Lisbon small steps
•Descargar como PPTX, PDF•
0 recomendaciones•3 vistas
Presentation at Beato Coworking Space filmed live on FB - small steps any business or community can take By Deb Brown cofounder of SaveYour.Town
Recomendados
Recomendados
Más contenido relacionado
Último
Último (20)
Destacado
Destacado (20)
Lisbon small steps
- 1. We believe small towns can be saved by their own people using their own resources. Anamosa, Iowa
- 3. Monsanto, Portugal pop. 1000 Built around a rock What’s your attraction?
- 4. Road Trip Worthy - provide a local immersion experience Crow Agency, Montana
- 5. More info at https://myportugalholiday.com/evora/Almendres-Cromlech-Evora-portugal.html .Off the beaten path: Almendres Cromlech has standing rocks
- 6. Take a tour: Mira de Aire, Portugal
- 7. Work with your artists Maureen Seamonds, a local potter, provides an AirBnB experience for her guests.
- 8. “It’s not only about investing in infrastructure. Bricks don’t generate anything. But if you make interesting things happen in the village, people will come. The problem is that some of these villages are already convinced that they are going to die, they have admitted defeat.” https://www.equaltimes.org/artists-wanted-to- bring-villages
- 9. Be a part of the Photo by https://www.pinterest.com/jonnyspl ace/_saved/ Orange City, Iowa
- 10. Pop Ups
- 11. Hold a class on slow days
- 12. Third Thursday Photo by Becky McCray Hutchinson, Kansas Hutchinson, Kansas, pop 40,000 almost every business was open and participating in the Third Thursday art walk
- 13. Work together – partnered with a Photo from FB of Mesa Collection Maple Hill, Kansas
- 14. Work Smart – and promoted each other. Had the same hours too. Photo from FB Flint Hills Smokehouse Maple Hill, KS
- 15. Weekends Only Juniper and Olive in Jewell, Iowa are only open weekends
- 16. Missouri Star Quilt Co. started with a YouTube Channel – Omni Local! Photo by https://ithinkbigger.com/missouri- star-quilt-co-named-mo-small- business-year/
- 17. Be Tech Savvy - teach customers how to order withAlexa, loop a presentation about your town, add a charging station, offer vendor tools
- 18. Your Website mobile friendly your location easy to navigate Photo by https://www.utahwebsitedesign.com/how- to-tell-the-difference-between-good-and-bad- website-design/
- 19. 97% of consumers searched online for a local business
- 20. Are you listed with Google?
- 21. Be Real and Shoot Video it’s all about engagement
- 22. Google Alerts
- 24. Buying Local will Beat Buying Online
- 25. Innovative Rural Business Models Tionesta, PA – Empty Lot Before
- 26. Courtesy of Forest County EDC Tionesta, PA – Empty Lot Now a Market Village
- 27. Single Best Strategy for filling large buildings Coppes Common in Nappanee, IN – divided the empty building up
- 28. Photo by Cathy Lloyd Possibilities Washington, Iowa empty building before
- 29. Try it out Same building, after Photos by Cathy Lloyd, Washingt Iowa
- 30. Inside and Out Joliet, MT
- 31. Curb Appeal 70% of first time sales happen because of curb appeal.
- 32. Front and Back Photo by Becky McCray Webster City, Iowa
- 34. Rushford, MN
- 35. Change your windows more often Grand Rapids, MI Rented front window to an artist
- 37. Photos SE Minnesota Rents out an empty wall
- 38. Try these ideas
- 40. Work together Van Buren County, Iowa
- 41. Attend your local retail meetings every month (or start them!) Webster City, Iowa
- 42. Find out what people want and give it to them. Reed Revolution started a subscription plan for people with reed instruments Fostoria, Ohio
- 43. More fun Open to all who play, or want to learn to play, the ukulele. All skill levels are welcome. Bring your own ukulele or borrow one from the store. Song sheets and chord diagrams will be provided.
- 44. Live fashion shows Rural Webster City, Iowa
- 46. Make the community a part of your business Control isn’t our goal. Efficiency isn’t our goal. Community is our goal.
- 47. We don’t have to move anywhere; we have to transform where we are. Photo by Chicago Reader
- 48. SaveYour.Town/subscrib e •Every week, we write and send a personal email to you and rural friends like you •We focus on the issues that matter to you: real, rural, small town •We share practical steps you can put into action right away
- 49. There may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here and there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody. Richard Moe
Notas del editor
- Main street retail: strategies for innovation and sustainability Opening Today we will look at innovative approaches for small and rural community retailers. You’ll hear stories of successful businesses and main streets. You’ll also receive lots of ideas to take home with you. Let’s get started.
