Shawn popped up a business test in his own yard! Photo by Deb Brown

Your fellow reader Ava asked a great question:

If I am already working, in school, and wanting to start up just a real small small business, then how would that work differently from someone who is coming from a completely different stand point, like not working or in school and is just generally starting up their business with saved money? Thank you!

The secret to starting a real side hustle, side gig or just a real small small business is to take small steps.

Try small scale steps that get your idea in front of people who can pay for it. That’s how you’ll build knowledge of what works, build an initial following in the market, and build assets toward your next, bigger step.

What can you do to test a business idea?

You don’t need much to start small. Even one square foot of space may be enough. Photo by Becky McCray.

• Try something temporary: pop-up for a day, a week or a season.
• Try something tiny: look for just a few hundred square feet to set up in.
• Try something together: set up your business inside an existing business, coworking space, maker space, shared art studio, or shared commercial kitchen.
• Try a truck or trailer: use more than one town to gather enough customers.

For example, a high school student in Alva, Oklahoma, popped up a business test by borrowing just one square foot of counter space in a beauty salon. She sold hand braided headbands made from fabrics scraps.

Our Deb Brown wrote more about testing your way into business here: Business plans are not worth the paper they’re written on

Surprise twist: this is how I’d advise someone not working or in school, someone who was generally starting up their business with saved money, too.

You can ask your rural small business question here.

These apples from a backyard tree might go to waste, or they might be the start of a profitable side business.

By Becky McCray

Need an idea for your next small town or rural business? This one would make a good side hustle: Gather and resell fruit that would otherwise be wasted.

Think of all the fruit, berries and nuts that no one picks, especially in yards and public spaces in your town.

You don’t have to be in a big town, either. In my yard, we have apple, pear and pecan trees that produce far more than we can use. Then there are my neighbors’ half dozen fruit trees, the wild greens and seeds growing along the side of the road, not to mention the wealth of mulberries that drop each year. All that in a community of just 30 people.

It will be different where you live. My friends in Maine talk about gathering and cooking fiddlehead ferns, and Deb learned that you can forage for hazelnuts in Iowa in a workshop from her Legacy Learning group.

You might have heard food gathering called foraging, urban harvesting or gleaning. Whatever you call it, it’s an opportunity for a small business, especially a seasonal or part time gig.

Where to find free foods to gather

You can ask around to find good sources for fallen fruits.

• Who has lots of fruit trees in their yard?
• Who used to garden but is older now?

Knock on their door and ask for permission to harvest the fruits or plants they won’t be needing. You can even offer to split the harvest: part to them for having the trees or plants, part to you to sell.

You can also look around for fruit, berries or nuts that are free for anyone to take.

• Where is fruit falling on sidewalks or over fences into the alley?
• Where are berries or nut trees growing wild or in public places?

Look for classes or workshops in foraging or harvesting wild foods. Extension education groups or cultural heritage organizations may offer sessions.

Talk to your elders to learn what they remember about gathering wild foods. My grandmother told me about gathering wild greens for salad back in the Great Depression.

Be good neighbors

Learn to forage safely and for safe foods. Check your library for books about local wild foods you can check out. Ask librarians if they know of workshops and classes. Learn and follow the health and food safety regulations that apply in your area.

Don’t enter people’s private property without permission, of course. Ask permission if it’s not clear where the boundary is or it just seems like you ought to.

Leave some for others. You’re part of a community, so don’t strip shared trees bare or take more than you are pretty sure you can sell. Maybe take special care to leave some easy to reach fruits on lower branches for kids and elders who may come after you.

Be smart business people

Take small steps in your business by gathering a few samples, just enough to sell at the farmer’s market this weekend. Then you’ll have a better idea what and how much to gather on the next foraging trip.

Add value to your wild foods. Find out the health regulations, then try your hand at jams, jellies, roasted nuts or even baked goods.

Wild sand plums make great jelly that’s always in demand in Oklahoma. The bushes grow wild alongside many county roads.

You can add value to nuts like hard shell pecans by having them cracked. Learn how to thresh wild grains to make them more valuable to customers.

Even cleaning and displaying your fruits attractively will add value. Scout around the farmer’s market or grocery store for ideas how to make your own foods sell better.

The types of wild foods available and the ways you can add value to them will vary, so learn from those local workshops and local elders.

I bet you could even sell responsibly foraged flowers.

The county is just going to mow these wild sunflowers down. What if you cut some to sell at the farmers market?

Falling Fruits on the map

There’s a collaborative global map of free places to go look for foods to harvest at FallingFruit.org with entries in most countries including the US, Canada and Australia.

When you find good free food sources, add them to the map. As rural people, we know we depend on each other especially in tough times. That’s a good reason to share what you know.

