I attended the EntreEd Consortium Forum in Oklahoma City with the National Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education. The session on engaging businesses with school entrepreneurship programs generated a lot of interesting thoughts for me as a business owner sitting in on a discussion among educators. Businesses are desperately interested in skills in the workforce. It’s a natural…
Last week, I attended the EntreEd Consortium Forum in Oklahoma City with the National Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education. I was there because I believe small towns don’t need kids who will graduate high school or return from college, then look around for a job. We need kids who will graduate, then look for an…
You don’t have to settle for a normal business. Rural businesses are exploring new shapes, new locations and new ways of doing business. Here are six innovative ways people are building businesses in small towns today. 1. Pop-ups These are temporary business that may last from just one day to several months. You’ve seen short-term…
Guest post by Laura Girty “Get back to the basics.” How many times have you heard that? Sometimes the basics are the best place to start. In the late 1990’s under the helm of Executive Director Leo Presley, the Oklahoma Department of Commerce (ODOC) developed a model for community development that worked especially well for…
Every small town faces the contradiction of young people saying “there are no jobs here” while business say “we can’t find good people.” My friend Kat Long from Ponca City, Oklahoma, sent this story of what they are doing to connect young people with the jobs that already exist in town and introducing girls to…
Coworking is like shared office space, except it’s more than that. Coworking works best when it’s a community, too. If you’re trying to build more entrepreneurship in your town, coworking is a smart place to focus. A new study from Emergent Research and partners showed that coworking spaces are human spaces. “The key finding…
If your town can’t get its act together enough to accept help or seek opportunities, should outside groups spend any of their limited time and resources on you? Or should they focus instead on the places with the best prospects of success? When I first had this conversation with Joe Borgstrom a few years ago,…
Guest Post by Anne Pyburn Craig It happened to cities and towns throughout industrialized America in the late and middle years of the 20th century. Big employers who’d propped up local economies for decades downsized or left, creating a brutal ripple effect on smaller businesses. Three towns in the Hudson Valley of New York…
Glad you dropped in to the rural and small town business blog, established in 2006.
We want you to feel at home, so please take our guided tour.
Meet our authors on the About page.
Have something to say? You can give us a holler on the contact form.
Want to search our past articles? Catch up with the latest stories? Browse through the categories? All the good stuff is on the Front Page.
We partner with campaigns and organizations that we think best benefit rural small businesses.
Copyright © 2006–2026 Becky McCray • Site by Webdancers