Starting a business the old way is hard

On an Idea Friendly visit to Jackson County, Kentucky, I visited with a group of artists/entrepreneurs. This group had created a loose organization called the Jackson County KY Creative Community. They wanted to start businesses, but were not ready to get a building and go through the extensive process of starting a business. Some needed to see if their work had a market and value to the customer. They felt stuck. Product and excitement, but no money to get their businesses off the ground.

Smaller steps to try first

We had gathered in an art studio in McKee, KY. There was lots of discussion around taking smaller steps to start your business.

• You could sell online in places like Etsy or eBay.
• You could ask a local business if you could have just one shelf to sell your product on.
• Or showcase your artwork on an empty wall in a place like the bank, or the insurance agents office.
• You could set up a card table at an event and sell from there.

Downtown McKee, KY, car show photo by Anthony Jackson

Try using an empty lot

The group shared there was a car show coming to town soon. How could they piggyback on that event? There was an empty lot right downtown on the main highway, right across from where the cars would be parked. It wasn’t the best looking lot, it needed some attention. There was kudzu climbing the walls of buildings next to it, graffiti on the same buildings and the weeds needed some major whacking.

Ask

Kathy Spurlock owned the empty lot. I had already visited with her. I knew her time was already stretched thin, and her funds were being used for other community projects. Still, there was this empty lot waiting to be filled.

I asked her if the artists in the Jackson County KY Creative Community could possibly use it for a popup.

She said yes

The empty lot pop up was created! One artist’s husband took his weedwhacker and cleaned out an area just big enough for pop-ups. Everyone in the group spread the word a pop up was coming through social media and word of mouth. Other artists were invited. Signs were posted around the county. No one person was in charge, everyone participated as best they could.

Empty Lot Pop Up photo by Greg Lakes

It worked!

There were many entrepreneurs set up with their works displayed. Folks came and bought from them, enjoyed the car show, and ate some food from local vendors. The Jackson County Creative Community added more artists as members too. There were lessons learned.

• You can pop up anywhere.
• It’s a good idea to join in another event and promote them both for more attendees.
• People are looking for something new and unique to do. Your excitement brings them in.
• Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes and offering this kind of small step helps create more businesses in your community.
• Business can be conducted in unusual locations and empty lots are great testing grounds.
• It’s a small step. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything.

Subscribe to Small Biz Survival.

Kids in a canoe photo (CC) by CC Chapman

Our latest Survey of Rural Challenges said natural resources are rural communities’ best rural assets, but most places don’t have enough outfitters to take advantage of them as tourism development.

Here’s how rural people like you can take small steps to grow into outdoor outfitters. 

• Gather Your Crowd to attract groups and organizations that want to help
• Build Connections to borrow equipment and acquire insurance
• Take Small Steps by splitting the work with different businesses and organizations in the community.

Both Deb and I visited Eastern Kentucky last year. I visited Estill County, and Deb was in Jackson County. We each shared a version of this process to help get tourism ideas off the ground.

Ask around, others may help

Kathy from Jackson County wanted to start her own outdoor business but she only had one side by side ATV to use. Then another person offered a canoe for Kathy to rent out. This started a conversation around the room of how she could start now, using what others offer and they would help her too. 

Small steps to take now

In Estill County, we sketched out the steps to grow their own outfitters for river and forest recreation. Here are some of the key steps:

• Talk to an existing outfitter in a similar area from the surrounding communities. Ask lots of questions.
• Find local outdoor recreation groups. Their members might be good potential operators, partners or customers.
• Consider covering startup costs with Sponsor-A-Canoe with local business logos or wraps.
• Cover insurance costs by finding a sponsor or getting a discount through the chamber or organizations like the American Canoe Association.
• Break up all the parts of the business and find a person or group to manage or run each part. One group might own the canoes, another has a trailer and can handle payroll, another might volunteer for part of the work during startup.

It’s not as traditional as starting all at once with a business plan and lots of debt, but it’s more of the rural approach. We’re used to making do and making things work.

Subscribe to SmallBizSurvival.

April is traditionally Move Your Money Month in the shop local community. Bank Local and Invest Local are the financial parts of the shop local movement.

In 2023, the timing couldn’t be more noticeable. High profile bank failures, lots of talk about other banks in trouble, and a serious debate about the financial system (AGAIN!) make Moving Your Money to a local bank more attractive than ever.

Local banks still exist in many small towns, and some of you have multiple local bank choices. If you don’t have a locally owned bank, regional banks may be a better bet than the giant banks.