You’re part of the Food Business Ecosystem

Gathering fruits and berries is just one part of a whole ecosystem of local food businesses. Find out more about creating a local food business ecosystem with this video we created with SaveYour.Town.

How Holyoke Hummus stays Idea Friendly through a crisis

One of the first small steps: a used minivan and a tiny food cart. Photo courtesy of Holyoke Hummus Company.

John is the owner of Holyoke Hummus in Massachusetts, along with Dawn and their family. Like a lot of food entrepreneurs, John started by cooking for friends and family. He grew through a series of small steps and experiments, from selling at a folding table at a event, through a tiny food cart, a mobile truck, and pop-ups at more events. Eventually, he opened a cafe in downtown Holyoke across from city hall.

Holyoke isn’t a small town, but you have seen this same type of experimentation by entrepreneurs in small towns that you know.

This was a perfect example of the Idea Friendly Method in business. You start with your big goal. 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.

Through each step, John was Gathering His Crowd as he built a following. He was Building Connections networking to find resources and answers before taking each step. And of course he was Taking Small Steps.

Business was up and down, mostly good, until COVID hit and closed down the downtown around him.

John didn’t stop. He closed his dining room, of course, but he kept experimenting. As soon as mobile dining was allowed, he converted his cafe to a production base for his food truck. He is also exploring opening it as a shared kitchen for other food businesses needing a base for their mobile operations.

Another small step, the food truck. Before investing in a custom paint job, a small banner held on with bungee straps was good enough to test the market. Photo courtesy of the Holyoke Hummus Company.

Since the downtown location wasn’t working anymore, he wanted to test a new location for his food truck in a nearby community, but there’s a local regulation that doesn’t allow selling from food trucks on the streets. John found the owner of an empty muffler shop building. He asked him for permission to park on his parking lot, and the owner said yes. So he’s setting up shop on the empty parking lot and building a new customer base. Another Small Step.

It’s not easy to keep a business going when a crisis hits, but the Idea Friendly Method makes it possible to move forward without knowing all the answers.

Thanks to our friend Rob Hatch for sharing updates on his friend John and the Holyoke Hummus Company.

Update: 2022 Growing again

Holyoke Hummus is still adapting to changing times. Read how they’re growing without going back to a restaurant.

Idea Friendly means you don’t have to know it all

You don’t have to know all the answers. You just have to be open to new ideas.  

Being open to new ideas requires us to let go of worrying about whether the idea will work. Lots of those ideas will fail. In fact, most ideas will fail. By keeping the tests and trials very small and immediate, we can reduce the cost of failure to almost nothing.

Author Clay Shirky says “Failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t.”

It will never go back to the way it used to be. You have to start from here and go forward, one small step at a time.

Get the Idea Friendly Method Video

At SaveYour.Town, we’re offering a special video on using the Idea Friendly Method to make your community a better place. Learn more about the Idea Friendly Method video at SaveYour.Town.

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

When businesses reopen for customers after lockdown, it’s not going back to the way business used to be. Chris has 5 shifts for you to consider.

As different places begin to allow local businesses to open up, you’re not alone if you’re breathing a sigh of relief mixed with a gasp of worry. We all need the money. We all want to get back to being useful for the people we serve. And some or most of us are worried about what happens next. Let’s talk about some of it.

OPEN UP! It’s the Customers!

Remember this above all else: everyone is tense. No one will likely be their most courteous and their best behaved. No matter how grown up and strong we all our, this really counts as actual real mental trauma. It’s going to take a bit to get over it, and that means you as the business owner will have to smother their customers and prospects with kindness, but there’s a lot more.

1. Clean Up

Customers are going to want to understand how you’re handing a clean work environment after this pandemic. Even if you personally think it’s silly in some cases, don’t discount your customer’s vote on this one. Make it clear and obvious and explain how you are handling everything, even things you can’t imagine someone wondering about like whether you disinfect your cardboard before boxing up their product. (Turns out this is a big and common question now when people consider purchasing something online.)

2. Sell Online

Even after the big bad bug is finally vanquished enough for us not to care about it, people are used to ordering and buying online for many products and services you can’t even imagine people getting remotely. I have a friend who sells hay and the moment he got the web store live on his website, he had orders.

3. Communicate More

Partly because of online sales and definitely because of this “If I can’t see it, how do I know what’s going on?” mindset, people are looking for more “touches” between themselves and companies, even in B2B situations. If the order typically takes a week to build and ship, then give people updates every day or two. When I ordered DoorDash to get a burger sent to me during lockdown, I received five or six texts from the app, telling me the food was being made, the food was ready for pickup, the driver picked up the food, the driver is two minutes away, and the driver is here. Do something like that.

