New Year’s Resolution Poll

While the typical New Year’s resolution is abandoned somewhere around the long Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, there is a certain feeling of “anything’s possible” in the air during these first few weeks of January.  Now really can be a good time to set some goals.  Go ahead, think big.  If you don’t stretch yourself to do more, why bother?

Take a few pointers from weight-loss experts and put these strategies to work in your downtown to make your resolutions a reality:

Write it down – Make sure your goals are clear and quantitative.  Write them down so you can track your success.  It also makes it more real when you can see it on paper, or better yet, chart it on a graph.

Tell a friend – Make sure people know what you are going to do.  They can hold you accountable and keep you on track. They may even offer to help!

Make it reasonable – As it didn’t take two weeks to pack on an extra 25 lbs, the historic facades in your district weren’t all covered over in a matter of a few months.  Go ahead and challenge yourself, but don’t expect to have a completely rehabbed, fully occupied downtown by June, either. 

Pace yourself – As we age, it seems the years fly by, but in reality a year is a long time.  Break out your big goals into some chunks so you can have incremental success along the way.

Now, take the first VMS poll of the new year.

Virginia Tourism is way ahead of the pack…again.

One of Virginia Main Street’s most prized relationships is the one we have with Virginia Tourism Corporation (VTC).  We often plan our strategies to complement theirs and they often ask us what’s going on downtown that they can use to better market Virginia.  They believe in Virginia’s historic commercial districts as tourist attractions to the point that they designed a special category of their Passionality quiz called Small Town Hound.

Many of the really exciting innovations at VTC have been ways to get your information out to travellers, whether they be from out of state or just down the street.  The Richmond Times Dispatch published an article touting VTC’s new iPhone app.  The application allows small businesses to directly reach travellers in a number of ways by self posting information about their businesses in a way that the app users can find them while they are travelling.

Features of the Virginia is for Lovers app include:

• a “near me” feature which finds all attractions within a 15-mile radius;

• directions and mapping for every listing;

• direct access to making reservations via phone or website;

• customer reviews of restaurants and lodging properties; and

• pet-friendly attractions listed by locality

The Virginia.org website has many tools to help local businesses and organizations promote their events and products.  You can go here to add your events now or you can contact a VTC representitive here.

Designing a Marketplace

Is your economic restructuring committee effective?  Challenges like recruiting businesses and interpreting expensive and technical market studies discourage eager volunteers. There’s no immediate result after hours of meetings and planning.  Pressure to see results from business owners, local government and the community compounds the frustration. It’s easy for this committee, in particular, to go inactive.

Main Street organizations all over America have faced this challenge, and many are beating it–by creating compelling and specific visions for their downtown marketplace.  To illustrate the best strategies Todd Barman, Program Officer for the National Trust Main Street Center (NTMSC), features Altavista, a Virginia Main Street designated community, in a recent issue of Main Street Now. 

Barman says “It will take a concrete and compelling vision of a fully functioning future marketplace to attract the entrepreneurs and investors who will eventually realize [their] vision.”   What works for Main Street communities is similar to the strategy of successful commercial developers that are good at communicating their development vision using verbal descriptions, architectural renderings, and diagrams/schematics.  Along with this are specific steps for filling vacancies in historic commercial districts.

“The NTMSC is working to empower Main Street programs to use similar tools to attain similar results.”

Check out the details in the Main Street at Work column of the July/August 2010 issue of Main Street Now, The Journal of The National Trust Main Street Center.

Downtown leaders cover Main Street Essentials at Abingdon training

On Sep. 22 and 23, Advance Abingdon hosted 70 downtown revitalization professionals and volunteers from across Virginia for a training and knowledge share of best practices in the organization and promotion of downtown revitalization efforts.

National Trust Main Street Center Senior Program Officer Kathy LaPlante, a nationally recognized expert on community based downtown revitalization, presented specific strategies for organizing local efforts and promoting local businesses in downtown districts. “Communities across the country are working toward creating vibrant, one-of-a-kind downtown districts,” said LaPlante. “We develop and share best practices, such as how to effectively recruit and use volunteers, and how to fund revitalization efforts.”

