Photo courtesy of IEDC

Guest post by Deb Brown

What attendees learned from attending the Idea Friendly Session by SaveYour.Town at the International Economic Development Council Conference — Big Ideas you can copy in your town 

Becky McCray and I were excited to lead an interactive Idea Friendly workshop at the International Economic Development Council Conference in Dallas in September of 2023.

The Idea Friendly Method is:

• You gather your crowd with a big idea. 
• You turn that crowd into a capable network through building connections.
• You and the crowd accomplish the big idea through small steps.

What Happened in the Idea Friendly Workshop

Attendees developed their own Idea Friendly Projects after learning what Idea Friendly is and how to use it effectively in rural communities. 

Engaging the audience, we asked what their rural challenges were. Not surprisingly, they aligned with the top 5 rural challenges on our Survey of Rural Challenges results: 

1. Shortage of good housing
2. Downtown is dead
3. Not enough volunteers
4. Losing Young People
5. Lack of Childcare

The attendees broke off into groups and chose a challenge to work on together. Each table had a flipchart sheet and the group worked the challenge through the Idea Friendly Method. The different groups presented their results to the entire room.

Photo courtesy of IEDC

What the Big Ideas were: 

Challenge: Housing

Big Idea: Offsetting public infrastructure to incentivize private development 

This idea brought to light the number of people who wanted help with a 12 unit housing development. The first small step they would take is to work with the economic development organization to find ways to bring the interested parties together for a conversation. 

Challenge: Not enough volunteers

Big Idea: Volunteer engagement and involving the whole community 

Their ideas included helping to promote all the possibilities for volunteering and creating a guide to managing volunteers ensuring any required government protocols are well explained. They created a brilliant tagline: making volunteering painless. 

One attendee said to me, “Friend, I’m just a redneck from Alabama and I never get to meet people from other places. This was awesome!” Attendees came from the continental United States, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Saipan, and Canada.

Challenge: Losing our young people

Big Idea: Helping youth boomerang back 

This group was excited about working with different organizations and people to create a strong publicity campaign. This big idea uses storytelling and sharing the small wins with some catchy promotional pieces. “Wish you were here”, “While you were gone”, and “We’ve grown up” are some of the hooks to use in promoting the community to their audience of young people. 

Big Idea: Downtown is dead

These folks took their big idea to fill the downtown and built out a list of who else wanted to work with them, and then built possible connections that could help get it done. They realized they were not alone and had others in their towns that wanted to help. 

Challenge: Lack of childcare

Big Idea: Create a downtown childcare facility 

After identifying a long list of people and organizations that would want to join this project, the group came up with the idea of playground “playdate” to bring them all together for productive discussion. They were excited to see how a new downtown childcare facility could not only improve the availability of childcare, but also spur downtown revitalization and contribute to positive placemaking. 

Creating Idea Friendly Projects is an easy to use and effective way to address our rural challenges. 

This interactive IEDC session was a great success, and it was inspiring to see the plans the participants came up with to address the challenges they were facing. By working together and using innovative approaches, we can create more vibrant and resilient rural communities that are better equipped to face the challenges of the future.

“Thank you both so much for your preparation and execution of your session today! Sincerely, it was a true pleasure meeting and supporting you today. Your preparation and professionalism was reflected in your session. I appreciate your adaptability as well.”

Alexa Schultz, IEDC

Next steps:

• Reach out to SaveYour.Town about an Idea Friendly Workshop for your community or event
• Read more about the Idea Friendly Method. 
• You can also watch a 24 minute Idea Friendly video for a $5 investment into your community. 
• Don’t forget to sign up for our free weekly newsletter that addresses rural challenges! 

Wash-o-mat sign from the small town of Clovis, New Mexico. CC by chames richalds

Lots of small towns have no self-service laundry facilities, so it’s a smart business to start. It also adds a valuable service and amenity to build your community.

Laundromats are notoriously expensive to get started, and rural businesses have to start with the minimum startup expenses.

The Idea Friendly Method was designed for these small towns and small business realities. An Idea Friendly approach to starting a self-service laundry place in a small town would be to:

Build connections to find what you need without spending any more than you have to at first.

Take small steps and experiment with extra services cheaply to find which ones people use.

