One of the Small Town Rules is to spend your brain power before spending dollars. Be creative about how you handle challenges rather than to throw money at the problem.

Venture capital vs. Bootstrapped

We’ve all heard about startups that have been funded by whatever venture capitalist or angel that has just dropped a truck load of money on them, so they’re just throwing money at every single challenge that comes up. They burn through all that money without doing the creative thinking.

The opposite of that is bootstrapping. Startups funded only by their founders are more likely to say, “I’m going to do it on all my own money, and I’ll figure out how to make it work. Because it’s my money, I’ll make it go as far as I can.”

The free solution

The example I like to share is from my liquor store. When my mom took over the store back in the 1990s, she started carrying a lot more wine than the previous owner had. She needed a place to store the extra wine in the backroom on its side to keep the corks moist and preserve the quality of the wines.

Mom didn’t have any of the specialized wine racking that was available for sale. That costs money. This was for the backroom, so appearances weren’t important. It just had to work. My mom was not about to spend money she didn’t have to.

She dug around and found old bookshelves she already had. Then she took the divided cardboard boxes wine was shipped in, put them on their sides on the bookshelves, and made wine shelves for the back room. It cost her nothing to do that. We were still using those cardboard boxes on shelves 20 years later. We hadn’t spent money on commercial shelving, and it worked just fine.

Why buy expensive commercial wine racking for the back room when you can make your own for free? That’s spending your brainpower before your dollars. Photo by Becky McCray

Have you filled out the Survey of Rural Challenges? Find it here. 

Murals add life and color to a downtown and are highly visible even to people driving through. The activity that goes into creating them generates more attention for downtown. Traditional wall painted murals usually cost a lot of money and take a long time to get approvals. The good news is that you can create cheap instant murals. You have or can scrounge everything you need to start now.

Make sheet murals.

Get cheap torn or stained sheets from the thrift shops, paint right on them, or sew them up into something decorative.

Hang them up downtown, maybe inside the windows of a building, outside hung over a railing or fence. Use magnets to stick them to any building with metal siding.

Find free wood to paint.

Paint on old boards you scrounge up from neighbors.

Paint on pallets that businesses can donate for free.

Pallets can usually be scrounged up at no cost, then painted for quick inexpensive art. Photo by Harmon County Forward, used by permission.

Display the painted wood inside the windows of empty buildings. Mount them on fences or railings downtown. Plant them in empty lots or vacant spaces.

Collect campaign signs.

After an election, collect the old campaign signs. Call the former candidates, and ask if they have extras they’d give you. Turn the paper signs inside out and paint on them. Take the colorful plastic coroplast ones and cut them up and re-assemble into fun mosaic designs.

Hang them from railings and fences downtown.

Use empty windows as a free canvas.

Use shoe polish on glass doors or windows, inside or outside. Start with the empty buildings.

Try a vine design on empty windows or glass doors. Photo by Becky McCray.

Make a chalk mural.

Any space you might paint a mural, you can make a chalk mural. It’s just temporary. Photo by Elaina Turpin, used by permission.

Check the thrift stores for cheap used sidewalk chalk. Ask around to see who has some they can donate.

Treat any smooth concrete surface as a possible chalk mural site. Yes, it will wash away in the next rains, but placemaking doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s the activity and visible change that matter. You can always replace it with a new chalk design next time.

Temporary art can be beautiful placemaking.

Instant murals make your downtown a more vibrant place right away without spending a fortune. After awhile, take down your fabric or wood murals, cut them into frame-able chunks and sell them off to raise money for the next project. 

Thinking that the solution has to be big and permanent is what keeps you from doing cool little things that only last a while.

The goal isn’t the mural itself or the artwork. The goal is to show life and activity right away so you can bring shoppers back downtown. 

Cheap Downtown Placemaking Ideas

Deb Brown and I found 39 practical placemaking ideas like this that you do for $100 or less right away. We put them in a video that you can buy and watch immediately. The video clip about sheet murals (above) is a sample from it. The full 30 minute video costs only $5, and you can find it here: Cheap Downtown Placemaking Ideas.

