Every retail store in a small town has slow days, times when you know you just won’t have many customers. One of your fellow readers wrote in with this tip for slow days in retail stores: I run a clothes shop in a small town in Oviedo in the north of Spain. I never…
Beauty salons. Even really small towns probably have one. But when was the last time an economic developer considered them as important business development tools? I was speaking to the Northwest Oklahoma Workforce Board about the 8 Innovative Rural Business Models. When I got to the Business Inside a Business model, my own local…
I went around to local businesses while organizing for Small Business Saturday. In every store, I found something I didn’t realize that they carried. Every single store. I’m not making that up! I knew my favorite women’s shop had kid’s clothes, too, but I didn’t know about the new line of watches or the…
We’re all using the same marketing theme this year: Shift Your Shopping. When we work together to spread the word, we’ll multiply how many customers we reach. Let’s get started using the Shift Your Shopping logo on your social media accounts, especially Facebook. First we’ll need a Shift Your Shopping logo. Here’s my favorite version,…
A downtown retail store owner told me she closes at 5 pm because she hates to stay later. She gets to work at 8 am most days, and so at 5 pm she’s ready to go home. She doesn’t like to delegate at all, she told me, and she wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything…
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…
We’re all going to use the same marketing theme this year. You, me, and every business in your town. We’re all going to use Shift Your Shopping. Here are 5 reasons why. There’s a tendency among small businesses in small towns to use the same marketing theme from year to year, the same ads with…
One-third of American consumers have used virtual-assistant services on their smartphones recently. That will climb to two-thirds of all consumers in developed markets using them daily, by the end of 2016, Gartner estimates. As search engines and intelligent digital assistants have gotten smarter in the types of questions they can answer, people are getting more comfortable…
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