If you have concerns, talk to your local or regional bankers. Some like Jill Castilla of Citizens Bank in Edmond, Oklahoma, (admittedly in a suburb, but still a great role model) go to great lengths to be accessible to their community.

Find your bankers online or at community events. Ask questions about how they manage the kind of risks that brought down big banks recently. See what you think of the answers. (Hint: they’re much more careful.)

Move Your Money

Really, it’s not that hard to move your money to a local bank. You’ll likely get all the important services you’ve come to rely on like mobile deposit and online bill pay. Even the bank in my tiny community of 30 people is online-savvy. (Shout out to Hopeton State Bank: Shaped by the past, Focused on the future.)

Need the how-to-move list? Search or ask your favorite AI for a list of steps to move to a new bank.

Source: People First Economy

Run a Move Your Money campaign in your community

Join the Move Your Money movement at AMIBA (American Independent Business Alliance). They’ll email you with resources throughout April. Check the Top 5 Reasons to Choose a Community Bank.

Get inspired by the resources page from The Local Crowd in Monadnock, NH: Move Your Money

Advocate for change with the policy-level info from the ILSR on Community Banking.

Discover more about local banking and local investing

Beyond shop local is bank local, 2010

Local investing could solve several rural business problems, 2011

Local investing will change the face of small towns, 2012

Small Town banks know lots that big banks don’t, Small Town Rules, 2013

Community banking is critical to small towns, audio, more from Jill Castilla (mentioned above), 2014

Economic self defense for small towns, 2020

Subscribe to Small Biz Survival

Will you run a Move Your Money campaign? Send us your small town business stories, and let us know what questions you have.

One pop-up is just a pop-up, but a group of pop-ups is a market. Photos by Forest County Business Alliance, Austin Moore, CC by Jeffrey Grandy.

When you’re planning to add pop-up businesses or shed businesses to your small or rural community, concentrate them in one area.

Better to have four sheds or pop up businesses together on a single lot, than fourteen vendors spread out all over.

Your goal is to make it feel like a concentrated burst of new activity. If your pop ups are too spread out, people will never notice them. Remember that nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and put your vendors close together.

Tionesta Pennsylvania clustered 10 sheds into one market village along contiguous empty lots.

Wolfforth Texas clustered a set of sheds to use as a farmers market.

Hyannis Massachusetts spread their sheds within the port area which is popular with tourists. Their artist shanties don’t stand shoulder to shoulder, but they are all within a very small area.

Get more ideas to turn your empty lots into bustling commercial spaces with SaveYour.Town’s video Empty Lot Economic Development.

A local furniture store hosts two temporary businesses for a special shopping event, combining business-in-a-business and pop-ups to benefit everyone. Photo by Becky McCray.

By Deb Brown

The old way of doing business is one building, one business. What if you could test an idea and have a business inside a business?

Anyone of us either knows or can find someone who is making things from their home and selling it.

What if you encouraged already existing home-based businesses to host a trial popup in your store?

These small popups can be short term, over a season or if it works out a permanent addition. Perhaps you’ll let them try their idea out for free for a short time. If it works, you can determine together if they pay rent to you or a commission.

Who do you know that is a:

• Quilt maker
• Artist
• Artisan
• Painter
• Sculptor
• Widget maker
• Baker
• Crafter

Look for those that are doing business from their homes. Maybe they are just beginning to think about making some money with their products.

How can you help them, and your business at the same time?

Invite them to set up in a corner of your shop, as a pop up.

Then try these ideas:

• Meet the artist event
• Have a party announcing your new acquisition
• Create a Facebook event and do something special to announce their arrival

Why does all of this matter?

1. You will be bringing in new people to your store to meet these crafters. Cross promotion is good for business.
2. You’re giving a hand up and not a hand out to a new business person.
3. You’re enlivening your community using local resources.
4. You’re making your store a place where people come for an experience.
5. You’re building community and that strengthens the town for everyone.

More rural economic development tricks

Find out more rural economic development tricks in our latest SaveYour.Town video.

My husband is a mechanic. The tools of his trade are important to his work. He has a large toolbox with many drawers lined in soft black padding. His tools lay clean and organized inside each drawer for easy access when he needs the right tool for a job. Yet, when things get busy tools don’t get wiped clean, and they don’t get put back into that organized toolbox. This is when frustration levels rise, every job gets harder, and jobs take longer because he’s looking everywhere for the right tool.