- Lights The first trend is making shopping an experience for your customer. You can buy anything just about anywhere today. Just because you have a store in a small town doesn’t mean the townspeople are obligated to shop with you. What will make it possible for more people to come shop with you? Give them an experience. Light up your stores – and create a place where people feel comfortable and safe at the same time. You can use solar lights too. This is Iowa City. In the winter, they could put Christmas trees in this outdoor seating area! What a great idea for a photo op.
- Rocks Monsanto has 1000 people and is built around a rock. My Iowa people love rocks! Many are sitting in fields and towns and are left over from the glacier times.
- Road Trip Road trips used to be a time when we checked off sights on a list. Now we can provide a local immersion experience. Find out who has immersive and interesting hands-on activities. Promote them. This is in Crow Agency, Montana population 2000 on the Crow reservation. You can sleep in a tipi there.
- Off the beaten path On the way back from Evora we found these stones. Almendres Cromlech is 20 minutes from Evora
- Mira de Aire, Portugal (Mira dye ra) Otelia’s daughter works in the store in Lisbon. Her husband was from there. One day all the factories closed. Tell story of talking and visiting .
- Artists Try introducing artists to visitors to your local artists in unique ways. Maureen Seamonds in Webster City provides an AirBnB experience at her retail pottery store and studio. What kind of experience can your business provide?
- Who are your artists? You’ve got artist residencies in your country. I’d like to take a look at some smaller steps you can take. Who are your local artists? I promise you have some. They may not consider themselves artists though. Who are the storytellers? Set up a series of evenings where these story tellers visit and tell history and old stories! Do you have students who like art? Ask them to make art and display it in the empty buildings.
- Culture Orange City, population 6000, has 3 days of Tulip Time including twice daily parades, horse drawn trolley rides, craft shows, wooden shoe making demonstrations, live performances and more. Think about the number of people who are in your town for these kind of events. Be a part of the action. Bring people into your store by choosing to be a location for an event, for example. Become a destination with experiences.
- Pop ups Make use of the empty spaces in your towns. Add seating. Invite the locals to create a spot. Then take lots of pictures and share them!
- Class Share your expertise. Kevin is a designer at his business Interior Spaces, and he partners with a nonprofit Legacy Learning Boone River Valley that provides workshops. Kevin teaches how to make a beautiful wreath for the holidays. What could you teach at your business?
- Third Thursday When we visited Hutchinson, Kansas, pop 40,000 almost every business was open and participating in the Third Thursday art walk. Why? Because every business was hosting an artist. Service businesses, too. Even the feed store had musicians on the sidewalk out front! Why it works: it’s cross promotion where you bring in customers who might not have ever come in. And all the artist’s friends and fans will be stopping by. If you’re a business owner, you don’t have to wait for someone to bring you an artist. Start your own cooperation with a single small step. Ask your customers! Do they have art to show? Would they like to be in your store during the evening stroll? When I managed a luggage store in Highland Park, Illinois we partnered with a local art school. Each month we’d have visual art mixed in amongst the luggage. This encouraged new people to stop by the store to see the art. Locals also came more often. Our sales went up also.
- Work Together In little Maple Hill KS, 600 people, Sam Capoun started her boutique from her home during the pandemic and it was only online. She was doing fine. Then she realized that many locals were reaching out to her for product and coming to her home. She decided to open a storefront but wanted it in a place where it would do the most good. She found a building across the new Smokehouse in town. He had a lot of supporters from out of town, and she thought she might get new customers too.
- Work Smart Even more importantly she reached out to the owner of the smokehouse and they coordinated hours, so they would both be open in the evening. They used social media together, creating videos featuring them both, and sharing lots of pics, hours and food and products! They shared each others' posts. She also opened a space in the back of her store for a local stylist. The art studio next door coordinates events with them too. Sam said, “sometimes it's about working smarter and not harder.”
- Weekends Only Juniper and Olive in Jewell Iowa are only open Saturday and Sunday. They’re starting to add special events on Fridays. Both owners Josh and Cindy work full time jobs elsewhere and this was a choice they made. I find it interesting that they are open Sunday – and busy! So many rural communities don’t have places open on Sunday.
