If you want to save your town, you have to take action.
You don’t have to wait for someone from outside to come in and save your town. You don’t need some other person with some special qualities to show up and help you. You don’t have to wait for fate to take its course. You have the choice to act to shape the future of your town.
Here’s where you should start: downtown. Start with downtown.
Here’s why. A lively downtown means…
- a lively environment for your local small businesses
- a better breeding ground for new businesses
- more chances for people to realize that you have more local businesses than they thought
- more chances for people to run into each other and interact, and ultimately make new things happen.
A lively downtown means a healthy town.
Here’s one idea: a Pop-up Fair.
What is it? It’s a festival of local businesses, artists, direct marketers, home-based businesses and others who have neat stuff to sell, creating pop-up temporary businesses right on your downtown sidewalks, just for one day.
Like an old-fashioned sidewalk sale, but with a decidedly new feeling of life and interesting new vendors. Rather than boring old tables and clothes racks from stores everyone knows all too well, we’re talking new and different mini-stores that pop up right on the sidewalk with shelves and displays and interesting items for sale.
You are welcome to take that idea and just run with it. But we know you’re much more likely to follow through and actually do it if we keep pushing you step by step. So that’s what Deb Brown and I are going to do.
We’re sending out four weekly emails guiding you through the process. You can always hit reply and ask questions, and we’ll come up with answers. We’re charging for it because we know that, too, will make you more likely to stick to it and actually follow through.
We know if you’ll take this idea and actually do it, you’ll kick off a run of good things for your town. We wanted something small enough to do in a town of 300 people, but flexible enough to scale up to big small towns and neighborhoods.
So if you’re ready to shape the future of your town, head to SmallBizSurvival.biz/popup.
Don’t wait too long. The sales close on June 15, 2015, and then you’ll have missed it.
- About the Author
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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.
