Rural business people are trying a variety of different business models today, including pop-ups, shared buildings, businesses inside of other businesses and more. Entrepreneurs are using these smaller-scale experiments and tests to learn what works before making a huge investments. Learn how these Innovative Rural Business Models are being used right now in small towns in this video from the RuralRISE speaker series, featuring Becky McCray and Deb Brown, co-founders of SaveYour.Town

Innovative Rural Business Models, Becky McCray and Deb Brown, RuralRISE Virtual Speaker Series, 2023 (59 minutes)

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Download the sample lease agreement (PDF)

The sample lease agreement for a shared building is one that we were given permission to share with others. Please have your own legal representative make a specific lease for your situation.

Would you like a presentation on the Innovative Rural Business Models?

Invite Deb and Becky to your town or event for a presentation or workshop.

Small businesses are trusted – tap that trust

For rural communities with struggling businesses, cash mobs and shop local used to be popular economic development tools. They are useful to bring together people from all across the community and bridge divides.

Small businesses are one of the few institutions with broad support across divisions, in fact they are one of the most trusted institutions in the United States. When we give people small but meaningful ways to support local businesses, we’re tapping that shared trust to bridge divides.

To do that, we want to create experiences that bring people together from across different groups to each play a meaningful role.

Cash mobs can pull the community together

Remember cash mobs? A “cash mob” is a group of regular people who decide to all support the same local business at the same time. Picture you and 10 friends all going to the hardware store each with $25 you’re going to spend there. Think how excited you’ll be and how much of a difference you’ll make in the merchant’s sales total.

This has all three elements: Bring people together across groups, give everyone a small but meaningful role, and create experiences that change people’s thinking.

Cash mobs went viral about 10 years ago, and now the buzz has died down. At the Institute for Quality Communities Placemaking Conference, Melody Warnick, author of This is Where You Belong, said cash mobs are still a good way to build place attachment.

Shop Local that still works now

Another project that is not as popular as it used to be is shop local campaigns. To be effective at bringing people together and changing behavior, it has to be more of an experience than just a slogan.

Franklin County, Iowa, started a ‘buy one product local’ campaign that turned into a real experience because they picked toilet paper as the focus. They identified every single business that sold toilet paper, including the Hispanic grocery, the farm supply and the hardware store. Those businesses got really creative with displays and promotions. The local radio station told toilet paper jokes. Facebook was filled with posts of people shopping for toilet paper, pictures included.

Everyone in town was talking about toilet paper! They were redefining themselves as people who supported their town, all because they bought their toilet paper locally.

This has all three elements: Bring people together across groups, give everyone a small but meaningful role, and create experiences that change people’s thinking.

Need a rural speaker for your event?

Rural Speaker Becky McCray presented this session to the Main Street Now Conference, Main Street America, in Boston.

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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

These upper floor murals were painted by the community members of Webster City, Iowa. It’s part of the bonus trend from this article. Photo by Michael Hansen, used by permission.

Who knows what trends will affect small and rural communities in 2022 and beyond?

Not many trends pieces cover rural places. These trends are specifically about rural and small towns.

I’ve been following rural trends and writing about them since 2009. My trends reports have been commissioned or quoted by Main Street America, Emergent Research, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, Farm Bureau’s Rural Community Building, Small Business Trends and the George H.W. Bush Points of Light Foundation.

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now. These are larger scale trends that will be in play for years, not super micro trends that are already obvious or so small they’re subject to change next week.

Top 5 Rural and Small Town Trends for 2022 and beyond

1. New residents arriving.

After saying for years that remote work would bring more people to choose a rural residence, here we are: Zoom Towns!

The real trend isn’t an explosive exodus from major tech and population centers, but the more subtle diffusion of opportunities to a broader swath of places.

We’re seeing the convergence of multiple factors:

• a pandemic that forced a major adoption of remote work
• pent up demand for rural living
• improving rural broadband
• the great resignation and re-evaluation of life choices
• climate and disasters shifting relocation decisions
• increased rural tourism through the boom in road trips

Bonus trend: People are eager to belong.

With more people relocating, expect an increase in deliberate community building, reaching across polarizing divides.

Watch for projects in:

• Neighboring
• Beautification
• Belonging

2. Natural environment regenerating.

The shift from simple awareness or protection of the environment to deliberately trying to make things around you better.

Innovative farmers and ranchers are being better stewards, improving the land and environment with each successive season.

Indigenous People and Native Tribes are gaining control of more of their traditional lands, fostering regeneration and advocating environmental policy improvements.

Natural resources are changing, and new sustainable natural resources booms are coming that make sense in rural places including:

• timber and lignin
• mushroom and other natural fiber materials
• dirt, clay and earthen buildings
• renewable and greener energy

3. Leadership and power shifting.

Much like the surge in new residents, the shift in leadership started a long time ago. In 2015, we developed our Idea Friendly Method to help you understand and adapt to the shift from the formal to informal, from centralized to community, from control to chaos.

Awareness of the change is finally percolating up, even to the World Economic Forum. And it’s also percolating down, to the level of local organizations and officials in small towns.

Watch for:

• Less emphasis on joining boards or committees to talk about change
• More emphasis on joining activities you enjoy to take action

4. Rural healthcare reimagined.

Pressured by financial crises, closures and staff shortages before the pandemic, rural health care is due for reimagining. Between improving telemedicine and rapid advances in smart everything, will we still need general hospitals in small towns in 10 years? Do we really need them now? We’re already seeing rural communities come up with innovative answers that improve health care without focusing so much on the building.

Keep an eye on:

• Community involvement in health care facilities and futures
• Smart use of technology to improve people’s health

5. Economic barriers falling.

Equitable economic development is the buzzword of the moment in grants, programs and planning. For small towns, it’s really about making entrepreneurship easier for more people and creating a fairer economy.

Small towns are the testing grounds for the future, and rural people innovate. Want to be resilient in the next big crisis? Tap our innovative spirit.

Focus now on developing:

• Local supply chain
• Small makers
• Artisans
• Tiny manufacturers

Free video report:

Watch Deb Brown and me present these trends more in depth at SaveYour.Town: 2022 Rural Trends.

Watch the free video

This article cited by:

• Forbes – Research and Insights on Why Millennials and Gen Z Will Drive Small Town Entrepreneurship by Bernhard Schroeder
• Mendimi – Pse Millennials dhe Gen Z do të nxisin sipërmarrjen e qyteteve të vogla? Albania
• Bank of I.D.E.A.S. by Peter Kenyon, Community and Economic Development Matters Newsletter, April 13, 2022, Australia
• Wetzel-Tyler Chamber of Commerce newsletter

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.

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