- Omni Local Instead of waiting for customers to walk in the front door, smart rural businesses are using the same omni-channel tactics as big businesses. We have access to cloud-based tools to reach local customers in multiple new ways and reach far beyond our local market. We can easily take orders online, offer mobile-friendly websites to connect with customers on the go, and sell subscription boxes to delight customers monthly. Let’s not forget private shopping hours and curbside pick up! Jenny Doan of Hamilton, Missouri (pop. 1,809) and her family started Missouri Star Quilt Company in 2008. They started a YouTube channel teaching quilting techniques and ideas. The company now ships hundreds of packages every single day to customers all over the globe. The brick and mortar shop has become a quilting destination attracting quilters from all over America to the small town of Hamilton, Missouri. They even had a bus tour of women who flew over from Australia! The company now employs more than 25 people, which is the largest private employer in their county
- Tech Savvy Try these steps Ipad to look up product info, teach them alexa or dot and how to re-order, a smart tv to loop a presentation about your town, a charging station while they shop, and ask your vendors for any tech tools or sites you can showcase.
- Website Is it mobile friendly Is your address and phone number on it Is it clear and easy to navigate You don’t need to start an estore – at first. Facebook is nice, but you don’t own that content. The best thing you can do is post there and direct people to your website to the content you own.
- Be online You want to be found. Because you did your homework, and found out who your market is – do a bit more research and see where they are at online as well.
- Google This is a local business – notice they have pictures as well. And a website. Get your business listed. Update frequently!
- Shoot video It’s so easy! Just use your phone, don’t concentrate on making it perfect because you won’t ever finish it. People want real! Keep it under 2 minutes. Tell stories. Make it fun and informative.
- Alerts See who’s talking about you. See what your competition is doing. See what’s happening in your area. Google alerts will find all of those things for you.
- Support Are you giving customers a way to support you in small meaningful ways? Kevin Rubash, the owner of Interior Spaces had several old inventory framed pictures that he wanted to do something with (like sell). Instead of just hosting a sale, he created a Facebook Art Auction. He posted a picture of each piece. Then he put a two day time frame on the auction. And he encouraged his local town followers to bid on them in $5 increments. It was an auction for local people only. He would not ship the pictures. In fact, they boosted the post locally! The final winner to this event, all of the proceeds were donated to the local food bank!
- 24
- Empty lot Let’s talk about making room for new businesses in your downtown. This is all about using the spaces available and lowering the barriers for entry for possible new businesses. And you want new businesses in town. They bring new customers. Pop-up a village of shops. This is a Block long empty lot when a business burned down – sat empty for 10 years in Tionesta PA pop 500 They were waiting on a traditional business to come fill the whole block up. They waited 10 years. Then they had an idea. What if we used garden sheds and filled this spot up?
- Sheds So that is what they did. They bought sheds, added false fronts to match the community and rented them out. It brought new entrepreneurs but it also brought businesses who wanted a 2nd store location. The winery owner from out of town uses one shed. The sheds are open Thursday to Sunday, May through Octoberish. Jewell Iowa has set up 3 sheds on an empty lot. These sheds give possible new businesses a small entry into the business environment, an opportunity to try out their ideas without the investment of buying or renting a building.
- Strategy You’ve got entrepreneurs in your town (just look at etsy or any crowdfunding site for them.) How can you get them into physical buildings. The single best strategy is to divide the empty buildings up. Coppes Commons, Nappanee, Indiana: An old factory with 100,000 square feet of space had sat empty for years. Made hoover cabinets. There was little chance another big manufacturer would swoop in and fill it all up. So, a local family bought the factory, they’ve opened it up, a little at a time, for smaller uses. There’s retail space, an ice cream shop, all kinds of cool and fun things. They now have 9 businesses, large and small event spaces and a business center. And they still have a lot more room to grow in the future. Rather than waiting until someone was ready to fill the whole thing, they split it up, and now they have a thriving retail space.
- Possibility Make a space that multiple businesses can divide and share. It can be a space carefully designed for compatible small retail shops, like Cathy Lloyd shared from Washington, Iowa. It was too big for one retail store and it set empty for quite awhile. Then a group of women brainstormed and created The Village.
- Make a space that multiple businesses can divide and share. It is a space carefully designed for compatible small retail shops. The table, the wall, the tree, the boutique – they are all stores. It is a perfect way for a person going into business for themselves to try out their idea and test the market. Low investment and not thousands of dollars to buy a building, fix it up, purchase inventory and hope someone comes in and buys.
- Trend It’s not just the inside of your store that you want to look amazing! This is Joliet MT, population 513, and they added benches to their downtown streets. Many of the businesses have made the facades look better as well.
- Curb appeal Curb appeal is what draws attention and brings people in your doors. 70% of first time sales happen because of curb appeal. Try extending your inside to the outside. Plant some flowers in pots and put outside. Or bring some of your items for sale outside. Did you know that women make 80% of all retail purchases? What if you put a bench outside for the husbands and partners to sit on while the women shop?
- Front and back We forget about our back entrances! Even if you don’t have customers that come in through the back, you can bet they notice it when they drive by.