More cheap ideas

The COVID-19 quarantine has crushed so many small businesses and the economy at large. It’s truly been the worst financial crisis unfurling in this country since the 1930s. And while some measures are in place to help this not reach that level of despair, many people are finding themselves out of a job.

But is there a silver lining? Heck yes!

“Work From Home” Will Invite More People to Experience Small Town Life

The whole “work from home” part of quarantine has shown a lot of employers and employees a path to choosing where they want to live. In a system that no longer requires “butt in chair” management, why would someone choose some of the big cities out there? Would you rather look out on some fields or forests, or listen to cars honking all night long?

But when some of these folks come to a small town setting, they’ll get exposed (maybe for the first time) to the power of a small town localized community. Maybe they won’t be able to visit the opera every weekend and maybe the little grocery store doesn’t have a big selection of quinoa (how many quinoa choices do we need?), but the sense that everyone is working together and everyone knows each other is a very alluring opportunity.

This Will Drive More Small Business Opportunities

The easy example is that delivery businesses thrive when city types show up at a small town. People are used to convenience living, and if those services don’t quite exist in the small town setting, you can step in and fill a gap.

Another way to serve this relocation migration that may come 3/4 of the way into 2020 or maybe at the start of 2021 is to find and adapt coworking spaces, even if they’re more “six feet apart” than they would have been a few months ago. These spaces will need great wifi, space to spread out and work, and a little kitchen space. Not a lot of investment really.

Small Town Sourcing

The other BIG opportunity is that right now several call centers are being pulled back from other countries and re-sourced to small US towns. So are software development jobs (you can learn several languages for free online and those jobs pay around 80K to start). Someone has to house these people. Someone has to prepare all the wiring and materials. Someone has to feed and do other services for them.

Big cities were the way to go for a while. Then suburbs (ugh). Small towns were “unsexy” for some time.* But it’s the right time to show off the power of the small town brand and how you can help grow the world not that far from your front porch.

*Editor’s note: We disagree, but who’s counting?

This is a short sample from the SaveYour.Town video “Refilling Your Business Pipeline” featuring Deb Brown and me.

Small towns and rural communities will need new business startups to revitalize their local economies, but not many people have the resources today to do a startup the way it’s traditionally been done.

Part of what holds your potential new entrepreneurs back is thinking that going into business has to be a big and difficult and long project.

Imagine all the work that “everyone knows” is part of starting a new business:

If you decided to open a retail store, you have decide on your specialty and what kind of merchandise to carry, deciding or guessing whether your town will support it, finding a location and remodeling it or even bringing it up to code, decorating, finding suppliers and getting started with them, getting your local banking established, securing financing, hiring staff, advertising and marketing, and all that before you even know whether your initial concept is actually sound.

In small towns, those problems can be magnified where you may face a shortage of usable buildings, long distances to suppliers who don’t pay attention to small accounts like yours, few local banks, no chance of local financing, few choices for potential workers, and a smaller potential market. It seems like it takes a lot of time, money and work just to get into business.

You have to get all your ducks in a row.

What if I told you there was a much easier way to get into business?

Just get one duck and go from there. 

Imagine building some steps in between. If you could buy just a few products and test them by running a temporary business inside another business for a month or two, you’d learn a lot about what sells in your local market right now. If that works, maybe you could rent a small booth in a shared retail building. If something doesn’t work, you can fix it and try again.

From there, jumping up to starting a traditional store doesn’t seem as hard. You’ve learned what people want to buy. You’ve established relationships with suppliers. You’ve gained a loyal following. All those smaller steps lift you up closer to jumping over that hurdle of starting a traditional business. And if you miss a jump at a smaller step, it’s easier to recover and try something new.

Why this works

That’s the purpose of the innovative rural business models. They put people in a much better position to succeed, or to fail in a manageable way. It cuts time and money off the process of getting into business. 

