[Melyn Johnson is the Main Street Manager in Guymon, Oklahoma. She always amazes me with her innovative projects in tourism and community development. She is also incredibly generous at sharing her knowledge. She wrote this piece for her “On the Bricks” column, in the Guymon Daily Herald. It’s been reprinted in other area papers, and she…
Last week, we talked about finding conference sponsors from your local network, working with local businesses. Today, let’s talk about being your own sponsor. Adele McAlear shared herexperience with local sponsorson last week’s post Why put your conference attendance into someone else’s hands? Take charge and send yourself to the event. If it is worth attending,…
Defining a distinct niche is key to building your small business. The narrower the niche, the wider the opportunity. Easy to say, but hard to do. Where do you find your niche? How do you define it? Niche Marketing is Not Wrong Jay Ehret speaking at the 140 Conference Our friend Jay Ehret at The…
Building entrepreneurial communities means doing everything you can to welcome, develop and support entrepreneurs. And it doesn’t have to be hard. That was my take away from the webinar that Dave Shideler and Oklahoma State University presented on Building Entrepreneurial Communities. Here are some of the key points that I typed up as he went. …
After I told you about my project folder, Jen asked for my day-to-day planning tool. So here it is: a simple weekly calendar. Before I start my work week, I review the projects in my project folder and assign the next actions to particular days on my weekly planner. I use the six most important…
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,…
If you’re online for any length of time, you’re bound to get flamed. And in any group of people who are thinking about getting their small business or tourism destination online, there are always several who are seriously worried about being attacked online. I think this is a natural extension of our small town concerns….
Setting retail prices is like some arcane art form. How the heck are you supposed to figure out what to markup items in your retail business when no one wants to give you real numbers? Here are two starting points for setting retail prices and markups. Keystoning Keystone pricing is simple and fairly common….
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