Here’s what Building Connections could look like:

• Often, hotels and motels offer a laundry area, maybe just one washer and dryer pair. See if you can build on that.
• Or, ask churches if they have laundry capability and could open it further to the public even during limited hours.
• Deb Brown told me about a Chicago sports bar that offered laundry in the back room.

Ask around for other groups or people in town who might be good partners.

Here are some extra services to experiment with by Taking Small Steps:

• Reader Emily Karsjens Perry mentioned 24 hour vending machines and exercise equipment. (If your Idea Friendly mind went straight to asking around to find donated or thrifted exercise equipment, 5 bonus points!)
• Sheila Scarborough mentioned the combination businesses Frama Coffee at Tumbleweed Laundry formerly in Marfa, TX. (Idea Friendly version: single serve coffee machine?)
• Deb Brown said another laundromat in Thomasville, NC, was near a bingo parlor. Deb said you often saw folks waiting on laundry who would fill their time by crossing the parking lot to play bingo. (Idea Friendly question: could you try a pop-up laundry, maybe in an empty building near an attraction like bingo?)

What ideas would you throw in the wash?

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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.

Empty lots in your town’s core are the biggest first opportunity for improving the rural housing supply. Photo by Becky McCray.

The only housing “best practice” that really works for every town:

Keep renewing your town’s core

No one likes a mushy core, in an apple or a small town. Build more in the center, less on the outside.

Grab a paper map of your town and a highlighter. Circle the oldest neighborhoods, the ones closest to your downtown or town center. Those are the areas to focus on.

There are two important reasons:

1. Make the most of your existing infrastructure. 

You already have water and sewer and streets in the core. You’ll make more of your existing infrastructure investment when you replace and renew the existing housing close to it.

2. Draw your community closer together.

People who live close to the core can walk and bike more to run errands. They can go downtown for shopping and events more easily. Parking at downtown events is less of a problem when more people can walk from their homes in the core area close by.

How to renew your town’s core housing

Find the empty lots within your existing core residential areas. Highlight them on the map. Use different colors for privately owned lots, ones held by banks or other organizations, and ones currently owned by governments at any level. You’ll probably find several that ended up in municipal government ownership after an owner failed to pay taxes or failed to maintain an old house.

Pick another color for empty lots in the core housing area that are only used as parking or storage. (Look next to churches and businesses.) You might have to get extra creative to find ways to put them back into housing.

Then get together and brainstorm ways you can promote homebuilding in the core. Here are some starter ideas that might spur your thinking:

• Make people aware which lots in the core are available for building right now.
• Offer incentives, like waiving utility connection fees for close-in lots.
• Sell empty lots in the core at low prices.
• Remove zoning barriers to adding new structures or accessory dwelling units in your housing core.

Add your ideas in the comments or send us an email.

Send us pictures if you put up signs: “Fabulous homebuilding location! Close to downtown!”

Find more ideas for small town housing issues in our video, Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach

So why do we greet new ideas with “That will never work”?

How to greet an idea respectfully

Picture being introduced to someone you’ve never met. You look them in the eye, and you shake their hand. You want to make a good first impression while you’re also forming your first impression of the other person. Now is not the time to hit them with all the negative thoughts that pop into your head.

You hold your opinions to yourself for now and make time to get to know the person better. You show interest in them, ask questions to learn more about them and listen to their answers.

You don’t necessarily agree with everything they say, but you show respect for them by listening first. 

You can do the same when you greet new ideas.

Practice greeting each new idea with a friendly hello and pause

Listen to the new idea without responding. You don’t have to agree with the idea, or think it’s a good idea. Hold your objections for later.

First show interest in the idea. Ask questions that help you learn more about it, not to help you poke holes in it. Avoid throwing out all the potential problems and reasons not to try it that pop into your head. 

People learn by doing, trying and sometimes by failing. If you stop them from trying, you’re stopping them from learning. But there’s one question you can ask that will help them learn the most while failing the least.

The magic question to ask of all new ideas:

How could you test that idea in a tiny way?

Every idea is good enough to test. It might lead to another idea or a new approach. It might inspire someone else to try another new idea.

The smaller the test, the smaller the possible failure.

That’s the Idea Friendly way.

Bottom line

Greet a new idea like you would greet a new person: with your respect, not your opinion.

Get more Idea Friendly Implementation tips in the video Idea Friendly Next Steps from SaveYour.Town.

