• Survey of Rural Challenges
  • Small Town Speaker Becky McCray
  • Shop Local video
  • SaveYour.Town

Small Biz Survival

The small town and rural business resource

A row of small town shops
  • Front Page
  • Latest stories
  • About
  • Guided Tour
  • Subscribe
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • RSS

Jumpstart your stalled business

By Becky McCray

How’s business? If it has stalled out, or if you just aren’t satisfied, you may be ready to reexamine your passion.

From Entrepreneur.com, brought to our attention by Be Excellent.

The first step is to sit down and determine your “best and highest use” or BHU. Your particular BHU stems from your unique talents and passions, the things that set your business apart and translate into the distinctive solutions you can offer your customers. Determining your BHU will connect you to the passions and purpose that led you to start your business in the first place.

Best and Highest Use manifests your preferences and talents in ways that fill needs in the marketplace:

  • Your best represents your preferred choice among all the things you do well;
  • Highest represents that which is most valued by customers, suppliers, employers, or partners; and
  • Use is the actual, essential value you provide to others.

Unless you have all three elements, you and your company will eventually experience boredom, dissatisfaction, mediocrity, chaos, or feeble sales and frail profits. Best and Highest Use begins in passion (the owner’s), is refined through need (the customer’s), and ends in satisfaction all around. When the marketplace says, “Yes, that is what you should be doing to give me what I need!” you have found your BHU.

Author Andy Birol walks you through a six step process to refine your focus:

  1. Document your successes.
  2. Consider the importance of fun.
  3. Discover what clients, customers and staff like about you.
  4. Distill and simplify.
  5. Know your blind spots.
  6. Synthesize, apply and focus.

It’s a good article, and Birol has an excellent point. Your passion is only one part of success. You must connect that passion to a need and a use. This is just a critical for a small town small biz as it is for the next billion dollar biz.

small biz rural entrepreneurship BHU Andy Birol

  • About the Author
  • Latest by this Author
Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

www.beckymccray.com
  • Start smaller: Any local business can be your incubator
  • Should I ask competitors before I start a business in a small town?
  • Will trendy axe throwing and escape room businesses last? More experience-based retail: the Hat Bar

May 11, 2006 Filed Under: entrepreneurship

Wondering what is and is not allowed in the comments?
Or how to get a nifty photo beside your name?
Check our commenting policy.
Use your real name, not a business name.


Don't see the comment form?
Comments are automatically closed on older posts, but you can send me your comment via this contact form and I'll add it manually for you. Thanks!

Howdy!

Glad you dropped in to the rural and small town business blog, established in 2006.

We want you to feel at home, so please take our guided tour.

Meet our authors on the About page.

Have something to say? You can give us a holler on the contact form.

If you would like permission to re-use an article you've read here, please make a Reprint Request.

Want to search our past articles? Catch up with the latest stories? Browse through the categories? All the good stuff is on the Front Page.

Partners

We partner with campaigns and organizations that we think best benefit rural small businesses. Logo with "Shop Indie Local"Move Your Money, bank local, invest localMulticolor logo with text that says "Global Entrepreneurship Week"Save Your Town logotype

Best of Small Biz Survival

A few people shopping in an attractive retail store in refurbished downtown building.

TREND 2025: Retail’s Big Split: what small town retailers can do now

99% of the best things you can do for your town don’t require anyone’s permission

Three kids in a canoe

Get started as an outdoor outfitter without breaking the bank

A shopkeeper and a customer share a laugh in a small store packed full of interesting home wares.

How to get customers in the door of small town and rural retail stores

Rural Tourism Trend: electric vehicle chargers can drive visitors

Wide view of a prairie landscape with a walk-through gate in a fence

Tourism: Make the most of scant remains and “not much to see” sites with a look-through sign

More of the best of Small Biz Survival

Copyright © 2025 Becky McCray
Front Page · Log in