4. Consider New Payment Options in Two Ways

On the one hand, if you’re not using things like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and Cashapp, you might want to get some accounts setup. People are sending money through multiple channels. Second, you might realize that with nearly 30 million people unemployed in the US on the day I wrote this to you, cash is tight. You might have to sell “smaller bites” versions of what you offer, so that people can afford you. There are many creative ways to work on this.

5. Reach Out

It’s no surprise that this is my advice. I’ve spent twenty years begging companies to use tools like video and audio and good email marketing to reach potential customers. There’s a lot to this, it seems, but at the root of it all is the same goal: communicate and connect with the people you hope to help and earn the right to sell and serve.

Here’s help

To that end, Becky and Deb have a whole new program about learning to restart your local shopping. If that’s your kind of small town business, then it’s pretty important you check that out.

If not, realize that all businesses are going through some form of what you’re experiencing and that it’s important to accept that it won’t be perfect. But know this, also: people are really getting behind “shop local” in a way they’ve never expressed it before. This might be an ideal time to change up some of your work and really earn their money and customer longevity.

You ready?

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.

Could a simple backroom tour be better for supporting startups than a full 14 week course? Photo of Bonnieheath Estate Lavender & Winery backroom tour, Ontario, by Becky McCray.

Because I’ve been an entrepreneur since junior high school, I’ve been asked to help with all kinds of entrepreneur support over the decades. I’ve taught entrepreneur classes, I’ve been part of day-long entrepreneur events, I’ve taught workshops and I’ve been a mentor in formal and informal ways. And I’ve been thinking lately about what works and what doesn’t work that well for people in small towns.

Not everyone learns best from the usual kind of formal trainings in a classroom with a lecture from an expert. 

And it’s not easy for would-be entrepreneurs to get to the classes because of timing and conflicts and they’re busy.

And the topics we had to cover in the trainings I was involved in, often focused on things that weren’t necessarily helpful for entrepreneurs. Or weren’t what they most needed to know.

In fact, I just got an email from an educational institution that they’re doing a six week entrepreneur training. When I looked at their list of topics, it struck me as exactly what is wrong with our traditional entrepreneur training:

It’s focused on writing out business plans and legal entity formation, and even the outline is full of jargon like “owner’s equity” and “Calculating Revenue to Break-Even.”

I’m convinced that training curriculum is not the right way to get more entrepreneurs actually doing business in a small town.

In small towns, we have a lot of potential entrepreneurs. They just don’t all fit into the “traditional startup business” model that Old Way courses assume. Think about all the people in your town who could be non-traditional entrepreneurs.

• People doing side hustles already
• Students making things in school classes or organizations
• People with talents they aren’t using in their jobs
• People who want to go into business some day
• People who have a business started but need some help
• People who have been in business before but want to try a different business
• People who are thinking of starting a retirement business

Old Way traditional entrepreneur trainings take all these different kinds of people and assume they all need the same 14 lessons. They assume they’ll all get everything written out and perfectly planned, before they go into business. This is that “traditional startup” model that was assumed a long time ago.

In this Old Way model, startups need to have all their ducks in a row in order to go into business. Everyone needs to have great credit, deep pockets, good connections, be clean and sober, have strong business skills, and a solid support network. Think about your town, there aren’t really that many people who have all those qualifications.

There is an Idea Friendly alternative, one that gives you practical steps to get your entrepreneurs to train each other in a way that is self-sustaining: 

Learn more in our latest video at SaveYour.Town.

Photo (CC) by BruceBer, on Flickr

Are you an entrepreneur or a small-business owner?

When one reads stories in the newspaper or journals, these two groups are not distinguished from each other typically. Neither the U.S. Small Business Administration nor the U.S. Census Bureau breaks them out separately. So does it make a difference?

Or should the writings about building the economy around entrepreneurs be the encouragement for us to be entrepreneurial if you want to succeed?

Based on what I have read, along with some exploratory research conducted by a colleague and me, the answer is “it depends.” It is based to some degree on how you define success.

In looking at our business owners in 1997, 2000 and 2007, entrepreneurs made more money. In part, that may have been a factor of having more employees. Yet the management of employees is not something all people feel comfortable doing.

And the earnings for entrepreneurs showed much greater variation when the U.S. entered the recession in 2007. Again, your choice may depend on your desire for perhaps a greater likelihood of income stability.

Another part to the equation is whether the business represents a way to earn income or a way of life. Small-business owners see it as a way of life and, I suspect, a means that may allow for more time to pursue other activities, personal and professional.

Finally, your risk tolerance may influence your decision. As noted, entrepreneurs accepted more risk and rode more of a roller coaster with big upswings but equally big drops. Small-business owners had a steadier income level.

However, these factors only represent part of what is going on with the business owner. Part of the research was basically a static look in time. I suspect that people change their orientation based on circumstances, opportunities, where the product/service is in its life cycle, market opportunities and general demographics of the owner.