- Signage Signage – are we using what works? Is the sign on the front of the store high up on the building? Did you know that people driving cars can’t see it? Is your name on the window? When the sun is shining, you can’t read it. If it only has your name, does it tell people what you sell?
- Fun sign This sign gives us a good indicator of what they do, and also shares a vibrant culture about the business.
- Windows This is a store in Grand Rapids Michigan, and they actually have rented their window area out to a working artist. People watch her from outside and inside. Changing your windows often showcases your store and its personality. It shows you care about your customer. It allows you to be expressive aswell.
- Don’t do this One more thing. Don’t put a sign in the window that says ‘no public bathroom’. How welcoming is that? Does that make you want to shop? Let people use your bathroom. Make your bathroom a fun place to use. Make sure that fun extends into the rest of the store too! When someone is using the bathroom, you have a captive audience. What can you promote at eye level in your bathroom?
- Photos This was an empty space inside the coffee shop in a store in Minnesota – they used the wall to feature photos from a local photographer until they could rent it out. Why not help another entrepreneur get started with a blank wall? You could do this in any business with a blank wall – it doesn’t have to be retail – it could be service too!
- Try these ideas Now let’s take a look at ideas that we know work.
- Partnerships Work with other stores in your community. Partnerships with ‘different’ kinds of business are an avenue we often forget about. Some of the partnerships we’ve seen in my town are are: Osweilers, a woman’s clothing store, has given $25 gift certificates to their customers when they spend over $100 in their store. Find ways to work with other businesses in your community to promote each other. You probably don’t all have the same customers!
- Work Together The Vilages of Van Buren County Host a Fall Festival weekend. Not just shopping - horseback riding, leather goods making, lunch with the firemen, pottery demonstrations, letter press business and more.
- Retailers Get to know each other and what your stores carry. You can start with a backstage tour – these three business owners visited each others stores one night after hours. Wine was involved. They learned things about each others stores they didn’t know. They now feel more comfortable giving referrals. They talk about each others stores and work together on local promotions.
- Ask questions The Reed Revolution is an idea the owner at the 2nd Wind Music Store in Fostoria Ohio pop 13000 came up with. It’s a subscription plan for people with reed instruments. They serve their local customers, but also their online customers. He found a need and filled it.
- Try it all They also have a monthly ukulele club - They post a Facebook event with the above information. On their website, secondwindfosteria.com, you can print on demand sheet music, offer a rental program for instruments to anyone in the country who wants it, and offers free access to videos, posts, product reviews, and more specifically for the small band.
- Live fashion shows At Dreamchasers Boutique, Whitney Coleman sells clothing and related accessories. During the pandemic, she started doing Live Facebook video fashion shows. She would show herself in an outfit, then step off camera and put on another outfit. Then step back on so everyone could see it. It was a one-woman fashion show! It’s not limited to only clothing – you could do this in about any store. Try showcasing products people may not know you sell. You could do this as a group of retailers couldn’t you? How fun would that be?
- Subscription boxes subscription boxes are a perfect fit for small town retail stores because they build on your strengths of knowing your customers and being more innovative. They’re also convenient for customers. With a subscription box, your customers sign up for regular deliveries at a set price. The best ones are like a surprise package, with a chance to sample and enjoy all kinds of interesting items along a theme. Just a few of the subscriptions boxes I know of are healthy snack foods, books, kid’s science projects, beauty products, clothing, jewelry, cookies, pet treats, nail polish, arts and crafts, wine, vitamins, and tea. Once you start watching for these, you’ll see them everywhere. What if you partnered with a couple of other businesses and tried this?
- Belong Timberville VA sets up a outdoor shopping district every December. They want to bring businesses together to showcase and sell their work. They are building community. You can too. Tell your stories. Customers want to know you are just like them. Do you support the Little League team? Great! Let them know! Have events in your business that feature them. Make the community a part of your business. You don’t have to finance every opportunity that comes by, there are other ways to show you care. Posting flyers in your window is a small step. Have a fashion show for the prom kids - and partner with the business who rents tuxes and/or sells prom dresses. Be sure to invite the moms to this too!
- Theater Gates Theater Gates converted an old currency exchange into a new café. He also said, ‘we don’t have to move anywhere; we have to transform where we are.” Which small towns will survive? Research says it’s the ones that are open to new ideas. Iowa State University studied 99 towns, following them over a period of 20 years. They found that rural communities that have managed to thrive exhibit one shared value: an openness to new ideas. Communities that are “tolerant of different opinions and allow newcomers to be involved in decision-making and power structures tend to have better economic and demographic outcomes.”
- Our gift to you Thank you for your time today. Please sign up to receive our free newsletter!