ASLU 030: Finding Creative Business Succes Outside of the Big City
In Episode 30 of the podcast Gabby and I talk about finding success with your creative business when you don’t live in a big city.
The truth is, that living and running a business in a small urban centre or even a rural location can have tremendous advantages over a big city business and it can also come with a better work/life balance. If 2020 has taught us one thing, it’s that you can work from anywhere.
But not only can you work, you can succeed. And while the definition of success varies from person to person, you can take the success of your art business, your maker business, your creative services business or any business for that matter, to new levels without having to head to the big city.
As we learned in Episode 29, Gabby started out in Atlantic Canada but, both her and her husband thought that a move to Toronto would be the right thing to do as she started out with her freelance writing and journalism career and her husband was fresh out of law school. But a few years later, the two of them found their way back to St. John’s, Newfoundland (a town of about 100,000 people) and have found success and fulfillment, along with a much healthier work/life balance.
Listen To the Episode
Here’s a direct link to Episode 30 - or you can listen via the players below:
Canada, is a big country. There’s no getting around it. It’s the second largest country in the world, geographically speaking. There are 5 time zones and three coasts and it takes a long time to travel from one end to the other.
But population-wise, we’re tiny - with only 37.5 million people, we rank 39th in the world in terms of population. The bulk of Canadians live in southern Ontario and Quebec, and our biggest urban areas are Greater Toronto (6M), Montreal (4M) and Metro Vancouver (2M).
What does that all mean? It means that most of Canada is a pretty big, wide open and empty space. And as small business owners, especially in creative fields where we’re more likely to be a micro business rather than a small business, that presents a lot of challenges:
a smaller domestic customer base
expensive domestic transportation - even on mainstream commercial routes like a Toronto to Vancouver flight
expensive shipping options
in some cases, less immediate or easy access to supplies and raw materials
And sometimes, depending on your field, it can feel like Toronto is the center of all things art and commerce and that if you’re not there or in another large urban center, you’re missing out on all the amazing opportunities that your business could have.
WRONG!
A Big Fish in a Little Pond or a Little Fish in a Big Pond?
As Gabby and I have both found out over the years, while a big city has a lot of opportunities, it also has a lot of people trying to fill those opportunities!
Smaller urban centres and towns may feel like they have less opportunities (although that’s not always true) but they have a lot less people who are trying to climb the same ladder or get seen by the same people as you - and that can have some significant advantages!
In Toronto
I felt like there were a million different Gabbys…little food writers who were itching to become a critic in a major newspaper…
While Gabby is now the restaurant critic for The Telegram in St. John’s, landing that type of regular column in a newspaper in Toronto or Montreal would have been a 10 year career goal that still would have been extremely difficult to attain. The same is true of her former position as the Associate Editor of Atlantic Business Magazine. Achieving both of those goals at her age in a big urban center would have been a huge challenge full of intense competition.
Don’t Dismiss The Smaller Opportunities
It’s very easy to dismiss landing these seemingly smaller positions in smaller towns but that is a big mistake. Because what they provide is a powerful stepping stone to bigger opportunities. Now Gabby has newspaper restaurant critic and magazine editor on her CV and, perhaps even more importantly, she has connections with industry colleagues in bigger cities.
Her network is bigger and more doors are open to her. She’s had opportunities to write for and speak on CBC, another major career goal for her that would have been much more difficult had she stayed in Toronto. And now, if she were to go back to Toronto, in all likelihood, all that smaller town experience would actually catapult her several rungs up on the career ladder. She’s got a wealth of respected experience and credibility in a relatively short time that would have taken her years or even decades to obtain in a bigger city.
So…
How Can You Take Advantage of Being in A Small town?
Today, Gabby and I are going to share our tips for taking advantage of what a small town can offer you and your creative business. You may want to use a small town as a stepping stone to a big city life. Or, you might want to build a successful small business away from the hustle and bustle of an urban core and have a better work-life balance. But these ideas will help you see that setting up shop in a small town can be as rewarding (or even more so) as life in the big city.
1. Find Connections
We hear this a lot: who you know is important. Networking is the key to a successful business. And networking in a small town is sooo much easier. It’s easy to make connections with just a little bit of effort. (if you’ve lived in a small town you know that sometimes it can feel almost too connected!).
Get involved with your local chamber of commerce. Attend functions and events (or sponsor them!). Advertise to the community. Let people know who you are and what you do. That friend from high school might play softball with somebody who is looking for a mural painter. These kind of connections can happen anywhere, but they happen much more frequently in a smaller city or town!
Find or create a space to make connections
Gabby joined a co-working space in St. John’s shortly after working home where she was able to connect with other women who were self-employed. If your town is too small to offer a co-working space, create a space where other self-employed people can meet up once a week. Try the local cafe or library or the backroom of small shop on Main Street.
2. Collaborate
If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now then you know we love collaboration - both from a business perspective and a creative fulfillment perspective. Small towns offer up lots of opportunities to collaborate.
As mentioned above, it’s much easier to make connections in a smaller community and with connections comes the opportunity to work together. Small towns also tend to have people who don’t just do one thing. Gabby writes but she also does food photography and styling. The local cafe may also double as the art gallery. A person who makes skin care products from native plants may also specialize in foraging for local chefs. All of this can open up opportunities to work together.
3. Create The Thing You’re Looking For
Humans like to complain and make excuses for why we can’t do something.
"oh I can’t sell my handtufted pillows because there are no craft markets nearby”
Start a market! Secure a space a the local community centre (no community center? Find another space where people can gather and browse - it could even be somebody’s garage) and invite other creatives to participate.
