Small business experiments like booths and pop-ups help grow the entrepreneurs who can buy out retiring business owners in the coming years. Photo by Jeanne Cole.
Twice recently, the question has come up: who is going to buy the stores in my town when their owners retire in a few years? The answer is no one, unless you start growing your people.
In small towns, this is a pressing question. If you lose a key business because the owner can’t sell it, it’s probably gone for good.
Buying an existing business is a big step. You’re going to have to come up with money to pay the retiring owner the price of all the business assets. You’ll need additional money to cover the cost of rehabbing, remodeling or updating the building. You’ll need to update the inventory, too, so add money for that. Then there will be taxes and fees and utility deposits that can’t be switched from the retiring owners. This is starting to add up to real money.
Then you get to run the business. Maybe some customers leave with the old owner. Maybe the retiring owner let things slide a bit, and you’ll have to rebuild. You have a big management job ahead of you, too.
So who is going to be able to pull this off? First, let’s talk about who is not going to be able to pull this off: a first time and completely inexperienced business owner. That’s just too much to ask for someone’s first ever experience with business. We’re looking for people who have had experience in business and have built up some assets of their own, but haven’t owned a full-scale business before.
Where do we find these people with business experience and assets but without a business? They are people who started smaller, maybe even tiny. We’re looking for people who did a booth at the big festival, then started doing all the fairs and shows they could find. They graduated to having a store-inside-a-store, then doing a pop-up store for a few months in the holidays. They experimented. They learned. They grew.
In other words, we can grow our own. We can set up business booths at events and festivals. We can pass the local regulations to allow food and retail trucks. We can use empty lots to hold a business fair.
The only way to grow the business owners we want to have in 10 years is to create more entrepreneurial experiments today.
Think about your next event, project, or promotion. How can you add a business experiment opportunity to it?
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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.
Great suggestions for keeping it local. As a side note, though, there may be potential buyers outside the immediate area who do have the required experience to purchase the business. Many people are unfamiliar with the role of business brokers, who help people to buy or sell a business. They may have a buyer who would be interested in moving to a small town. It’s worth exploring. Not all brokers are qualified and credible, though. Look for ones who are accredited i.e. by the IBBA.
Thank for bringing up brokers, Karen. It’s tough to find the right buyer from outside who will be a good fit in the community. Good brokers can sometimes help widen the search.
Thanks for this post, Becky. I’m passing it along to the local business development agency, which is supposed to update the town’s comprehensive plan. Most of our businesses are owned by people who are retirement age already. We need to be working now on people to take over.
Linda, thanks for passing it along. You can also take action yourself, finding ways to help others experiment as entrepreneurs. And we can all do a better job of supporting those experimenting entrepreneurs with our purchases.
A handful of us are working on something along that line, but don’t want to overstep our boundaries too much!
Go ahead. Overstep boundaries. If you’re working to make opportunities for new businesses, that’s a great thing.