For economic developers, these give you an easy way to add entrepreneurship promotion to existing projects and activities. It’s not about starting new things from scratch. It’s about finding and building on the small steps that already exist in your area.

Get the full video

The entire 30 minute is available for purchase at SaveYour.Town: Refilling Your Business Pipeline.

Learn more

Social distancing is making shopping tricky, where in-person shopping is still allowed. Photo (CC) by Guido van Nispen

Monica Bailey of Rock Port, Missouri, sent in this question that I think you can relate to:

Thank you ladies, as always, for supporting small towns! My question is super generic but it is giving me sleepless nights. I am our counties economic/community development director and I’ve been scrambling to support our small businesses during this crisis. What’s the most helpful thing I can be doing for them right now??

Take care!
Monica

This is a great question. While there’s no one right answer, we are hearing lots of suggestions. And we’re making up a few of our own. I’ll have a more complete answer on this later, but right now here are my thoughts, in order of importance by my guesstimate:

1. Get in touch with each and every business.

• How are they doing?
• What have they changed?
• Where do they know they need help right now?
• Who’s hiring?

2. Get the word out.

• Share what businesses and services are available now, what’s different, what’s still the same, what jobs are open.
• Use every channel available to you.
• Enlist others to spread the word.

3. Listen for community projects and activities that you can amplify.

• Share stories of anyone doing anything positive, anything people can join in on safely.

4. Answer as many of the assistance program surveys and questionnaires as possible.

• Get more businesses to, as well.
• The longer this goes on, the more of these will come out. Many of them help determine how much money gets allocated where.

5. For businesses that are closed or downsized, help them transition.

• What’s next for them?
• What’s next for the space they occupied?

6. Play matchmaker.

• Help businesses that are downsizing to combine with one another to share space or share resources, safely.

7. Fill empty spaces with cheerful things to look at.

• Start filling empty business windows with art of any kind.

8. Start preparing for rebuilding.

• Look for the small spaces and the shared spaces that will help the tiny new startups take root.

Bonus: Don’t do any of these alone.

• There’s a whole community of people out there who want to help. Give them small but meaningful ways to participate, spread the word and cheer each other on.

Monica wrote back to say she’s already doing 1, 2 and 4, so I’m sure you’re on the right track too.

What are you trying in your community?

Hit reply or answer in the comments.

Read more at Can You Use This Technique To Fund Your Business Expansion?

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The IRS has launched a YouTube video site and an iTunes podcast site to better serve taxpayers.

People can visit the video site at www.youtube.com/irsvideos to view information about the Recovery, tax tips and how-to videos. These videos will be in English, Spanish, American Sign Language and other languages.

The YouTube focus will be on the provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Videos will highlight the $8,000 first-time homebuyer’s credit for those who purchase a house this year, the sales or excise tax deduction on new car purchases and the expanded credits for education and energy conservation.

The IRS YouTube channel will debut with seven Recovery videos in English and ASL and eight in Spanish. Also, included will be a video on using the IRS Withholding Calculator. Many workers received the Making Work Pay tax credit in April through their tax withholding at work. However, people who have more than one job or working spouses should especially check their withholding to ensure neither too much nor too little is being withheld. People can use the calculator to help determine if they should make adjustments.

People can visit the audio site at iTunes to listen to IRS podcasts about ARRA tax credits. People without an iTunes account can hear those same podcasts, in English and Spanish, on IRS.gov’s Multimedia Center.

In this economy, what is the best use of my funds? Marketing, expansion, keep under the mattress? What? It’s the question that small biz is wrestling with. Do I hide under the covers, or do I make a run at real growth? And how…
Submitted by Tony Katz, via Twitter

First, how sound is your business? If your business is in trouble today, your money is probably better off under the mattress, than poured into your business.

If your business is sound, what is its real potential? Can it grow? Does it have the potential to go big in this climate? I don’t think you can answer this question yourself. You need some outside perspective. No one can truly say they have experience with this economy, but someone out there has enough experience to offer you some of their best thinking. You might have to look well outside your industry to find the right person, but it’s worth the search right now.

