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Community engagement planning: old way vs. Idea Friendly way

By Becky McCray

You’re familiar with the traditional way of handling community engagement. Once every few years, an outside consultant comes in and leads a community engagement planning meeting. There are lots of flip charts and post it notes.  Most of the people who attend hold official titles or formal leadership roles. Almost all are professional middle class […]

October 3, 2021 Filed Under: community, economic development, mistakes, planning, rural Tagged With: economic development, good management practices, idea friendly, rural

In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars

By Becky McCray

Book shelves with divided cardboard boxes filled with wine bottles

Be frugal. One of the Small Town Rules is to spend your brain power before spending dollars. Be creative about how you handle challenges rather than to throw money at the problem. Venture capital vs. Bootstrapped We’ve all heard about startups that have been funded by whatever venture capitalist or angel that has just dropped a […]

November 25, 2020 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, management, rural, survivors Tagged With: economic crisis, economic downturn, entrepreneurship, frugal, good management practices, recession, small business success

Did America Get Too Big? Next steps for small businesses right now

By Chris Brogan

Survival skills for small town businesses in the Coronavirus era By Chris Brogan As the world starts to ask what’s going to happen when this pandemic is finally over and we can look at what it will take to jumpstart the economy again, one venture capitalist says we have to save Main Street and not […]

April 17, 2020 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, global, management, planning, rural, survivors Tagged With: business survival, coronavirus, COVID19, entrepreneurship, good management practices, guest post, rural, small business, success, survival

Let’s Have a Meeting

By Glenn Muske

Think back to the last meeting in your small business? Does your memory make you cringe? Or was your response that you only have a couple of meetings and you talk every day, so maybe you never bother with a meeting. And how did the meeting go? Was most of the conversation off-track and non-business […]

January 10, 2018 Filed Under: Small Biz 100, success Tagged With: business meetings, effective meetings, good management practices, meetings

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