What can you expect to read here? Articles by and for small business people in rural areas and small towns. You face some special challenges in a small town small business, including:

• Pressure from competitors in bigger cities,
• Pressure from competitors online, world wide,
• Scarce, or variable quality, resources to assist you locally,
• Tight labor supply, and a graying workforce,
• Lack of skills in your workforce,
• Isolation from your industry peers.

But for each challenge, there is also opportunity.

• The online market opens the world to you.
• Involvement in your community is your way to fight against decline.
• Land is usually cheap, compared to growing areas.
• Regulatory burdens tend to be lower than in well-developed regions.
• A little payroll usually goes a long way.
• Work ethic is usually high.

I believe... 

• Entrepreneurship is the best way to support small towns. When the local people start their own businesses and prosper, they help their town to prosper, too. 
• Small town business people have a lot to teach the rest of the business world. Small town rules of customer service, tenacity, caring and community are long overdue for a come back. 

Regular Features
Based on those challenges and opportunities, we talk about small business basics, tourism, marketing, and economic development. Our most famous feature is the weekly Brag Basket. It's your chance to share your successes and celebrate with others. Down at the bottom of the page you'll find links to our recent stuff, and there is a full index in the right hand sidebar.

Some additional articles on small business, economic development and rural communities, collected from all over, can be found in my Shared Items from Google Reader. You can read it as a complete web page, and you can subscribe to the feed. It's also in the sidebar to the right.

Do you like what you see?
Come back and visit often! And feel free to comment. We enjoy a good conversation. We welcome your story ideas, feedback, tips, and ideas for us to share with everyone. Don't miss out! Make sure you get our updates, in which ever form you like best:  Subscribe.


Our works here are published and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. If you'd like to reprint any of our materials, you may do so for noncommercial purposes, with no changes, and properly attributed with the author's name and a link back to the original source. We'd also appreciate an email or a comment letting us know that you found our work useful!

That's all!
So that's the tour. Hope you found something useful for yourself and your business. Keep in touch.