Are you in a damaged or dying industry? Now is not a great time to be investing your money into a print newspaper. How is your local economy? If you’re local economy is in the tank, can you really buck that trend?

How’s your attitude? Are you positive enough to make it through the onslaught of bad news?

How do you deal with failure? Can you afford financially and emotionally to fail at this?

I believe it comes down to you. Are you good enough to go for it?

Consider this old insurance company award, from New York Life, from 1931. It was for their testimonial program. They were two years into the Great Depression, and at least nine years from the austere recovery that started in 1941 and far from the post-war boom. They didn’t sit it out. They were moving forward. New York Life survived, and Irvin Bendiner kept that award until the day he died.

So I offer you a litmus test:
When I tell you you can’t, when I say you aren’t good enough to make it work, how do you react? If you are afraid I’m right, then take a cautious tack in your business. If you get angry, worked up, and feel challenged, you may just be the one who should go for it.

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

The secret of New York’s post-1970 reinvention was that smart people, who knew each other and learned from each, innovated in ways that made billions in financial services.

(Looking at the last 4 words of the sentence may bring doubt to its wisdom.)

Regardless, the truth remains that smart people who know each other and can learn from each other will innovate ways that will make us…hundreds of thousands, or millions or billions or…trillions. Trillions is what we need to rejuvenate our economy.

Ok. So how’s this wisdom applied for small business in small towns? ( NY City is not included in the universe of small towns. )

What about trust? Small business in small towns know each other. And they have skills and talents and resources to help each other. They also share the most important, and most undefinable, element: trust.

However, the universe of potential resources may be limited.

And now with social media….blogs and twitter and youtube and rss feeds and google reader…our community of smart people grows exponentially into a global community of resources we need and those who need the resources we can provide.

The secret to surviving downturns…is to surround ourselves with other smart people, get to know each other, learn from each other and innovate ways to make billions in [something other than financial services…].

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About the Author: Zane Safrit’s passion is small business and the operationsí excellence required to deliver a product that creates word-of-mouth, customer referrals and instills pride in those whose passion created it. He previously served as CEO of a small telecom service provider in rural Iowa. Zane’s blog can be found at Zane Safrit. His radio show can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/zane-safrit. And he twitters at zanesafrit.

Same ol’. Same ol’. Month in; month out. No biggie, right?

That’s what you do to survive. You face a cash-flow issue; you dodge it by finding a new product, a new service, a way to offer more to your customers and/or you find ways to streamline your business operations and cut expenses, do more with less.

And every once in awhile you take a breath and celebrate it.

And if you use a resource like Twitter…you can share it with a global audience. Maybe find others who’ve done the same: dodge a cash-flow bullet or found a new revenue stream or a way to cut costs.

And you reach out and connect with them. And now you have one more resource for ideas or partnerships or support or commiserating or resources or tools to help you get to the next month. And a few more people to help or be helped by.

That’s what small business does. We help each other. That’s what social media does. It helps us…help each other. It helps us far more than it does big corporations where the approval process to use a tool like Twitter compares with an elephant’s gestation cycles. ( No. I don’t know how long. But I could ask on Twitter and someone would tell me and I would have a new friend, resource. Imagine if you asked a question about business or answered a question about business every month…? After awhile, you’d have a network of 100-200-300 people or more, all helping each other. You might even have a new product, a new service, a new partner or vendor. You might even skip a month or two in between crises. )

Anyway, take a minute and share your story with someone who could benefit from it. They might have one you could use to hear, too. Then you might both be able to help each other or others. And grow your business, too.

How cool would that be…?

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About the Author: Zane Safrit’s passion is small business and the operationsí excellence required to deliver a product that creates word-of-mouth, customer referrals and instills pride in those whose passion created it. He previously served as CEO of a small telecom service provider in rural Iowa. Zane’s blog can be found at Zane Safrit. His radio show can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/zane-safrit. He tweets at twitter under the username: zanesafrit