Like a mechanic needs easy access to the right tools, our local community economic development (CED) organizations need easy access to the right tools — like public policy. In most rural communities, the development organization is the one group responding to the local needs that neither the market economy nor government is fully satisfying. These development organizations are working mostly alone to create solutions for housing, daycare, business retention and expansion, workforce issues, leadership development, and other quality of life issues. One organization cannot effectively tackle all these local issues alone. If the role of public policy is not in place to support development, then local frustration levels rise, every project gets harder to do, and progress takes longer because development leaders can’t grab the right tool from the toolbox.

Nine components of community and economic development

I was community coaching in a small town recently with twelve local leaders. This group represented city council members, county commissioners, and the economic development board of directors. We were mapping out their community and economic development model.

This model included the components of:

1. business attraction
2. existing business
3. entrepreneurship
4. workforce/education
5. infrastructure
6. quality of life
7. leadership development
8. storytelling/branding
9. role of public policy

As each person was journaling their lists of activities in the nine areas, the mayor asked me for an example under the column labeled, “Role of Public Policy”. To prompt his brainstorming, I asked, “To support community economic development, have you hired a code enforcement officer or implemented the Municipal Gross Receipts Tax?”

As we worked together that evening, the group named two activities under the role of public policy – 1) Implementing Zoning and 2) Code Enforcement. Those are both good supporting public policies. Yet, as I looked over their collective work, it concerned me that a room with many elected officials could only name two public policies to support development. In that moment the story I told myself was, elected officials don’t know their role in public policy when it comes to supporting development.

So, what’s missing that could help elected officials connect the dots between the role of public policy and community economic development?

Goals of community development

A first step toward connecting those dots may be to define and understand development in your community. In addition to the nine components of the development model I listed above, below are a few general goals of any typical development organization:

Goal 1. Building Greater Community Capacity and Quality of Life

Goal 2. Nurturing Pride, Self-Reliance, and Leadership

Goal 3. Enhancing Skills and Attracting a Quality Workforce

Goal 4. Developing Businesses that are Responsive to Social and Economic Needs

Goal 5. Fostering Balanced, Fair, and Sustainable Economic Development

Example public policies to support community economic development

A next step is to explore public policies other communities are implementing to achieve their goals. Some examples of existing policies include:

1. Investing in workforce attraction/retention incentives
2. Prioritizing financial investments for paid staff of local housing, chamber, and economic development organizations, along with joint agreements on desired impacts
3. Implementing a city sales tax, Municipal Gross Receipts Tax or lodging tax
4. Implementing discretionary tax formulas to support housing improvements and business development
5. Implementing local Main Street beautification and façade programs
6. Creating an ecosystem of supporting local business to increase local sales tax
7. Investing in quality-of-life and recreational amenities
8. Utilizing Tax Increment Financing
9. Prioritizing Planning & Zoning
10. Owning or supplementing local daycare facilities.

Together, elected officials and economic development leaders can connect the dots between the role of public policy and community economic development by visioning for the future, naming the local needs, setting some goals, and innovatively developing public policy as a tool to create a thriving rural community.

Once every few years, an outside consultant comes in and leads a community engagement planning meeting. There are lots of flip charts and post it notes. 

Most of the people who attend hold official titles or formal leadership roles. Almost all are professional middle class white people, in their 30s to 60s. The Same Ten People who seem to be on every committee and board are there. Not many other people outside those groups attend. 

The consultant leads a discussion of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats as these people see them. The usual people bring up their usual topics.

Several ideas are written on big pieces of paper and mounted on the walls. Everyone gets some sticky dots they can use to vote for the ideas they like best. The ideas with the most dots are the winners. 

Maybe a survey is printed in the paper to gather more input. 

The consultant gathers up all the papers, goes away and writes up a plan. It more or less reflects what was on the papers. 

The resulting plan is submitted to the town government several weeks later in a really nice binder. It goes on the shelf in city hall. 

Who is missing from this view of “community”?

When we get these same people together, who speaks for those outside the professional middle class: the wait staff, the retail clerks, the nurse aids, the mechanics, the truck drivers, the office staff? Who brings the perspective of different ethnicities and cultures? Who speaks with a younger voice about the future?

Idea Friendly community engagement

Here’s an Idea Friendly version of community engagement. It doesn’t start with a meeting.

People from throughout the community are encouraged and supported in trying their own ideas all year long.

Small spaces are available to try micro business ideas. People are able to connect with each other at frequent networking and learning events so they can work on even bigger ideas. The whole town is idea friendly.

Throughout the year, the officials are engaged in helping with and watching the experiments.

When someone brings an idea to a city official anytime, they are met with, “Great! What would you need to test that out?”