Thanks to Jurek Leon for sharing this concept in his newsletter several years ago, inspired by Paul Hellman, author of You’ve Got 8 Seconds.

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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.

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

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

How do we convince the mayor and economic development group?

Big old factory buildings can be intimidating to revitalize. Should you start with grants? Make a presentation to the economic development leaders? The Idea Friendly Method can help. Photo by Deb Brown

The empty factory building

A reader wrote in to ask about converting and dividing up a huge old building. Because my answer isn’t quite what the reader asked for, I’ve taken the details out. This could be your town, too, couldn’t it?

I absolutely love your articles about turning vacant buildings into small shops and creating a retail space to revitalize small towns. Honestly, I have long thought something like this would do well in my small town. There was once a manufacturing plant that has been shut down for years. The building is huge, yet it is slowly falling into disrepair because it has been sitting empty.

I think this would make a wonderful shopping area if it were broken up into smaller shops. Not only that, but there is a large covered area that would make a great covered farmer’s market.

However, we live in a small rural town where most of our officials in the city office as well as the economic development authority, do not really think outside the box. I would like to pitch this idea to them; however, I do not think they will be receptive if I do not have information such as possible grants or an expert’s advice.

So my question to you is:

1) Can you give me some ideas on where to search to find grants for vacant building restoration?

2) Can you give me examples of other towns/cities that have offered incentives to potential businesses to fill up the spaces? and

3) If the first two options are not persuasive enough, would you be willing to come in and give a presentation to the economic development association and mayor?

Any assistance you can lend would be greatly appreciated. I would really like to help our town become a better version of itself for my children to grow up in.

Where not to start

Before you write that plan, why not try a pop-up of your business idea? Even in your own front yard you can learn more than you will staring at a computer screen. Photo courtesy of Shawn’s Kettle Corn, Webster City, Iowa. 

by Deb Brown

At least, the old way of doing them

Writing a business plan is an intense project that takes up a lot of your time. You spend weeks and weeks on it, and you’re not even sure everything in it is correct. Your financial projections are just wild guesses. You’re not even open and they want you to guess how much money you’ll make! You can find out the amount of traffic that goes by your proposed location. But just because 10,000 people travel down that road doesn’t mean any certain percentage of them will be guaranteed to stop. 

What if you waited and wrote your business plan after you’ve run a few tests? 

How do you test out your products and market without having a brick and mortar business? 

Participate in a pop up event or two

Small towns have these kind of events. Car shows, town fairs, three day events for fun, goat eating contests, celebrations and many other kinds of parties. You can set up a table and a covering and sell your product. 

Do track your sales! It’s as easy as counting inventory at the beginning and at the end. Write down if you had to drop the price. Write down suggestions people give you for similar products they’d like. You’ll begin to get an idea of what products people like.

Try a longer pop up.

Does your town do seasonal popups in empty buildings? It’s worth asking the building owner to do that! You could partner with other entrepreneurs and give it a try.  

Again, track sales, price drops and suggestions. If possible, track the  number of people who came in the building. 

Let’s not forget online selling

Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Poshmark, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBid, and Ruby Lane are a few places. Be sure to choose the right site(s) for your type of product.

Many of these sites will do the tracking for you! If not, track them yourself.

Shared spaces

Is there a place in your area that has more than one vendor in the location? See if you could join them. This is a shared space, and they are operated in different ways. Some have one cash register, some have each vendor with a cash register. Both have been known to work. Get the details and see if they work for you. 

As you track results, don’t forget to write down your market

Who is buying your product? 

As you are trying these ideas (and making money) pay attention to the people who shop with you. Do they fall into a certain age category? Are they male or female? Of a certain social strata? This is all research for the kind of people who make up your market. 

Where do these people live? What do they look like? How old are they? What gender are they? Are they different nationalities? Where are they shopping for similar products? Are you satisfying a need in the marketplace? 

After this time of tracking sales, places, and people you’re really ready to begin writing a plan.

The difference is you’ll have actual figures and not made up ones. You’ll also want to write about your products, competition and staffing. You’ve already got the answers for these topics too.

You have everything you need for a simple business plan. You can show the banker, if you need one, exactly what you’ve been doing as you build your business. You’re not putting your dreams and wishes on paper. You’re putting facts and figures and proof that your business is working. 

Our next video is Before You Write Your Next Plan and you’ll hear about real people in real towns who are not writing business plans the old way anymore.