Author: Becky McCray

We have had a lot of productive discussions here lately.  Your ideas on lights for dark downtowns are here, including some hard numbers on costs from Cecil Carter.   Turning a dilapidated property into a shiny new spec house using local investors: it’s like a trifecta of small town improvements! Our friend Gary Van Meter shared…

When you do business from a small town, that town becomes part of your extended family. Whether your business is primarily online or offline, you have a vested interest in your town. You need a place to shop, a place to get your hair cut and a place to eat. You’d like for your town…

Remember we talked about stores being open later and how important that is? Well, Nora wrote back with an important stumbling block: it’s dark. Really dark. Nora owns a store, the anchor for their three-block downtown area. She closes at 5 pm because there are no streetlights. Without streetlights, it’s much too dark for customers to…

My friend Donna Maria asked me why I’m so personal online, why I’m always building personal connections, and how I manage to build connections when I speak and write. It’s because I do business in a small town.  Doing business in a small town, all the people you meet are interconnected. You’re not just my…

Thank you for contributing some great ideas of what to do with a building that has lost its roof. Together, we ended up with 19 ideas for roofless buildings. I imagine a lot of people in small towns all over will do some interesting things with their buildings over the next several years, expanding on…

“Small town thinking” is frequently used to mean an ignorant or limited viewpoint. You might hear it used as, “She moved to the city to get away from the small town thinking.”  It took on this meaning when living in a small town meant being disconnected from the wider world, cut off from news and…

A news story from Garland, Texas, got me thinking about what you can do with a roofless building.  You probably have one in your downtown. Maybe a building burned, or maybe the roof just fell in. These things happen. Now you have an empty space, maybe with walls, or maybe just an open lot. What…

Cities and towns, urban and rural, face a lot of the same challenges. We share the same basic issues in trying to build prosperity: support businesses, maintain infrastructure, provide basic services, improve the quality of life, build a sense of place, support the arts, promote health, and all the other to-do items you can think…

When you find yourself completely painfully overwhelmed with your commitments, you need to say no to some things that you already said yes to. But you probably feel like you can’t back out now. Time to apply the broken leg test.  If you broke your leg tomorrow, could you back out? Of course you could….

Back in the summer time, a small auto repair shop owner in Elliot Lake, Ontario, was posting his “gone fishing” sign and taking off in the middle of the afternoon. His city friend, who vacations there every year, happened to catch him at it and said, “You are so lucky to live here!”  The small…

Too much small business advice is Big City business advice by default. It’s written by and for the people living in one of the top 10 cities. It’s a world of millions of people, easy access to support and resources, high-rise office buildings, cubicles, cabs, and co-working spaces. I don’t do business in that world….

Entrepreneurs can support each other better than any expert or organization can support them. So if you want more entrepreneurs in your town (because they create more prosperity for you), it’s mostly a matter of your existing entrepreneurs and business owners supporting the new ones. “Research shows that once entrepreneurship gets established, it tends to…