Other more specific strategies discussed at the session promote the assets unique to each place. For instance a festival that draws people to a downtown in Virginia will be different from one in Wisconsin. “The overall guide to promoting your district,” said LaPlante, “is to be true in character to who you are as a community. No one size fits all.”

In addition to hearing from LaPlante, representatives of local governments, nonprofit organizations, and businesses shared the latest efforts of their home communities with others from around the commonwealth.

Sponsors for the event helped provide a warm welcome and included Michael’s Pharmacy, Mac’s Medical Equipment, Home Nursing Service of Southwest Virginia, Highlands Union Bank, The Office Place, and the Town of Abingdon. Participants took trolley tours, ate a dinner at the Farmer’s Market, attended a reception at A Tailor’s Lodging, and enjoyed lunch on the town.

Virginia Main Street trainings are open to anyone interested in downtown revitalization, and all PowerPoint presentations and notes from the group discussions are available at the Virginia Main Street training archive.

Virginia Tourism’s wine tweets win award

Virginia Tourism Corporation (VTC) has a track record of excellence in tourism marketing. The agency recently celebrated 40 years of the longstanding Virginia is for Lovers campaign. While they’ve maintained that well loved umbrella brand, they’ve also successfully continued and grown a host of niche marketing efforts, speaking to the specific tastes and demands of travelers.

A recent Twitter campaign used the social media tool to promote wine travel and won one of 12 U.S. Travel Association awards for top marketing initiatives in the country. Their Vintage Tweets reached more than 43,000 consumers in under 24 hours. Read  Governor McDonnell’s annoucement of the award here.

VTC puts a lot of energy into the marketing state’s growing wine industry, and with good reason. Virginia is now home to 160 wineries and 16 wine trails,  and it was recently named one of the top five up-and-coming wine destinations in the world by Travel + Leisure magazine. 

There’s bound to be a winery near you.  How does your downtown connect with it?  In Harrisonburg, Cave Ridge Vineyard has opened Wine on Water, a downtown tasting room. This year Woodstock, held its first wine festival and a local entrepreneur began a limosine company to transport visitors to the nearby wineries.  In Abingdon, the farmers’ market showcases wineries of the region.

October will be Virginia Wine Month. If you haven’t fully explored how you can tap the marketing muscle of Virginia wine and make it work for your downtown, now may be just the right time.

Quality v. quantity

Last Thursday, at the Virginia Main Street 25th Anniversary Milestone Achievement Awards, keynote speaker Chuck D’Aprix spoke about the importance of making your downtown attractive to entrepreneurs.  One way to do this is to focus on the quality of the experience rather than the quantity of products you sell.

In short, it is difficult to compete with big box store prices and the accompanying scale that makes those small margins possible.  So why not try delving into high quality products that carry a much higher margin and offer a much richer experience? 

If you focus on giving your downtown customers a quality, authentic and unique experience, you will become an attraction for those with quality in mind who don’t mind paying a little (or a lot) extra for that quality.  To quote an article on Kansas’ Prairie Marshes in Legacy Magazine,

Happy and satisfied visitors stay longer, return often, and “spread the word” both about the joys of visiting our region and the importance and significance of the resources found here. This has raised the visibility of the tourism industry at the local, state, and national levels.

From $10,000 boots to stagecoaches to ballgloves to guitars, watch this short slideshow on successful “craftpreneurs.”  And yes, I just made up that word.

Bob Mills, owner of Angle Hardware in Rocky Mount, VA, once told me that Wal-Mart didn’t bother him.  Their product knowledge and quality was poor.  Lowe’s has a much wider selection and is more specialized than Wal-Mart, but do you think you can get someone at Lowe’s to tell you whether a machine screw or a hex bolt will hold better?  Angle Hardware is the real deal.  You don’t wander for hours past spa tubs to find your drill bits.  You walk in and you get greeted by name and with a handshake and a sincere, “What can I help you with?”  If you need one screw, you get one screw, not a box of 25. 

Quality customer service is a rare commodity; but one you can find readily on Virginia’s Main Streets.

Tell us what you think.

When a financial crisis arrives, it is too late to try to make the case for all the services your downtown organization provides to the community.   You need to be spending that time engaging your support base and selling the future.  To do that, there has to be a broad based system of support throughout the community made up of stakeholders that know who you are and the value you provide.  This requires constant communication with the community as a whole and your primary stakeholders in particular.

Bright ideas for business

What is a good business proposition?  That is a tough question to answer. 

I am sure that many people thought that two old hippies were crazy when they started an ice cream company in Vermont, where summers last only a few months and the temperature can drop to near freezing in August.  But those that saw promise in a high-quality, extra-creamy, frozen-fun idea have been well rewarded for their investment in Ben & Jerry’s.

InteliTap is a young Virginia company that looks to have strong growth solving the eternal bar owner’s dilemma; where are all the profits going?  If the beer is too warm, the profits are literally going down the drain in the form of extra suds in the mug.  A common culprit is the bartender who pours a few extra for him or herself and his or her friends.  According to Dave Adams, the founder of InteliTap, it is not uncommon for a bar to have a loss rate of 20 percent on draft beer. 

In a keg that holds 125 beers, that’s 25 pints at $4 a pop for recaptured revenue of $100 a keg.

This company saw a problem, and through some technological innovation is providing a solution that can show immediate results on a bar and restaurant owner’s bottom line.

We bring up this company for two reasons.  Most immediately, you can share this information with your local beer slinger and hopefully help them become more profitable.  At the very least, the owner may have a few more dollars to spend locally, but this could be a way for the owner to become profitable or even increase payroll.

In a more long term sense, this company illustrates that we never really know who will have the next big idea or what it will be.  This is why it is important to have a system in place to foster these micro businesses in the start-up phase and have policies in place to encourage the businesses to stay local as they grow.

Making lemonade

Norm Brodsky is a writer for Inc. Magazine.  He is the co-writer of: The Knack: How Street Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up.  He also has started six businesses.  Lets call him an entrepreneur. 

In the April issue of Inc, Brodsky writes in his Street Smarts Column about lessons to use when your original plan goes out the window.  Here is a brief summary, but this is a must read:

1. Ask your customers what they need

2. Be flexible

3. Quit complaining

4. Make a new Plan NOW

5. Say “Yes” when others are saying “Maybe”

Focus and attitude

When times are tough, even the most successful retail business can have some trouble.  Making the right business decisions is paramount when the margin for error is slim.

“Fear can be a motivator, but it can also lead you into bad decisions, particularly in times like these,” says Norm Brodsky, small business writer for Inc. magazine.

Brodsky took some time to assist an art gallery owner make a plan to weather 2009 and the 50 percent drop in business she was seeing.

From discussing the pitfalls of shorter business hours (how are you going to sell more products if you are open less?) to offering additional value rather than cutting prices, this is a straight forward and exceptional article for anyone involved in or affected by the retail sector.

But don’t forget that attitude is key for sales.  Virginia Main Street constantly hears about local retailers who complain to everyone who walks through the door, making the retail experience  a poor one for the customers.  Think about this; how long would a Wal-Mart greeter last if they greeted everyone with “crumby economy today, isn’t it?” or “What are you, a Rockefeller?  Spending money in times like these.”

Being positive is more than saying, “Have a nice day!” though.  Jill Hamburg Coplan wrote a long but excellent article earlier this month in Business Week online on Positive Psychology.  The short version is that you should focus on what you can do in the future, not what is happening to you.  In other words, take control of your fate and don’t be a victim of circumstance.

Obviously, there is more to it than that, so give the entire article a read, it could be just the boost you need.