise awareness, attract resources and stimulate research toward solving grand challenges facing rural communities. And goodness knows we have some grand challenges.

I’ll be facilitating two community round table discussions where you can share your challenges, opportunities and success stories. 

Who can participate?

Yes, Oklahoma State faculty and students will participate, but it’s open to all of us. Rural community members from across the U.S. and around the world are invited to connect  and learn about the latest discoveries, trends and approaches for rural renewal.

Corporate partners, non-profit organizations, government and tribal leaders, and anyone with a passion for rural people and places are invited to participate. I think I fall into the “anyone with a passion for rural” category.

What will the event be like?

There will be invited speakers, oral and poster presentations by researchers, round table discussions for community leaders, networking opportunities, and award presentations.

The students from the Rural Scholars program will describe their studies and present the findings of their work in actual rural communities. Their projects include deconstruction (how best to remove dilapidated structures) and comparing ag technology between rural Oklahoma and rural China.

Other speakers will cover rural issues including:

• broadband access
• health systems
• water resources
• infrastructure and economic development
• education and youth leadership development

What virtual platform will it use?

The event is using Whova and Zoom. I just participated in another event using this same setup, and it’s user friendly. Here’s a screenshot of a discussion session from that event:

This was the SMTulsa conference on the Whova platform with Zoom streaming. It made it easy to connect for group discussions and speaker presentations.

You don’t need a Zoom account to participate.

How much does it cost and where do we register?

You are invited to register and join the Symposium no matter where you live. I’d love to see you at the community round tables!

The cost is US$25. 

The schedule is online, and you can register for the Symposium here.

And what topics rural people most want help with

Wouldn’t it be great if the people who say they want to help rural people would actually listen to rural people’s own challenges?! That’s why we created this survey!

We use the results to create practical steps that help you shape a better future for your town. Your responses also get shared out to others who work with rural communities through articles and media stories.

Using these survey results, we developed a free video of action steps you can take to shape the future of your town or the towns you serve.

Get the Action Steps Video

Surprise! Stereotypes didn’t hold up

The survey asks rural people what challenges they most want help with and what actions they are taking to address them. The results don’t match the common themes in media coverage and policy conversation around rural communities.

• Are rural people focused on well-publicized crises like opioid addiction or poverty? No, other challenges were selected much more often. Crime and drug abuse ranked in the bottom five of the standard choices. In their own words, fewer than a dozen people each mentioned drug abuse or poverty. Three times as many mentioned negative or angry people as a top challenge they’d like help with. 
• Are most rural communities devastated by lost factories, closing mines or damaging natural disasters? No, “our town has suffered a terrible blow” remains one of the least chosen options on all three rounds of the survey in 2015, 2017 and 2019. 
• Is the lack of small business lending a big challenge in small towns? Needing a business loan did not made it into the list of top 5 challenges chosen. More than twice as many people selected the lack of good employees as a challenge.  

Rural Community Challenges

Top five concerns at the community-wide level this year are very similar to the results from 2017 and 2015.

1. Losing young people
2. Downtown is dead
3. Not enough good housing
4. Need new residents
5. No one shops in town

“Losing young people” and “Downtown is dead” have dominated the top 2 spots in 2015, 2017 and 2019. “Not enough good housing” is a new entry that wasn’t included as a choice in the 2017 or 2015 surveys. “No one shops in town” also appears in the top 5 in all three rounds of the survey.

Here is a graph of all the choices offered on the 2019 survey ranked in order of how often people chose them. (Click to see it larger)

Small-town Business Owner Challenges

Almost ½ of those surveyed identified themselves as current or prospective small business owners. Here are the top five challenges they chose.

1. Can’t find good employees
2. Marketing isn’t working
3. People buy from online competitors
4. Tried opening later hours without success
5. Need a business idea

A new choice, “Can’t find good employees” was chosen by over 50% of respondents making it the number one challenge. It replaced a previous choice, “Need help but cannot hire,” in the top 5.

“Marketing isn’t working” has been consistently in the second spot, and “Opening later hours without success” remains in the top 5 on all three surveys. Online competition moved up to 3rd this year from 6th in 2017 and 2015. Needing a business idea returned to the top 5 after dropping to 9th in 2017.

Here is a graph of all the choices offered on the 2019 survey ranked in order of how often people chose them. (Click to see it larger)

What’s working

A new question in 2019 asked people what they or their community are trying to address their challenges. The four choices ranked in this order.

1. Traditional economic development groups
2. Informal idea copying
3. Formal programs
4. Other things

Traditional economic development was the clear top choice with over 75%, and informal copying of ideas was chosen in over 50% of the responses.

In their own words

When offered the opportunity to share more in their own words about challenges, what is working, or anything else, 389 people shared more. Their responses can be grouped into these general categories with both positive and negative themed responses.