The existing plans are revisited and revised throughout the year based on the exciting experiments and developments going on throughout the community.

During the next planning cycle, lots of people are personally invited to attend and participate, and ideas that are being actively tried and proven right now are incorporated into the plans. 

Before you write your next plan this way

There are more alternatives! You can use a calendar, a few sheets of blank paper or even a big mock up in a parking lot. You have lots of alternatives to inviting the Same Ten People to write the same old plan. Find out more in the video: Before You Write Your Next Plan from SaveYour.Town.

The same ten people are here! We can get started updating the old plan.

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

Your downtown is your core, your front door, your barometer. Photo by Deb Brown.

Why does downtown matter?

I’ve been asked why downtowns matter to small towns. Why should you invest your time and money into revitalizing your downtown? What makes it more important than any other area of town? What about that highway frontage? Or the edge of town where the discounters locate?

In our Survey of Rural Challenges, people ranked downtown as one of the top challenges, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. It doesn’t matter whether you call it your Main Street, High Street or town centre, you’re not alone if it’s a challenge.

Joe Borgstrom with Place and Main said that your downtown is your front door, barometer, recruiting tool and collectively a large employer.

Don’t miss those last two: collectively, your downtown is both a recruiting tool and a large employer. Make sure downtown businesses have a seat at the table for economic and community development decisions.

Downtown matters because it represents your town as a whole. One mayor said downtown is like the core of an apple. No one wants a mushy core. 

If your downtown buildings are mostly boarded up windows or empty storefronts, that represents your town to everyone who drives through town. If your downtown is busy with lots of businesses, that represents you, too. And you have the power to change your downtown from empty and boarded up to busy and full of life.

Downtown is a symbol of the social connections we yearn for.

We have a drive to be better connected with other people. We want to belong to something. We want to be able to trust our community members. We want to be social. That’s easiest to imagine happening on downtown sidewalks and streets, not highway frontage or discounters on the edge of town.

How small towns can attract and support remote workers

What successful towns do to attract remote workers:

• offering financial incentives
• providing coworking spaces
• building a community of remote workers

Providing co-working and alternative workspaces

One of two top ideas for small towns is to provide places to do remote work. This doesn’t have to mean a formal coworking space. Small towns can start by identifying and sharing alternative workspaces from within the community.

If you don’t have a coworking space in your town now, there are small steps you can take now. Find creative alternative places where remote workers can connect with each other and get some work done.

Where can you find unofficial coworking spaces?

• Start with the public library. They have work areas.
• Maybe a local hotel, motel or bed and breakfast has a workstation or two for guests.
• Whatever organization or business you work for, could you set up a guest workstation in your office? Economic development groups or chambers might be first to volunteer.
• Look for businesses that aren’t using all of their space.
• Maybe an insurance company has some open space up front.
• Maybe an attorney has an extra office they don’t use.
• What about the church fellowship hall or youth center? Would they accept folks for coworking?

As you share your lists of alternative work spots, you’ll be starting to build your remote work community.

Make more of the internet service you already have by improving public wifi coverage

Rural internet is exceptionally variable. Even places that look like they are served on coverage maps may in fact be dead spots. Just crossing the street in a small town can mean the difference between 30mbps and 3mbps service.

That makes public wifi even more important to supporting remote workers. Here’s how to improve the coverage of public wifi in your rural community right now.

1. Find out where free public wifi is available now. This can be as easy as driving around town with a wifi finder app or even the list of available networks on your phone.

2. Let people know about the wifi you found. Make big, consistent, simple and easy to read signs. Everywhere you find public wifi, ask them to post one of the signs.

3. Pursue more wifi. Encourage businesses of all kinds to add guest wifi. Encourage your local government to get involved. Does your local telecom offer any free wifi spots? Give them a push to start.

In places where you find wifi is locked down, ask if they can open it or provide a second network for guest access. Many routers make adding a guest network as easy as checking a box in settings.

More tips for Zoom Towns: Remote Work Ready

These tips are part of the Zoom Towns: Remote Work Ready video from SaveYour.Town. Co-founders Becky McCray (hey, that’s me!) and Deb Brown lead you through a 31 minute video. You’ll learn to position your small town for the future of remote work, without breaking your budget.

Learn More: Zoom Towns video 

Cited in:

Balancing Act: Preserving Historic Fabric and Enhancing Economic Vitality in Towns in the Metropolitan Periphery, Planning Practice & Research, John Accordino & Sarin Adhikari, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2021.1995970