Rural business owners commonly use part of their home in their business. This can include using an extra bedroom as a home office, an specific area of one room for product crafting such as sewing, an exterior building like a shed or garage for production or research, or a specific section of your lot or…
I recently received the Ice Bucket Challenge (which I accepted). If you haven’t heard about this challenge, the idea is to either have a bucket of ice water over your head or donate money to the ALS Association. This challenge has went viral. You probably have even heard about it or participated in it. Today over…
Dean Abbott @DeanAbbott told me (on Twitter, of course) that he was thinking about how to drive engagement and draw a bigger audience on Twitter. I gave a few suggestions that might be helpful for you, too. Follow smart people. They are more interesting to engage with and easier to learn from. Watch for the…
Most small-business owners are not excited about handling the financial recordkeeping for the business, which should come as no surprise. Instead, business owners often put it off until later and, quite often, the “later” means tax time. Not keeping good financial records can result in a multitude of problems. At best, you may not maximize…
Because I have a pretty specific mission, people have asked me how I decided on it and my niche. So here’s a little of that story. Finding my mission was about taking away, not adding to. I had lots of overlapping circles of topics, areas of interest, markets. Some of my circles were rural,…
“Big data” and “mining big data” are terms that are appearing in business magazines and journals at lot these days. Yet small-business owners often are not sure if and how big data fits into their business. Nor do they know where to get it and how to analyze it, even if they would have it….
Now that we have research showing that people are wanting to move to small towns, how do you let people know your doors are open? You can use these frameworks for thinking and online tools to help people find out that they will love your town. What matters in a town? “What makes a community a desirable…
Pricing your services is a tricky business. Without a physical product and costs to start from, the answer always seems to be “it depends.” Let’s try to get a better handle on how to charge for your services and still make a living. My friend Scott Townsend asked on behalf of his son: @SBSurvival Matthew…
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