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.

When businesses reopen for customers after lockdown, it’s not going back to the way business used to be. Chris has 5 shifts for you to consider.

As different places begin to allow local businesses to open up, you’re not alone if you’re breathing a sigh of relief mixed with a gasp of worry. We all need the money. We all want to get back to being useful for the people we serve. And some or most of us are worried about what happens next. Let’s talk about some of it.

OPEN UP! It’s the Customers!

Remember this above all else: everyone is tense. No one will likely be their most courteous and their best behaved. No matter how grown up and strong we all our, this really counts as actual real mental trauma. It’s going to take a bit to get over it, and that means you as the business owner will have to smother their customers and prospects with kindness, but there’s a lot more.

1. Clean Up

Customers are going to want to understand how you’re handing a clean work environment after this pandemic. Even if you personally think it’s silly in some cases, don’t discount your customer’s vote on this one. Make it clear and obvious and explain how you are handling everything, even things you can’t imagine someone wondering about like whether you disinfect your cardboard before boxing up their product. (Turns out this is a big and common question now when people consider purchasing something online.)

2. Sell Online

Even after the big bad bug is finally vanquished enough for us not to care about it, people are used to ordering and buying online for many products and services you can’t even imagine people getting remotely. I have a friend who sells hay and the moment he got the web store live on his website, he had orders.

3. Communicate More

Partly because of online sales and definitely because of this “If I can’t see it, how do I know what’s going on?” mindset, people are looking for more “touches” between themselves and companies, even in B2B situations. If the order typically takes a week to build and ship, then give people updates every day or two. When I ordered DoorDash to get a burger sent to me during lockdown, I received five or six texts from the app, telling me the food was being made, the food was ready for pickup, the driver picked up the food, the driver is two minutes away, and the driver is here. Do something like that.

4. Consider New Payment Options in Two Ways

On the one hand, if you’re not using things like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and Cashapp, you might want to get some accounts setup. People are sending money through multiple channels. Second, you might realize that with nearly 30 million people unemployed in the US on the day I wrote this to you, cash is tight. You might have to sell “smaller bites” versions of what you offer, so that people can afford you. There are many creative ways to work on this.

5. Reach Out

It’s no surprise that this is my advice. I’ve spent twenty years begging companies to use tools like video and audio and good email marketing to reach potential customers. There’s a lot to this, it seems, but at the root of it all is the same goal: communicate and connect with the people you hope to help and earn the right to sell and serve.

Here’s help

To that end, Becky and Deb have a whole new program about learning to restart your local shopping. If that’s your kind of small town business, then it’s pretty important you check that out.

If not, realize that all businesses are going through some form of what you’re experiencing and that it’s important to accept that it won’t be perfect. But know this, also: people are really getting behind “shop local” in a way they’ve never expressed it before. This might be an ideal time to change up some of your work and really earn their money and customer longevity.

You ready?

Social distancing is making shopping tricky, where in-person shopping is still allowed. Photo (CC) by Guido van Nispen

Monica Bailey of Rock Port, Missouri, sent in this question that I think you can relate to:

Thank you ladies, as always, for supporting small towns! My question is super generic but it is giving me sleepless nights. I am our counties economic/community development director and I’ve been scrambling to support our small businesses during this crisis. What’s the most helpful thing I can be doing for them right now??

Take care!
Monica

This is a great question. While there’s no one right answer, we are hearing lots of suggestions. And we’re making up a few of our own. I’ll have a more complete answer on this later, but right now here are my thoughts, in order of importance by my guesstimate:

1. Get in touch with each and every business.

• How are they doing?
• What have they changed?
• Where do they know they need help right now?
• Who’s hiring?

2. Get the word out.

• Share what businesses and services are available now, what’s different, what’s still the same, what jobs are open.
• Use every channel available to you.
• Enlist others to spread the word.

3. Listen for community projects and activities that you can amplify.

• Share stories of anyone doing anything positive, anything people can join in on safely.

4. Answer as many of the assistance program surveys and questionnaires as possible.

• Get more businesses to, as well.
• The longer this goes on, the more of these will come out. Many of them help determine how much money gets allocated where.

5. For businesses that are closed or downsized, help them transition.

• What’s next for them?
• What’s next for the space they occupied?

6. Play matchmaker.

• Help businesses that are downsizing to combine with one another to share space or share resources, safely.

7. Fill empty spaces with cheerful things to look at.

• Start filling empty business windows with art of any kind.

