Becky McCray
International speaker on rural and small town development topics
My advice is based on my real world experience as a lifelong entrepreneur and cattle rancher. I don’t just talk about rural issues; I live them.
Location: Hopeton, Oklahoma, USA
I come by my down-to-earth perspective honestly.
Throughout my career, rural has been the focus. I ran a small town liquor store. I’ve been a city administrator for a small town with a population under 1,000 and a nonprofit executive working the broad stretch of rural counties that no one else wanted. I’ve been an antiques dealer scouring rural auctions for bargains and a teacher of computer classes for rural small businesses and senior citizens. I helped small towns learn how to use social media for tourism. I don’t just talk about rural issues, I live them.
Yes, I’m really a cattle rancher.
I watch the rural trends
Because I care about rural people, I watch the global trends and disruptive changes in the economy, technology and society from a small-town perspective. The coronavirus changed the world. Remote work rocketed to wide acceptance. Economic inequality was questioned much more broadly. Local businesses were squeezed even tighter.
At the same time, there’s a renewed emphasis on quality of life and a sense of community. I’m hearing increased interest in downtowns, walkability, human-scale places and thriving local businesses. New models for local entrepreneurship, new ways of creating equitable local economies are needed.
Our next 30 years won’t look like our last 30 years. But knowing the trends is different from knowing what to do next. All those 10 year plans from 2019 look pretty out of date. Even knowing what we know now, none of us can predict exactly what will happen even 5 years out.
You don’t have to know all the answers. Our best move is to be open to new ideas. If we can make our town more Idea Friendly, we can better adapt to any future that comes our way.
What stands in our way
The biggest reason we don’t adapt as fast as we’d like is our own people, or at least some of them. You know the ones, the negative ones. The ones who–even in a crisis–say things like “We tried that once,” or “That’s not how we do things here.” Like you, I’ve had my ideas blocked and sabotaged. I’ve watched my work be dismantled, and I’ve had other people take the credit for my efforts. I’ve been fired from my job for small-town political reasons. I’ve had people write letters to the editor to run me down in public. I know what it feels like when you watch your best ideas being killed publicly.
And it’s not just my own experience. For more than 15 years, I’ve been writing online about rural small business, and people have shared their struggles with getting their ideas accepted. At events across the US and Canada, rural people have told me more about the difficulties in proposing new ideas.
When I surveyed over 1,400 rural people about their challenges, they spelled out more about coping with small thinking, competitiveness and lack of cooperation. They told me about town officials who micro-manage, people who do their best to run off any new volunteers, people who oppose every change no matter what it is.
Our old solutions aren’t helping
Rural people like you have tried using frameworks from government agencies and other organizations, but they don’t solve the real problems. Those formulas are focused on building more committees or they’re just too rigid and old fashioned to address the changing realities.
You’ve probably been through too many strategic planning sessions with sticky notes and voting on issues, where you felt like every minute of it was a waste of time. You’ve probably put hours of work into a great plan, just to see it put on the shelf to collect dust.
The Idea Friendly solution
We can change this. I knew there had to be a way. So I’ve been learning, researching change science, behavioral motivation, open networks and crowd innovations. And I brought in what I’ve learned of rural realities and trends from everyday rural people like you over the past 15 years.
There’s a system, a method to bring the new way of thinking to your town, to make it open and Idea Friendly. You do it with three elements: Gather Your Crowd, Build Connections and Take Small Steps.
You know you have to start with tiny, easy-to-do steps. That’s how we get things moving. You know that connecting people with each other is the essence of both community and innovation. And you know the few people you can most rely on to get started. You’ll draw more people to you as you go.
The same things that make rural places challenging can be turned into positives. Our very disadvantages can be our advantages for success. You know how. There’s a lot of rural wisdom inside you; it’s just been covered up with the busy-ness of everyday life. It may feel like a refresher course in common sense. These are the bedrock principles that small-town business owners have survived by for years, but it’s not a return to the past.
It will never go back to the way it was
We have to start from here and go forward. You’re the person who is best positioned to spark the excitement in your town. You’ll build the small steps and tiny experiments that will add up to change the shape of your town. I’ll show you how with practical tools like the Small Town Creed.
Your town matters. It’s worth the effort. No place is quite the same mix of people and place, culture and heritage. You’re unique. Despite all the naysayers, your small town has a future, and you’re about to change it.
Meet Becky McCray here:
