What can you expect to read here? Articles by and for small business people in rural areas and small towns. You face some special challenges in a small town small business, including:
- Pressure from competitors in bigger cities,
- Pressure from competitors online, world wide,
- Scarce, or variable quality, resources to assist you locally,
- Tight labor supply, and a graying workforce,
- Lack of skills in your workforce,
- Isolation from your industry peers.
But for each challenge, there is also opportunity.
- The online market opens the world to you.
- Involvement in your community is your way to fight against decline.
- Land is usually cheap, compared to growing areas.
- Regulatory burdens tend to be lower than in well-developed regions.
- A little payroll usually goes a long way.
- Work ethic is usually high.
Regular Features
Based on those challenges and opportunities,
- Small Biz 100: 100 hands-on useful small business articles
- Reviews: tools, resources and products to help your small business survive. Read our current disclosures.
- Tourism: taking tourism to new places
- Failure: if you aren’t failing, how are you learning?
- Brag Basket: celebrate! Once a week, we give you a chance to share your business successes.
We also write all sorts of how-to articles, post tips for USA income taxes, and anything else that strikes our fancy. For a list of what we like best of our work, read the Best of Small Biz Survival.
Some additional articles on small business, economic development and rural communities, collected from all over, can be found in my Shared Items from Google Reader. You can read it as a complete web page, and you can subscribe to the feed. It’s also in the sidebar to the right.
Do you like what you see?
Come back and visit often! And feel free to comment. We enjoy a good conversation. We welcome your story ideas, feedback, tips, and ideas for us to share with everyone. Don’t miss out! Make sure you get our updates, in which ever form you like best: Get our updates.
Our works here are published and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you’d like to reprint any of our materials, you may do so for noncommercial purposes, with no changes, and properly attributed with the author’s name and a link back to the original source. We’d also appreciate an email or a comment letting us know that you found our work useful!
That’s all!
So that’s the tour. Hope you found something useful for yourself and your business. Keep in touch.
Thank you very much for the tour, I just started a group at yahoo, thinking of having members of entrepreneurs sharing and bonding for Business purpose, Helping each other and networking with others who share same or related Business interest.
Thanks to my Google alert, It led me to your site, I could use a lot of your materials and share it there. I like everything I see here.
What a neat blog, I just stumbled across it courtesy Lifehacker. I’m having to resist stopping tonight’s late night of work just to read all the old posts. Put me down as a new subscriber. Even if I can read through all the back posts I’ll eagerly be awaiting future ones.
Martin @ MartinKelley.com, not the most isolated business but still small town an hour from the nearest big city.
Like MartinK, I stumbled here via Lifehacker. So glad I did. What a fantastic idea for a blog. I’ll be hanging here for the duration! Cheers.
I’m glad to have found this blog – I live in a rural area and have a small pc repair business. already, just in a few minutes surfing, you’ve answered my questions. In my RSS reader you go!
I found this blog today through Twitter (@SavvyVA), and am so glad I have!
As a Virtual Assistant in a remote rural area in Alberta Canada, I am thrilled to find a resource specifically addressing the unique issues and interests of the rural or small town business owner.
Added to my RSS Feed!