For communities trying to develop their business economy, remember that all economic activity is good for the community.  As the sign suggests, variety is a goo thing.

The bottom line for owners is: Don’t get caught up in titles or swayed in developing your business to maximize the returns you desire.

Photo (CC 2.0) blullana_miranda, on Flickr

How many hits did you get? Or how many people saw your ad?

If you have read many articles on marketing, especially those talking about social media marketing, you may come away with the idea that marketing is a numbers game. The more people who “like” your page or respond to your advertisement, the better your marketing effort.

The idea of counting is not new. Traditional marketing often looked at how many “eyes” saw your advertisement or how many people subscribed to a newspaper or magazine. For radio and television, the numbers were about how many listeners a station had or how many people were listening to a certain station.

Knowing your numbers is useful. The more people who see your message, the better your chances of them doing something. We hope that means buying. But you can spend a lot of money getting your marketing message in front of a large number of people. Is it money well spent?

So before launching your marketing campaign, first define your goal. Is it awareness, building your brand, making a sale or something else? Remember that this goal needs to be consistent in all your marketing.

Then you need to understand, in as much detail as possible, exactly who is your target market.

Think about the Super Bowl, where a 30-second advertisement might sell for nearly $5 million, but it should get you in front of more than 110 million viewers. What an opportunity, right? The problem is, does your target audience watch the Super Bowl? (This might be a poor example because many people watch it just to see the ads, but you get the idea.)

You also need to determine if your message does what you want. Run some test messages on a variety of platforms to see how people respond before spending your entire marketing budget all at one time. Understand that each marketing method may require a somewhat different way of presentation. A colleague ran a Facebook ad test and found people respond differently whether they were viewing the message on a desktop computer or on a mobile device.

Your message must connect with your intended audience. It must encourage people to read more, embed your company and products/services into their mind, or elicit action. Again, what is your goal?

The fourth issue for many small-business owners is this: What does your marketing do for your bottom line now or in the foreseeable future? In part, this means determining the most cost-effective way to reach your goal or goals.

Numbers are great, but aware, engaged customers taking action are what you want.

Photo (CC) by Robert Scoble, on Flickr

What plans are you making for your business? 

For many of us, the idea of developing a plan is just overwhelming, scary and something we often just don’t do. It sounds tedious and time-consuming, and is seen as something that’s useful only as a doorstop.

Yet ask a business owner who takes the planning process seriously and he or she often will say he or she considers it was time well spent. But, the person usually clarifies, and experts agree, that the process is what offers the benefit, not the plan.

The planning process involves gathering information such as financial data, including monthly cash-flow statements, profit and loss statements, and balance sheets.

You also should pull together a customer list with total sales for each one. What is even more helpful is if you add a category on that list for what each customer bought. And as long as you are working with your customer lists, it would be a good time to pull together any customer satisfaction surveys or studies you may have gathered during the year.

It’s also time to examine the return for each marketing campaign you did. Which campaign brought in the most customers? Which one had the lowest cost per customer? Which one had the greatest sales? You also want to examine things such as the number of likes, retweets and engagement.

Check out your competitors for changes they have made or are planning to make. It’s also time to examine the trends in your industry, as well as related industries. And don’t forget to look at overall trends as well. Don’t stop with just trends in the U.S. We live in a global economy, so capture a broad picture.

And don’t forget to dig out any previous planning information you gathered. The idea is to look back and see what has worked and where you need to make some changes.

Of course, today, part of your examination of trends is to look at technology and the changes that are occurring.

Pulling the information together is just the first part. The second part is the crucial step. This step is the analysis: deciding what the information is telling you and what steps you need to take in the coming one, two or possibly three years.

Then let your mind wander, bring in some advisers, don’t set any ground rules, and start laying out some action you might take, given what the data tell you.

As you come up with the ideas, jot them down. This is not in a formal document; it’s just to get the idea and enough information so that you will remember what you were talking about. Set some milestones and, if you decide to make assignments, add those to the list as well.

My suggestion is that you write everything in pencil.  Penciled notes are a way to reinforce the idea that anything and everything can be changed, not only in the initial process but also throughout the year.

Flexibility is key to planning. You may be lucky and go 90 days without finding the need for adjustments, but changes will be needed; it is only a matter of time. Always be ready to go back to the drawing board. Successful business owners are those who can change and adopt to new situations quickly.

By now, your eyes are glazed over and you can’t see any way of getting it all done. The reality is that how much you do is your choice. If it seems overwhelming, don’t skimp on the analysis side. Instead, gather less information focusing on some key metrics. Second, remember to be flexible, which is why you wrote it in pencil. The faster you respond to changes, the greater your odds of success.

As you can tell, planning is never ending activity. Today is a great time to start or to update previous plans you have made.

So let’s ask the question again: What plans are you making for your business?