As you wrap up one year and prepare for the next, your business needs to do the same. You have some accounting tasks to reset and some backups to make. Must do Jan 1 These are the ones you can’t easily do later, so you don’t want to put them off. The good news:…
By Becky McCray When you ask small town people what challenges they want help with, the responses provide an interesting insight into rural areas today. SaveYour.Town and SmallBizSurvival.com conducted a survey among subscribers and visitors to their sites during 2017, receiving 250 individual responses. Participants included 215 from the USA, 25 from Canada, and…
Reader Dave Tucci sent in this terrific question that you may identify with: Here in our small town Unionville, Ontario, Canada, (pop 9000) we have a free concert night every Thursday night from 7:30 to 9pm. We have awesome cover bands like Elton Rohn, Hotel California, Absolute Journey and many more. We draw crowds…
“Every one of your Innovative Rural Business Models is illegal!” That was the code enforcement guy at a recent event I spoke at. I just nodded and agreed. Yes, sure they are in some towns or in some circumstances. But so what? Don’t let an outdated law or rule stop a great idea…
When I was a kid, we had a water well at our house. The pump would run long enough to fill up the tank, then shut off. So the water pressure in the house was either all or nothing, kind of like your income. Being self-employed is almost synonymous with wild swings in income. Compared…
A reader wrote to me about an influx of low-income people into his town, using subsidized housing and other community services. He said a town council member had talked about them as “a drain on resources” and “dead weight.” I got angry when I read that. But it took me awhile to figure out…
After we talked about the difficulties in finding good people for low-level jobs in rural areas, I wanted to follow up with a challenge Mike shared with us: “Getting people to live here or come here for the jobs we have open NOW!” Mike’s not the only one with workforce challenges. It was one of…
One of the top issues named in our recent Survey of Rural Challenges was how to retain young people. It ranked the number one concern in 2015, and number 2 in 2017. One participant commented, “We have already identified that to survive, we will need entrepreneurial millennials who want to be rural by choice. The…
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