Rural Small Business on Small Town Back Roads
From the monthly archives:
With thanks to reader Barbara McWilliams, another source of the ‘Improving Your Rural Business With The ADA’ training package discussed yesterday is Breaking New Ground, Cultivating Independence for Persons with Disabilities in Agriculture. The price is $25.00.
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Improving Your Rural Business with the ADA is a training package targeted toward rural businesses.
It is a program that can be used to assist rural business owners as well as other community members in understanding and implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Owners of rural businesses will learn how the ADA can have a positive impact on their businesses. Priority is given to providing information to help improve attitudes of business owners toward the ADA an people with disabilities.
This resource package includes a 13-minute video about making rural businesses more accessible, copy-ready overhead transparencies, handouts, and brochures. The package also includes a leader’s guide that will help in organizing and conducting an ADA training session in your community.
The more tourists and senior age visitors businesses in your rural community depend on, the more important it becomes to learn how to serve this important customer population.
This training package will help owners of rural businesses:
* Gain better understanding of the Americans with Disabilities Act
* Learn how the law can benefit their businesses
* Increase positive community awareness of people with disabilities
* Become aware of the attitudinal and physical barriers present in their businesses
* Learn practical solutions to remove such barriers
* Become acquainted with resource agencies available to answer questions relating to the ADA
Check with your local Ag Extension office or Small Business Development Center to see if they have already purchased a copy of this training package. If not, it is available through the National Agriculture Safety Database (NASD), a national repository of agricultural health, safety, and injury prevention materials and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
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Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending February 21, 2009:
President Obama signed the stimulus package this week, with much discussion on the funds allocated for rural America in installing rural broadband.
In Stimulus Stirs Debate Over Rural Broadband Access, you can get caught up on comments made this week by former FCC economist Michael Katz on National Public Radio (NPR), and the outrage that followed.
Katz feels that the $7.2 billion allocated to expand rural broadband could be put to better use, saying that rural parts of America are environmentally hostile, energy inefficient and even weak in innovation.
“The notion that we should be helping people who live in rural areas avoid the costs that they impose on society … is misguided,” Katz went on, “from an efficiency point of view and an equity one.”
In more hopeful news, two corporations announced their plans to provide broadband to rural America: IBM and Frontier Communications, America’s second largest rural telecommunications provider.
I.B.M. is working with rural electric cooperatives in Alabama to offer high-speed Internet service, delivered over power lines. Technology to send broadband over power lines has been around for several years, but it typically hasn’t been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone companies.
Frontier Communications chairman and CEO Maggie Wilderotter says there is a growing demand for advanced services in rural America, and that providing quality broadband internet service is the key to shoring up a rapidly evolving rural economy. Frontier already provides telephone, television, broadband and wireless services to some 2.4 million customers, and is for many the only option for those services.
Wilderotter explained that rather than farming, most rural Americans own or work for small businesses. And those small businesses “deserve better” than what many telecommunications companies have offered them, Wilderotter said. Rural customers don’t want broadband service just for watching videos, she explained, but instead need it “for commerce and education - and creating and finding jobs.”
Rural consumers are just as eager for to make full use of broadband once they get a taste of its capabilities, she said.
And to once again encourage us to look on the bright side of life, take a look at Five Silver Linings (That’s Right) of the Recession in this week’s US News and World Report.
The five ‘rays of sunshine’ they identify to show us the economy isn’t as gloomy as many people think:
1. Recessions are good for start ups
2. Borrowing Costs are lower
3. There’s a Bigger Market for Outsourced Duties
4. Some industries grow in a recession
and lastly -
5. At least you’re in America!
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What is the future of business cards?
I was looking at various items I need to reprint this Spring, and my business card is one of them.
I’m always amazed at print prices and how they continue to come down from years past, even just from last Fall. That’s definitely not a complaint. The color and stylistic options seem to expand all the time.
But in thinking about business cards, I was wondering if they are still used as much as they used to be, or in the same ways.
I find I usually use a business card for a short time, using it to check out someone’s website (assuming their website address is on their card), email a message to follow-up on meeting them, or to call and set up a meeting.
Some of my friends enter business card information immediately into their Blackberries or IPhones, or meticulously file the cards in their Rolodex.
I have one graphic designer friend who has a business card with only his website address on it. He prefers to use his website as his business card, with all contact information easily accessible online, but not on the card.
Another created an animated video for her website that displayed the information usually presented on a business card. That was great until she moved, and the video was no longer current and had to be re-shot and edited. It’s still not back online. The video was too complicated to be updated easily, like a printed business card could have been.
So I’m back with the same question I started with. I’m wondering how people are using and storing business cards they receive, or how they are sharing them.
They have always been so fundamental to networking and sharing information.
What do you think the future of business cards is FOR YOU in your rural business? How will you use them?
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A person who never made a mistake