Small Town Rules—How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Prosper in a Connected Economy

Technology and economics are transforming business in a completely unexpected way: suddenly, even the largest companies must compete as if they were small, local businesses. Suddenly, your customers can talk to everyone else across the nation, and people listen to them, not your carefully crafted advertising or branding. It's just like doing business in a small town, where "reputation is forever." Suddenly, communities and personal connections are critical to your success - just as they've always been in small towns. The best small-town and rural entrepreneurs have been successfully overcoming these challenges for centuries. Their lessons and techniques are suddenly intensely valuable to even the largest companies, most dominant brands, and most cosmopolitan businesses. Small Town Rules adapts these lessons and techniques for today's new "global small town": one knitted together through the Web, Facebook, and Twitter. Two pioneering entrepreneurs and social media experts show how to:

* Survive seasonal cycles and year-to-year fluctuations the way rural farmers and businesses do

* Use "small town entrepreneur secrets" for coping with limited access to people and capital

* Reduce risk by "piecing together" multiple income sources * Start using customer-driven communication to your advantage

* Interact with customers on a more human scale, no matter how big you are

* Rediscover your company's local roots, and more

Barry Moltz gets small business owners unstuck by unlocking their long-forgotten potential. With decades of entrepreneurial experience in his own business ventures, as well as consulting countless companies, Barry has discovered the formula to get stuck business owners going again.

Barry has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. After successfully selling his last business, Barry branched out into numerous entrepreneurship-related activities. He founded an angel investor group, an angel fund, and is a former advisory member on the board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation.

His first book, You Need to Be A Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business, describes the ups and downs and emotional trials of running a business. It is in its fifth reprint and has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Thai. His second book, Bounce! Failure, Resiliency, and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, shows what it takes to come back and develop true business confidence. It has been translated into Korean and German. His third book, BAM! Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World, shows how customer service is the new marketing.

Barry is a nationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship and has given hundreds of presentations to audiences ranging from 20 to 20,000 people. As a member of the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame, he also has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Barry has appeared on many TV and radio programs, such as The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, MSNBC’s Your Business,and The Tavis Smiley Show. He hosts his own radio show, Business Insanity Talk Radio. He blogs regularly for the American Express Open Forum and Crain’s Chicago Business.

Becky McCray has been called “the small town Seth Godin” for her savvy combination of rural entrepreneurship and marketing skills. She started her first business venture in junior high school and has been going ever since. Currently, she and her husband own and operate a cattle ranch and a retail liquor store. Along with Sheila Scarborough, she co-founded Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals new marketing skills. Like many rural entrepreneurs, she has pieced together multiple lines of business to build a career.

Becky is a recognized expert in small business and social media and has taught nearly 1,000 classroom hours and more than 100 workshops and speeches on small business subjects. She has been featured in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Inc., Entrepreneur, Niche, Winning Workplaces, Reimagine Rural, Community Developer, and the Agurban. Becky publishes one of the top 20 small business blogs in the world, Small Biz Survival, which is focused on small town small business.

What makes all this possible is her wide experience in small town business, community, and government. That includes work as a small town administrator, a non-profit executive with the local workforce development and Girl Scout councils, an antiques store owner, a business and computer consultant, and a newspaper reporter. For nine years, McCray spent her evenings and weekends teaching a variety of com