Another great small town small business idea: If you can draw, consider painting windows of small businesses in your town. A local artist used to do a healthy side business of decorating business windows with seasonal designs. Since we can’t draw at all, we miss her! Could you provide a similar service in your small…
This is an idea in the Tom Peters style. Innovate fast, and get customers involved early in the design process. Our friend Owen Mead-Robins at Oprius Software is doing this. Here is his great idea for getting customers involved early in the design process: We will soon be adding a section to our website where…
The best business ideas for small towns are already out there. Where do you find them? Here are four different ways to connect with great small business ideas. Keep in mind that you’ll find ideas you can freely use, ideas you will need to license for a fee, and ideas that are only available as…
Another small town small business idea: Buy damaged items from online auction sites, repair them, and then resell them. I got this idea from a student in one of my eBay classes. She would search eBay for broken china dolls. Her search keywords included “needs help” and “poor thing”. These broken dolls came at a…
Our friend Jack Schultz found the best ever “shop local” campaign. (From Oklahoma, of course!) An advertisement from the Perkins Community Foundation really caught my eye in the Perkins Journal. It showed a picture of the local fire department fighting a fire in the community with this caption, “If you have a fire, you need…
Researchers at universities worldwide have developed techniques for creating uses for otherwise wasted items, like chicken feathers and cotton plant stalks. Some of these techniques can be licensed from the universities, and some are freely in the public domain. Can you put these ideas into practice, making something out of “nothing”?Pulling together several different processes,…
[Special guest author Laura Girty lives in Cherokee, Oklahoma, and works for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce in community development. She has kindly contributed articles she wrote for the ODOC Developer newsletter, and yes this article does refer to me, OkieJ (Jeanne Cole) and OkieK (Karen Payne). ] Does your community buy into your community…
Want to support new businesses in your small town? Try a Business Symposium. Barber County (Kansas) Development, Inc., organized one with guest speakers to cover topics including: Barber County’s micro-loan program State and local tax exemptions Incentive programs Enterprise Zones Other local initiatives You can pull together speakers on a similar list of local help…
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