8. Start preparing for rebuilding.

• Look for the small spaces and the shared spaces that will help the tiny new startups take root.

Bonus: Don’t do any of these alone.

• There’s a whole community of people out there who want to help. Give them small but meaningful ways to participate, spread the word and cheer each other on.

Monica wrote back to say she’s already doing 1, 2 and 4, so I’m sure you’re on the right track too.

What are you trying in your community?

Hit reply or answer in the comments.

Changing your questions can help you change the leadership of your community, empowering a new generation to lead. Photo by Becky McCray.

Guest Post by Paula Jensen

Leaders are the essence of small towns and rural communities. The success or failure of any housing, community or economic development efforts in the places we call home often rests upon the level of engagement and investment of local citizen leaders. Yet, in so many communities I work in across South Dakota there is an invisible divide holding back the development of a strong leadership base. I hear experienced leaders saying, “Young people just don’t want to be involved in the community!”  and I hear emerging leaders saying, “The people in charge won’t let us try anything new!”

So, I am asking you, “How can we empower more people to lead in our rural communities?”

To begin searching for a solution to this question, I want to help you understand two community leadership systems that exist:

1. Most community leadership systems currently operate in a traditional hierarchy – meaning top-down (like a triangle) – the board’s officers propose ideas to the members based on their knowledge of what the community needs. Then, following a decision of the board, the tasks gets allocated to the members who carry out the projects with board supervision. Traditional leadership systems define levels of authority and decision-making within the organization and invite you to join the work they are currently doing.
2. The non-traditional community leadership system being implemented by some rural communities has a core leadership team that is structured as a network – meaning connected (like a circle) – with the basic goal of allowing distributed decision-making to empower and raise up resident leaders while giving everyone in the community the opportunity to identify priorities and go to work on projects they are passionate about. The non-traditional community leadership system can be chaotic and allows community leaders to collaborate, innovate, dream, and experiment which creates increased optimism and hope for new possibilities within the community.

The two systems listed above are quite different, yet if we are going to show emerging leaders that they do have the power to innovate and have real impact on the community, then we need to begin transforming the community’s leadership structure.

Experienced community leaders can initiate this process by asking good questions, listening with curiosity, and taking new ideas seriously. Below are some sample questions to help these transformational conversations begin.

Questions to transform rural leadership:

• Open Ended Questions – What needs to be done?
• Challenge Status Quo – Why must it be done that way?
• Learner Mindset – What is good or useful about this?
• Forward Looking – What possibilities does this open up?
• Optimistic – What can we learn from this?
• Empower Others – What are you trying to accomplish?
• Build Relationships – How solid are our connections with others?
• Understand Self – What do I need to reflect on to move us all forward?
• Deal with Dependency – Would you like people to solve their problems rather than coming to you for answers?
• Serve Humbly – How can I help you?
• Encourage Action – What will you commit to do by when?
• Evaluate – What does our leadership team do that gets in the way?
• Listen – Are we listening to each other with curiosity?
• Involve All Stakeholders – What are our common areas of interest?
• Enable Change – What will you need from us in the future?
• Develop Vision and Values – Are we being honest with ourselves?

The responsibility of building a pool of leaders in our rural communities falls to both sides. Experienced leaders must let go a little bit, and emerging leaders must build a foundation of trust. This will allow a smooth community leadership structure transformation with minimal chaos – ultimately good for the future of our rural communities.

So, if they want to lead, empower them to lead. #Iamrural

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Photo (CC) by Sean MacEntee, on Flickr

Buzz words, the hot topic – You know what I am talking about. Go to a networking event and just listen.

As you listen, there is a good chance you will hear certain words, tactics, techniques or ideas brought up and discussed several times. These same words are ones that you are probably also seeing in print or on the Internet.

The first time, and maybe for several more times after that, you probably have no idea what people are talking or writing about. And you may ask yourself, why should you care?

The need to care is that these hot topics are a sign of the changing landscape surrounding your business. Yes, it’s true that many of them are not relevant to your operation or that the idea is not a trend but simply a fad. But one, two or more are a rich nugget for the potential development of your business.

These new ideas represent change, change desired by your customers and/or suppliers. It offers insight into what they need or want. It reflects their potential behavior if you can meet the expectations.

But listening and analyzing is not enough. You need to take action. Without implementation, the time you spent in this activity adds nothing to your bottom line. It is only a cost.

