Suzy and Tracie make bread in a little strip mall in Mishawaka, Indiana. They have a franchise with Great Harvest Bread Company. They give you free slices to sample. (Apple Scrapple is very good.) They are like lots of bread stores in lots of towns.Their store/bakery is only a couple miles from our daughter’s college,…
Last year at the Oklahoma Entrepreneurship Conference, we had two people tweeting: me and @stargardener. When we announced the hashtag we were using for the event, we got the oddest reactions. We had a tweetup, with just the two of us, and it was great. And the brand-new-at-the-time @OKCCoCo was there. This year, there were…
Our crack research staff (my husband) caught a discussion thread about tourism websites. This one happened to be on a hunting safari forum, but there are lessons for anyone’s tourism website.(If you don’t like hunting, or hunting pictures, don’t click through: here is the original hunting discussion thread.) A hunting and tourism operator asked the…
Every small business has to market itself, but not many small businesses have a marketing plan of any kind. Even fewer have one they actually use. That’s why I developed the Simplified Marketing Plan, back in 2006. It’s high time to update it. The plan is simple, so you’ll actually do it. There are just…
Every week, I open a new Basket. I call it the Brag Basket, but it’s not really about bragging. It’s about sharing. I started this so you can introduce yourself, share some good news, or congratulate a friend. This particular basket is open from Feb. 19-21, 2010. This will be our first Brag Basket that…
Small Biz Social Media Summit 2010 is a live, rub elbows, shake hands and sit down across a table from other small business owners event in Hutchinson, Kansas, on June 5 and 6, 2010. Our friend Deb Brown, with help from our friend Grant Griffiths, put together some of the most respected social media, internet…
Last week, Enid, Oklahoma, hosted a tourism forum, with over 90 people in attendance. Here are some of the best points captured in my notes. Best silver bullet in travel: People want to eat like the locals. Recommendations from the locals of the hidden gems and “must eat there” places. Hardy Watkins, Oklahoma’s State Tourism…
The upcoming US Census matters to rural small businesses because it will affect your community for the next ten years. Census data is key to: Federal grants, especially CDBG and Rural Development Economic development efforts Redrawing political boundaries from Congressional districts, all the way down to local political boundaries Every single person counted brings $790…
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