The one thing your town needs

When I visited Colfax, Washington, one of the questions asked at the end was, “What do you think we need as a town?” 

See, Deb and I don’t do the thing that you expect most from a “visiting expert”: we don’t tell you what to do. We do help you learn a way to do things that is more open and more Idea Friendly. Then we let you do the things you most want to do, only easier.  

After I explained all that, I did offer a suggestion to Colfax, and I think it applies to your town, too. Here it is: 

Create more small spaces for businesses. 

Take a big retail building and divide it for tiny retail spaces, a few hundred square feet each.

Convert a huge office space into tiny offices for co-working.

Take a cavernous factory building and chop it up into tiny workshops the size of a little garage.

Any building or space you’ve been wondering how to fill, divide it up. You don’t even have to do the whole building at once. Just start with a handful of small spaces and use that to jumpstart the project.  

Right now, there are people in your town who have the seeds of a business. Maybe they just have the idea and want to try, or maybe they’ve done some sales to friends or at an event. The next thing they need is a small space to grow into, but all that’s available right now are big places. The best thing you can do for them is make one of those small spaces available. 

When you create small spaces, you enable more small entrepreneurs to grow.

When you create more small entrepreneurs, you are filling the pipeline of future successful businesses.

When you create more successful businesses, your whole town prospers.   

Keep shaping the future of your town, 
Becky

PS – We share more ideas for growing your own entrepreneurs in our next video, called “Grow Your Own Entrepreneurs.”