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How one food business keeps adapting, from table to cart to truck, to restaurant and back again

By Rob Hatch Leave a Comment

Holyoke Hummus Company cart

Guest post by Rob Hatch My dear friend John Grossman and his wife Dawn own the Holyoke Hummus Company in Holyoke, Massachusetts. I’ve marveled at how they grew from setting up a small folding table at a local park selling falafel sandwiches to acquiring a cart. Next, they outgrew the cart and bought a food […]

April 28, 2022 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, management, rural, survivors, trends Tagged With: business success, food business, guest post, small business success

Metaverse business idea: virtual world tour guide

By Becky McCray

Screenshot from the Metaverse Festival captioned "A POAP token is being sent to your wallet"

  Are you a proficient online gamer or metaworld master based in a rural community? You could make a small business out of being a virtual world tour guide. Years ago, a now-defunct business ideas site profiled Synthtravels, a business that offered guided tours of online virtual worlds. If you’ve heard of the metaverse or […]

April 15, 2022 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, ideas, rural, trends Tagged With: business ideas, metaverse, rural, virtual worlds, VR

An embarrassing story about community engagement and dialogue

By Paula Jensen

Chairs and tables set up for a town board or city council type meeting

By Paula Jensen Quite simply, community dialogue is an exchange of ideas and experiences through listening, sharing, and questioning. At its best, community dialogue is created in a safe environment where a diverse group of people gather to talk and understand each other. Community dialogue at its worst looks something like the embarrassing story I […]

April 1, 2022 Filed Under: community, economic development, rural Tagged With: community engagement, guest post, leaders, officials, Paula Jensen

Make extra money from extra workspace: co-working and 3rd workplaces in small towns

By Becky McCray

  With more people working remotely, more people are working from places that are neither their offices or their homes. Cue the rise of the Third Workplace. You may remember “third places” as places you hangout that aren’t home and aren’t work. Coffee shops, bars and places like that. “Third workplaces” are places you work […]

March 28, 2022 Filed Under: economic development, entrepreneurship, ideas, rural, trends Tagged With: coworking, remote work, third places, workshifting, zoom towns

Trade show booth design trend: hand drawn visuals

By Becky McCray

At the recent National Rural Electric Cooperative Association PowerXchange Expo, I noticed one booth that really stood out. In fact, it was so good, people stopped to take pictures of the booth displays. (When was the last time someone took a picture of your booth display?) What made this booth stand out? Hand drawn visuals. […]

March 21, 2022 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, marketing, rural Tagged With: booth marketing, expos, small business marketing, trade shows

New business sign design? Don’t use cursive script

By Becky McCray

A grocery store building entrance with a sign that says "Alva's Market"

Fewer and fewer kids learn to read and write in cursive, so it’s time to stop ordering business signs with cursive or script lettering. You might have seen the memes and jokes. Someday all us old people will use cursive as secret code. But you might not have thought about how this applies to your […]

February 14, 2022 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, marketing, rural, trends Tagged With: outdoor advertising, signage, small business

Way more people prefer rural than urban, new Pew Research study finds

By Becky McCray

Pew Research chart showing preference for cities has declined, a growing share now favors suburbs, and many more prefer rural than urban

Pew Research released a major rural vs urban study, and the headlines missed the best bits. Pew Research’s new social trends study has shown up in a lot of news stories with widely varying headlines. Pew themselves titled it “Americans Are Less Likely Than Before COVID-19 To Want To Live in Cities, More Likely To […]

February 1, 2022 Filed Under: community, rural, trends Tagged With: challenges, community, future, Pew Research, rural, studies, trends

What to do with a building that’s falling down: The roofless Royal Theater in Archer City, Texas

By Small Biz Survival

Archer City, Texas, Royal Theater, side view facade and roofless building behind

A building that is falling down or where the roof has fallen in can still be useful. One example is the Royal Theater, in Archer City, Texas. The Royal Theater was featured in the movie “The Last Picture Show,” and production crews did the work to shore up the facade. The space behind has a […]

January 23, 2022 Filed Under: community, rural, tourism Tagged With: downtown, event space, historic preservation, roofless buildings, Sheila Scarborough, tourism

Top 5 Rural and small town trends 2022

By Becky McCray

Who knows what trends will affect small and rural communities in 2022 and beyond? Not many trends pieces cover rural places. These trends are specifically about rural and small towns. I’ve been following rural trends and writing about them since 2009. My trends reports have been commissioned or quoted by Main Street America, Emergent Research, the […]

January 3, 2022 Filed Under: community, economic development, entrepreneurship, POV, rural, trends Tagged With: Becky McCray, Climate, community development, future, nature, neighboring, news, remote work, rural, rural migration, rural sourcing, rural trends, small towns, trends, zoom towns

How to start a real small small business

By Becky McCray

Small Steps with kettle corn

  Your fellow reader Ava asked a great question: If I am already working, in school, and wanting to start up just a real small small business, then how would that work differently from someone who is coming from a completely different stand point, like not working or in school and is just generally starting […]

December 17, 2021 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, planning, rural, youth Tagged With: building a business, business ideas, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, part time businesses, rural, side gigs, side hustle, side hustles, small business

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