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.

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

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. 

Mangum Artists Alley photo courtesy of Travel OK

Small communities often are looking for ways to enhance and expand their local economies. A commonly used tool in this effort is encouraging the building and expansion of local businesses.

Communities want jobs and dollars, and they usually want them relatively quickly. Often development plans look towards high-fliers and/or large firms. Yet, the local business core consists of small businesses, often comprising more than 95 percent of all businesses that exist.

Four common categories of businesses are often defined as existing within a community:

• Family businesses
• Small businesses
• Large businesses
• Entrepreneurial businesses

Yet these categories are not mutually exclusive. There is a great deal of overlap in them.

Family businesses are simply a measure of who owns controlling interest in the business. Although not consistently defined in the industry literature, entrepreneurs generally are viewed as being innovative, planners, achievement-motivated and risk takers, which are perceived as factors in building high-growth firms.

Small-business owners show innovation and planning but are identified more by a focus on lifestyle and quality of life. The U.S. Small Business Administration defines them as a business having fewer than 500 employees.

These terms are used inconsistently. Plus, firms move between categories. Today, a small business can be a family business and an entrepreneurial business, but tomorrow that all can change. Gearing a strategy towards one segment can miss its strongest members. It may leave out those entering their fast growth stage while keeping those just exiting that stage.

I, along with a colleague, recently examined a mix of family businesses. We could identify, at any single point, firms that had more employees and higher revenues.

The interesting finding, which may be the most useful for community developers, is what happened to those firms as we entered the last recessionary period. The entrepreneurial firms showed significant drops in employees and income, while small businesses did not.

Small businesses then become crucial not only for the products and services they offer, but for keeping a community going. The latter is a role that is incredibly important by itself in building strong communities, but small businesses also offer economic balance.

As you think about the goals and the hurdles outlined, a suggested strategy might be to focus on a holistic business development effort that includes all business owners. It can help avoid the issues of definition, identification and time.

Building your community? Bring all your businesses to the table.

Small Business matters on more than just one day.

Since 2010, the Saturday after Thanksgiving has been designated “Small Business Saturday.” It is a day to recognize small businesses and what they bring to a local community. 

You probably know the direct impact of the small businesses in your community. They provide needed goods and services. Everyone needs to be reminded of their contributions and encouraged to shop small whenever I can.

You know the people. The owners take care of you because of the local connection.

Yet providing goods and services is just the beginning of what small businesses offer. Many of them provide employment. They also generate sales tax revenue that helps support local needs such as roads, parks and emergency services.

Research also has found that these small-business owners give back to the community in terms of charitable donations. In addition, some provide people to work at charitable events. Also, check how many posters you see in their windows or on their display boards that advertise such events. For some of the bigger events, their entire front window encourages community spirit.

In addition to dollars and other resources, the small-business owners give their time. Often, you find these small-business owners as local leaders, elected officials, and participants in civic and other organizations. If the town has a volunteer ambulance or fire service, they probably are involved.

The bottom line: They are crucial in developing and maintaining many of the aspects that form the ‘quality of life’ in communities, be that community a small, rural town or an identifiable district within a large city. The owners just respond when asked. They keep things going.

Across the U.S., more than 90 percent of businesses are small. The vast majority of those business have fewer than 20 employees. Many have fewer than 10 or even five employees. Yet they generate a substantial portion of our gross domestic product.

Small businesses are not only sellers in the economic system, but they also are buyers and consumers of goods and services, thus adding more to their total contribution. They typically also are the point of departure for new ventures that may, one day, be a major corporation.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of a community. On Nov 29, stop in at your local small businesses. Make some purchases, but also say thanks for what they do for the community and you as a consumer.