1. Government, leadership or officials
2. Business and economy issues
3. Community teamwork, volunteers and engagement
4. Non-government programs such as Main Street, Chamber of Commerce and many others
5. Workforce, employees or jobs

Here are some of the individual responses.

• Team work is what is working and working best. What isn’t working is thinking that the money pool is the [economic development group] or Chamber [of Commerce]
• There is a group of us that are willing to try new things and looking for ideas. There are some in town who are stuck in the old way of doing things. We are starting small and I think the big will come. With each idea, it seems like more ideas are starting to happen.
• The empty building tour worked well. We will be planning another one for the Fall. Getting everyone working together is not working well.
• After losing some major employers, some people have opened businesses, also some spin-offs related to remaining businesses. Landing the “big one”, outside employer, has not been successful.
• A group of progressive minded “young” (30 to 55) leaders have joined together to celebrate what is right about our community and to make some fun things happen.

Each community is different, and different people from within a single community can see the challenges and opportunities differently.

Diversity in rural people and communities

How diverse were survey respondents? An open-ended question invited people to say if there were ways they considered themselves diverse, and 278 people chose to answer. Some answered with their own personal diversity, but most answered about their community at large.

More rated their communities as diverse than not

Over fifty percent more people said their communities were diverse than the number of people who said their communities were not diverse. Over 70 people said their community was diverse now or increasingly diverse. Another 43 responded with average or not sure; and 42 said no, not diverse or not applicable.

The top 5 most common descriptive answers were grouped into these rough categories.

1. Color, race, ethnicity or cultural origin
2. Age
3. Education, skills or technology use
4. Businesses, professions or commerce
5. Cultures, ideas and ways of thinking

The grouping of cultures and ways of thinking includes common perspective divides such as new vs. longtime residents, farm vs. town, city/urban vs. rural/small town, and full time vs. part time residents.

Gender spectrum and LGBTQIA diversity featured in over 50 of the responses. Diversity in income or class, disability, family makeup, religion, political views and military service were also mentioned.

What next? Action steps you can take

Using these survey results, Becky McCray and Deb Brown developed a special video of action steps you can take to shape the future of your town or the towns you serve. There is no charge.

Get the Action Steps Video

Press and Media Information

You’ll find more information on the methodology, talking points for media and links to prior surveys at our Survey page.

New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.

What are the challenges in your rural place or small town? We’d like to know! Photo by Becky McCray.

Every small town has its own set of assets, issues and opportunities, but many of us share common challenges. We created the Survey of Rural Challenges so you could share your own view of rural, and we could better help you.

A total of 479 people answered our previous surveys, and we’d like your help to get an updated view. We’re asking about challenges to your community and your business, and what’s working well or not so much.

Add your input here:
Survey of Rural Challenges 2019. 

We use the results to create practical steps that help you shape a better future for your town. Your responses also get shared out to others who work with rural communities through articles and media stories.

Wouldn’t it be great if the people who say they want to help rural people would actually listen to rural people’s own challenges?! That’s why you should take this survey!

The survey is available in English, French and Spanish.

The survey is presented by Small Biz Survival and SaveYour.Town. Dr. Dave Shideler from Oklahoma State University will help us analyze the trends across all three surveys.

If you’d like to help get the word out, that would be great!

You can share this survey to your own members, subscribers, readers, followers or friends. You can put it in your newsletter, on social media, on your website, or anywhere else you think rural people will be likely to help us out.

The survey will close July 30, 2019.

Results will be posted on our Survey of Rural Challenges page.

Photo by Becky McCray

We all hold different titles, work in different fields or sectors, but we’re all fighting for the future of our towns and rural places. We want to be a place our children and grandchildren and our nieces and nephews can live a good life. Quality of Life, a prosperous future for our towns, these are things we can all agree on, even if we’re working different ways to get there.

All of us have faced the same drag on our efforts. It’s our own people.

• Wheel-spinning
• Wasted effort
• Meeting after meeting after meeting
• Talking ideas to death, but not getting very far

At the same time that we’re being slowed down by all that drag, we also face social pressures not to fail. No one likes to look stupid in public. Especially in a small town, it feels like everyone is watching, everyone is judging and everyone will know if you mess up and you’ll never hear the end of it. You’ve seen people bring up decades-old failures, just to remind someone that they failed before. Have you ever felt that fear that your idea or project will fail?

Years of this pressure not to fail, of those voices getting inside our heads, can add up.

You can see this in people in your town, people who have learned this lesson so well, who are so worried about risk that they never try anything new, and they don’t want anyone else trying anything new either.

The people who do the most dragging think they’re helping. They’ve told me so. Here’s how one person explained his desire to drag against progress:

“We have too many high-energy people, accustomed to making decisions quickly. Negative people offer a balance, raising questions, slowing down the decision-making process so we can have time to consider the issues, before it’s too late and we’ve spent money on something that turned out to be foolish and ineffective.”