As you find ideas that seem to hold promise, you need to:

• Dig deeper – Learn more about the idea, technique, or tactic.
• Check with others who have already implemented it
• Plan the launch
• Do it

Buzz words – Find AND IMPLEMENT the nuggets among the rubble.

Photo (CC) by bark, on Flickr

Let’s start with two underlying truths.

First, you probably are near the point where your time is maxed out. It would be hard to add anything more and still manage to stay on top of everything at work and in your personal life.

Second, things change and there are always new opportunities and requirements coming at you in terms of running the business. Just look at some of my blog posts in the last 30 days – innovation, distinguish yourself, and tracking customer value. Each is a suggestion of something to try.

So how do you mesh these two truths that are each tugging in different directions?

Peter Drucker, management consultant and author, gave us an answer with his advice, “If you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

His statement acknowledges the fact that you just can’t keep adding new practices onto what you are already using. .

By practicing his advice, it forces you to ensure that your gain will be greater than your lose.

So often we get caught up in the new bright, shiny idea that we fail to look long term at what it might cost us. Yes, it’s great to be practicing the newest trend but does it really enhance your total return.

When considering the gain of doing something new in operating the business is no different then when consider adding a new product or service to your offerings. Does it strengthen your business position?

Staying abreast and taking advantage of new tools and techniques is necessary in building and sustaining your business. Just the time to do this though must be carved out of a busy day.

And if you wish to implement a new idea, you should think seriously about Drucker’s advice – if one thing comes in, another goes out.

Photo (CC) by Dennis Skley, on flickr

The world we live in is not a static place.

This is true in every aspect of life, including small business. For small-business owners, things are changing, and those changes are happening at an ever-increasing pace.

Doing business tomorrow will be different than doing business today. And doing business next week might be something we can’t even imagine today.

Disruption is another term people use when discussing the changing environment in which we live. When disruption occurs, you are forced to respond in some manner. No longer can you continue to do business as you have in the past.

While small-business owners may not know exactly what the next disruption coming down the road will be, they know it’s coming. Knowing it’s coming means the owner has a chance to determine his or her response.

Owners can respond in one of two ways:

• One choice is to do nothing. Let the disruption come and then respond.
• The other choice is to be proactive and to disrupt the business themselves. The event no longer happens at a random, and perhaps a bad, time.

Taking a proactive stance gives the owner several advantages.

For one thing, bad timing is taken out of the equation somewhat. The disruption occurs on the owner’s time schedule.

Second, being proactive means that the owner is not forced into playing catch-up but instead has done at least a little preparation in terms of possible responses. Even if the decision is to do nothing, the owner has made that decision and has not let circumstances make the decision for him or her.

By disrupting your own business, you also can get a jump on your competitors. Not only might you get a step ahead, but you put them into the position of being behind and responding to the external environment.

Being proactive changes the mindset you are working under. No longer are changes in the environment a threat. Instead, they become opportunities. You take control.

The bottom line: Disrupt your business before others decide to disrupt it for you. 

Photo (CC) by Robert Scoble, on Flickr

Is 2015 the year you want to start your small business?

 If so, have you sat down to develop your business plan yet?

 Check out most how-to business guides and you will find a section on writing a business plan. Yet ask business owners and you often hear that they did a plan only because it was recommended by books and consultants or they wrote it to get money.

Thus, the business plan has gotten to be something that is beginning to seem less and less valuable in the popular press and academic writings.

Business plans are seen more and more as something that the banker requires. The business owner is more likely to view them as something, once written, get put on the shelf to gather dust.

Business owners also are likely to hear from their peers that they started a business without putting everything down on paper.

This view that a plan is unnecessary, however, misses the important aspect. It’s not the plan, which is just a thing, but the process or the doing of the plan that is the value.

Developing a business strategy and thinking about the why of developing the business, the who will benefit from the business, and the what it means to the potential customer and to the world are crucial when developing a successful business.

Developing these elements means coming somewhat from a different mindset. It also means that the owner is thinking how all of the elements may change. Change becomes part of the strategy.

A plan often becomes the end in itself. It is static and may not reflect the passion and excitement of the owner. A strategy gives a sense of what you want the final goal to be. By stating that, the path on how you get there opens up the options on how you reach the goal.

President Eisenhower focused on this difference between the process and the end result when he stated, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

So if you are headed into business in 2015, you need to go through the planning process to increase your chances of business success. If you already have a plan but haven’t looked at it in some time, maybe you should revisit it with these thoughts in mind.

