My annual rural small biz trends email is coming soon. To get it, sign up for my email newsletter. Trends is always the most popular email of the year. See, each year I do a trends post for Small Biz Trends. And each year, I have more to say about trends. There are some extra trends…
Time for two critical end of year accounting tasks: mileage and inventory. Use your vehicle for business? Write down your mileage at the beginning of the year. Learn more about deducting business use of your vehicle. Sell products? Take an inventory of all products on hand at the turn of the year. Make products? Inventory…
I’d like to add a new dimension to what we do here. We’ll still focus on equipping rural entrepreneurs to prosper so their communities can prosper. But together we can support some organizations that make a difference to entrepreneurs in small towns and rural areas. Some examples of rural entrepreneurship organizations that leap to mind:…
Time to get your business finances under control. I recommend you do it the easy way: make the computers do most of the work. I’ve long been a fan of Outright. It asks you to track only the minimum of detail required to do your income taxes. (As a sole proprietor, that’s a Schedule C.)…
Rural sourcing is like outsourcing, except to rural areas with lower costs of doing business. It’s like off-shoring, only it’s on-shoring. We’ve talked about it before, most recently in “Rural sourcing can replace outsourcing.” Two more rural outsourcing firms to watch: Saturn Systems celebrated 20 years in 2010. Rural America OnShore Outsourcing has a collection…
Every small town downtown has some unused buildings and others used just for storage. They aren’t adding anything to the downtown economy. What can you do with them, besides ignore them? Use the storefronts to advertise other businesses. Yes, it will take cooperative building owners. And this only works if the front windows are in…
Need some new small town tourism ideas? Borrow some. It’s the rural tradition: swipe from the best. The Rural Information Center at the USDA has links to tons of resources and ideas on rural tourism. It can take a while to figure out their menu structure, but trust me, there is great info linked from there. It…
The narrower your niche, the wider your opportunity. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? It seems like if you chose a narrower niche, you’ll have fewer potential customers. Actually, it works just the opposite in the real world. Let me give you an example. When Sheila Scarborough sat down to draw our target market for Tourism Currents,…
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