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

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

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

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

Why your answers matter

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

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

Tell others about the Survey

The more people who answer the survey, the better.

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

https://saveyour.town/survey2020

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

Get the survey results

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

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.

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?

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Guest post by Chris Brogan

The whole quarantine and COVID-19 situation has impacted small businesses even more than the big guys because it’s not like anyone has massive reserves of cash around so that you could deal with shutting down for months at a time. And now, as different areas go into different versions of reopening, we’re seeing signs that maybe this won’t go as well as we wanted it to, either. This post is about what to do with the whole mask-wearing situation. As such, you might think of it as a political issue, but I’m a business person. This is about revenue.

Masks Are a Feature of Revenue and Branding

At this point, if you open your business and have an anti-mask stance, you’re instructing your customers and prospects as to how you feel about their public safety. This goes a layer deeper. If you run a business with multiple employees, everyone has to be on the same page with this. Example: I went to my local gas station and the pump was not taking payment (convenient during a pandemic), so I had to go inside. Every customer in the place had a mask on, and magically – they were wearing their masks correctly.

The employees, however, were a mixed bag. Three people had their masks on just right. Two were wearing chin guards. This gives me the sense that these people, who were in charge of restocking the shelves, were at liberty to breathe all over the items I was thinking about picking up while getting my gas. Oddly, I just paid for the fuel. Would you blame me?

Your revenue walks out the door every time your employee “just can’t deal with it.”

Training is Only Part of the Picture

Look, you can order your employees to comply, but we both know that when the day gets long, people are going to do what they want to do. This can’t be a facet of your operations going forward. Cleaning and protocols around resetting places of business in between certain numbers of customers will become (more or less, this is already being written in) rules of the business road. Places like restaurants and grocery stores have already set their systems up. And sadly, you get to watch them be ignored every few visits.

This has to become part of the culture. It has to be like smoking was at the end of the 80s. Right before that time, smoking was a reasonably optional thing inside restaurants and offices and all kinds of places. And then, as laws and social norms took over together, this changed. Masks and cleaning protocols are the new no-smoking. 

Nobody Wants More Rules (But You Want Money, Don’t You?)

Again. This isn’t a political statement. It’s a revenue statement. You lose money if people don’t trust you. You lose trust if you flaunt the rules which have been put in place for your health. Health is a pretty key part of business success. Don’t you agree?

And in case you want to project your “brand” to be about ignoring the rules and living fearlessly, I can point you to several dozen articles showing you the death rates associated with those choices. Just like smoking. And again, I love money. Dead customers spend far less on your products and services.

Train Often. Check Often. Use Small Words.

Make this easy. You don’t have to teach your staff to be biohazard engineers. You have to educate people on the right way to use a spray bottle and a paper towel, the right time to wear gloves, the right way to wear masks, and that sort of thing. And then you have to reinforce it at all turns. Until we hear otherwise.

There’s money in this advice. And to flaunt it, and go without a mask is to make you the bandito in this situation. And we don’t want that.