“oh there is no restaurant column in our local paper”
Pitch the newspaper! Tell them why they need a restaurant critic. No newspaper? Start one. Start one online if you can’t do print. Start a website where you review restaurants for your town. Only a handful of restaurants in your town? Travel to other small towns in your region and check out their eats.
Gabby mentioned a woman in St. John’s who created a clothing store in a food truck, which is getting creative in its own right, and then gathered together other food truck owners and businesses and created a night market!
Small towns often have much more flexible or lenient permitting regulations when it comes to where you can hold events or park a food truck. They also usually have much, much more affordable rental rates for space. So investigate what your town can accommodate. Get creative (that’s what you do best, remember?) with what’s available. With my other business we’ve held food events and food photography and styling workshops in a music studio, a vintage guitar shop, a monastery (yes, for real), a cidery, numerous cafes and restaurants, offices of local businesses and we even once used a cooking school (crazy, eh?).
You Become Known As A Founder
When you start something, you become known as the founder and this is another very powerful way to grow your network and make more connections - and not just in your town. People in surrounding cities and even in the “big” city will start to hear your name - especially if that thing you started starts to get some word of mouth traction.
You might find that local journalists want to talk to you. People who want to participate in your craft market or your film festival or your long table dinner series will want to reach out. This can create even more inroad into working in a bigger city.
If you build it (and talk about it, and invite people to participate) people will come - and not just from within your town! Entertainment options in smaller towns might not be as robust as they are in a bigger urban centres and so people are often looking for fun, interesting things to do. And don’t discount potential tourists!
4. Help Your Town Become a Destination
We are living in an era where people are looking for experiences. And in this immediate time of a global pandemic, they’re looking for experiences that aren’t too far from home. They don’t want to get on a plane or ferry or train but that still want to feel like they’re escaping city life for a few days.
There are a lot of people who want to feel like they’ve discovered the best artisanal loaf of sourdough bread from a gem of a bakery in a sweet little town a three hour drive away. And they’ll share it on Instagram with all their friends.
What can you do to make your town a destination? As we’ve already mentioned above, collaborate with others, create the experiences you want to have and as we’re about to discuss, leverage the technology that’s available to your to market your creative business and your town to the rest of the world.
pop-up dinners featuring local produce and products
night markets
craft fairs or studio walks
take your show on the road - if you create something that takes off, take it one the road to neighbouring towns or even provinces or states.
offer an open house in your studio once a month
get the other businesses in town to display artworks or products by the creatives in town - it could be a cafe or restaurant or small shops. The local bakery could carry pretty plates by a local potter. The cafe can display paintings that are for sale.
If you can bring your town together on a project like this the results can be very powerful. People who are planning vacations don’t just want to buy that jar of jam. They want to go to a long table dinner, visit artist’s studios, take a workshop on outdoor watercolour painting, go surfing or white water rafting. The more things there are to do, the better!
5. Leverage Technology
It’s 2020. And technologies that help keep us all connected have been catapulting forward at a very fast pace. The internet has allowed so many people to make their lives in smaller towns while still having very productive and profitable businesses.
Digital content creators like bloggers and YouTubers can work from anywhere that they have access to a decent internet connection and successful ones who treat it as a true business can make well into the six or even seven figures. Products that a food blogger, fashion blogger, or beauty blogger in a smaller location might not have had easy access to 10 years ago can now be delivered to their doorstep.
Small makers and artisans can sell outside of their immediate community with platforms like Etsy, Amazon Handmade or through their own websites thanks to Shopify. This year, virtual markets are happening where people can’t gather in person. There are even platforms available to help them get their goods into the hands of bricks and mortar shops hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Raw materials and art supplies are now available from their laptop.
Social media provides access to marketing on a global scale for budgets that range from “no budget” right up to people who want to spend thousands of dollars a month to make sure their products and services get in front of the right people.
Make use of hashtags so people can find you. Use tags that mention your city and what you do or what you make. So many smaller businesses doing interesting, quirky things have become nationally known via having fun or beautiful social media accounts that speak to a bigger audience.
Platforms like Instagram can actually make it easier to be seen when you’re in a smaller community than a bigger one. If somebody searches #saskatoonceramics far less content will pop up than #torontoceramics. And, if somebody follows a potter in Moncton, the Instagram algorithm is likely to suggest other Moncton pottery accounts to that same user. That’s less likely to happen in a bigger city. So make use of those small, free tools that can help you get found.
Have a website - at bare minimum. Take advantage of Google and SEO so that if people are searching for you they can find you!
6. Get The Experience and Move On and Up (or Not!)
All the experiences you gain in a smaller center can be leveraged when you’re ready to move on to a bigger city. Now you have a CV that shows you launched a successful monthly artisan market in your town or you were the restaurant critic at the local paper. And as mentioned earlier, all those things open up doors in bigger centres. They grow your network, they help you stand out in a crowded marketplace and they give you name recognition that probably would have taken your years to get if you’d started off in that big city from Day 1. Now’s the time to take advantage of that… or not…
Smaller centres can offer so many other gifts: a more relaxed pace, a lower cost of living, easier access to nature, more time (very minimal commute) a deeper sense of connection. There’s nothing wrong with making a life you love while making a living doing what you love in a place that’s less connected to the hustle and bustle of a big city. And today, a big city isn’t as far away as it might have been at one point.
You can still go for a visit and a burst of inspiration or access to cultural activities or businesses you might not get at home. The city’s bright lights will always beckon but sometimes, those smaller places feel more like home!