Photo (CC) Sean MacEntee, on Flickr

Maintaining status quo can have severe consequences for small business. This situation often arises when the “that is the way we have always done it” mentality is present.

Not changing because of tradition or policy, or simply not taking the time to look forward, often can mean the slow, or sometimes rapid, decline of a business.

Change is occurring all around us. It is occurring at the macro level with the aging of society. The last of the baby boomer generation hits 50 years of age in 2014. The median income has been slow to rise except in certain areas of the country, such as North Dakota. The racial makeup of the country is changing. Population growth and shifting are occurring continuously.

Not only are people and communities changing, but our wishes and wants also are changing. Many products today include more and more technology. Have you looked at new automobiles lately, or what about farm equipment? A recent experience with drone potential for agriculture was a clear demonstration of this. Or what about the fact that more than 20,000 new items will hit the shelves in supermarkets across the country?

Change surrounds us. We see it happening all over in our communities. It may not be happening quickly at times, but there is hardly a store operating today like they did only a few years back.

 Business owners need to stay current with the macro changes in the world in general, as well as with the changes in their respective industry. The changes that need to watched include new products and services.

Customers face a daily barrage of marketing efforts introducing them to new products, services or ways that should make their life easier. And not all of these new offerings are even a change but instead just represent a new competitor on the scene who promises to offer something new, better, faster, easier, with that home-made taste, etc.

Two key tactics for small-business owners can help them respond effectively to the changing marketplace.

The first tactic is to remain vigilant to the environment.

It is necessary to find time, preferably every day, to do a scan of the changes occurring. Because so many of the changes are slow or subtle or because we get so used to the world as it is, it may be important to enlist the aid of a mentor, a trade group or even the local chamber of commerce to help track the changes occurring.

In addition, you always need to be watchful of change. On trips out of town, stay observant to new ideas and processes. Every change you see probably is headed your way

Keeping up with the trends also means using online resources as well as traditional media.

The second tactic is analysis and action. Once a change is identified or suspected, ask what it means for your business. Some may have little bearing and can be set aside safely, while others bear further watching, and some demand immediate action.

Once a shift in the way things are being done is noticed, it is time for action. Chances are, it is not something that will just go away.

Change (CC) Nana B Agyel, on Flickr

Long-term small-business success means constantly changing. This is not new. However, these changes are happening more rapidly than ever. And the odds are, the pace of change only will get faster.

Some of the changes that small-business owners have had to adjust to are new ways of marketing, a broader competitive market, new ways of doing business because of technology, and a changing consumer, in terms of demographics and shopping habits.

Those are just some of the bigger changes. Smaller changes might have even more of an impact on the small business.

The small changes include more and more products and services flooding the marketplace. Some of these products and services will be successful and some will not. But the business owner must be aware of and be ready to respond to each new idea.

Today, you can go to bakeries for pets and ice cream stores for dogs. No longer do you need to go out to buy clothing when personal shoppers will bring an assortment of items to your home or office. All of these once were not even on the radar screen. Today, these ideas are all growing in size and thus might mean more competition, depending on your business.

Don’t like cooking? Then get someone to buy the ingredients, prepare your favorite dishes and leave them in your freezer. That concept also isn’t so new. Today, though, entrepreneurs are taking that idea and combining it with the growth of local foods. These business owners will go to the farmers market, a CSA (community-supported agriculture) or food co-op to get local foods to prepare these dishes. Today, entrepreneurs will come into your home and do your canning and jelly/jam making for you.

Also, stores are specializing. Examples include a licorice store, doll repair, and bedside service for expectant mothers and new parents. Any kind of personalized service you want probably is available. And what about selling single, travel-size products? Would we have thought that was possible only a few years ago?

Technology also means changes. Using local-based services, a business owner can send out a deal for people within a certain region.

All of these new ideas are changes but also mean more competition for the existing marketplace. Not only are new stores popping up, but existing stores often are diversifying. Luggage stores can be found selling some of the above mentioned travel-size toiletries.

What about really small changes? Remember when free Wi-Fi in a store was unusual, if available at all? What about charging stations for mobile devices? Even taxis are beginning to offer such services.

We also have today’s mobile services movement: food trucks, veterinary services, and personal hair and beauty services.

Change is constant. The business owner who will survive and thrive knows this, watches for it and prepares, as much as possible, for it.