What they’re worried about is making mistakes. The risk of failing very publicly.

You might be tempted to agree with him on his approach to avoid mistakes, but it’s a trap because we’re terrible at judging the risk of failing.

We’re far less likely to fail than we think.

Author Margie Warrell says that using the latest brain imaging technologies, researchers have been able to prove:

1. We overestimate the probability of something going wrong.
2. We exaggerate the consequences of what might happen if it does go wrong.
3. We underestimate our ability to handle the consequences of risk.
4. We discount or deny the cost of inaction, and sticking with the status quo.

Once we realize how we’ve all been misjudging risk and trying to slow things down so we don’t make mistakes, we start to see what it is doing to our communities. Decade upon decade of this pressure not to make a mistake, not to fail, is built into our formal organizations, our government bodies, our groups, clubs and associations.

We’ve built the drag and wheel spinning and endless discussion into our organizations thinking that we were dealing with the risk of mistakes.

But as Margie Warrell pointed out, we’re not very good at judging risk.

The net result is that our towns are too closed to new ideas. People can take being closed to new ideas to such an extreme that they end up saying no to everything.

Why this has to change

But our whole society is changing fast. Trendwatching.com says “we’re in the middle of an epic power shift away from government, social organizations, and big business, towards the individual.” We’re seeing regular people accomplishing big things, with no formal organization, no structure, no officers in charge. No one to put the brakes on.

We are crowdsourcing our future, the future of our communities. The power to shape our cities and towns is no longer just in the hands of officials, but now in all of our hands. When we want to accomplish something, we don’t need to form a new committee. We can just make it happen.

What changed? What is causing this shift in power? It’s our ability to communicate, coordinate and work together in new ways. Email, the internet, social networks, all shrunk down into the palm of our hands and we carry it everywhere with us.

These new communications tools mean we’re experimenting with new ways of working together. That’s why we are shifting from formal organizations to working together informally, as needed, and getting things done without all the formality and foot dragging we’re used to.

But it’s slow going, with plenty of people still dragging their feet. We’re stuck using old methods of organizing and working together. We’re drowning in committees, task forces, planning groups, meetings, and all the old ways of doing things that slow us down. We grew up with these methods. They are deeply ingrained in our people and our organizations.

A new method

What we’re missing is a method of reducing the risk of making big mistakes while working together more easily to accomplish things quickly using the tools we have in our hands right now.

This is what I’ve been working on. I’ve listened as people just like you have written to me with real struggles in your small towns. I’ve paid attention to what 473 people like you told us in two rounds of our Survey of Rural Challenges. It’s our own people holding us back, slowing us down, even with the best of intentions, keeping us from moving forward.

I’ve been researching towns that succeeded, change science, behavioral motivation, open networks, crowdsourcing, innovation and how you build a revolution. Pulling lessons from all of those, I’ve come up with a method that reduces the risk of making big mistakes while letting us work together more easily using the tools we have in our hands

An Idea Friendly Method

It’s called the Idea Friendly Method, because our aversion to risk has had us acting idea unfriendly for too long.

You start with your big goal for your community, the thing that you feel will improve your quality of life. You use that goal to Gather Your Crowd. You turn your crowd into a powerful network by Building Connections. And you and your newly-powerful network accomplish that goal by Taking Small Steps.

How to apply the Idea Friendly Method in your town

To help you learn and apply the Idea Friendly Method in your town, Deb Brown and I have created a video and action guide at SaveYour.Town. You’ll learn the Idea Friendly Method in depth, hear examples of how it’s used, and learn specific behaviors to create the most lasting change.

It’s free to NADO attendees in October 2019 only.

New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.

We’ve missed you!

Since I secured this site with https, you haven’t been receiving our emails. It was my fault for not updating our feed for delivery through MailChimp. I’m sorry.

But you’re back now! Here are a few of the great articles you’ve missed lately…

From me:

• The giant checklist of social media marketing basics for small town business
• How will autonomous vehicles work in small towns?
• Finding the money to renovate an old building in a small town: grants, loans and other funds

From Glenn Muske:

• Going Outside the Box When Operating Your Rural Grocery (or Other Rural Store)
• My Small Business has a Social Media Presence. Where are the Clients?
• The Old Market Methods Still Work

Don’t want these emails?

Since it’s been awhile with no emails, you might not want them any more. Everyone’s inbox is full enough, so I understand! Here’s how to stop getting these articles, but keep getting the weekly newsletters from Deb Brown and me.

Click the link for “Update your preferences” in the footer below, and you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this: 

Check the boxes for the emails you want, uncheck the ones you don’t want. Then click the Update Profile button, and you’re all set.

You can go back and change which emails you get from us at any time.

Thanks for caring about your small town, and thanks for reading!

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