01: What Small Town Businesses Know That the Internet Forgot

Small town business is different. The way people build trust is different. The way word of mouth works is different. Even the way communities rally around businesses is different.

And yet almost nobody's talking about what it actually takes to build something meaningful in a small town today. So that's exactly what we're gonna do here. Welcome to Small Town Stories, the podcast exploring the business behind Main Streets and the people shaping small towns across Canada, the U.S.

, and beyond. I'm Jan Dishwell, top right podcast host, marketer, and small town local. And every Thursday, we're diving into honest conversations about entrepreneurship, creativity, marketing, reinvention, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the small town today. From local storefronts to growing brands, community builders to nationally recognized names, this is where modern business meets small town life.

Let's get into it. Well, hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Small Town Stories. I'm your host, Jan Ditchfield, and I am really glad you're here. This show is recorded in Merrickville, Ontario, which is a tiny little village of about 2,500 people and the place where I was born and raised until I left.

And every time you drive into Merrickville, you pass underneath this old train bridge at the edge of town. And I know this sounds dramatic and maybe a little unhinged, but it's always felt a little bit like driving through a portal to me. Like the second you pass underneath it, the world shifts slightly. And not in a magical way exactly, more in a slower way.

Because Merrickville is probably like a lot of small towns. Beautiful in the way that people romanticize and complicated in the ways that people usually leave out. And when you grow up somewhere like this, you end up holding both versions of the place at the same time. There's the version everybody sees when they visit, and then there's the version you remember.

And what I remember is St. Lawrence Street when I was just a kid. That's back when parts of it still felt rough around the edges and people were just beginning to build things here. I remember storefronts sitting empty, and I remember my mom's friends opening businesses and all the excitement that came with that.

I still remember the first time we got an ice cream store in town. And it felt like the whole town was slowly becoming something new in real time. And now when I walk down that same street, it still feels like the heart of the community to me. In the mornings, it can feel kind of sleepy.

It's quiet enough that you think that nothing much was happening here at all. And then by mid-morning, especially in the summer, the whole street changes. There are tourists everywhere, and patios are full, and people wander in and out of shops. And by the evening, everything just softens again.

And the stores close up and the sidewalks empty out, and the village just seems to settle back into itself. And really honestly, I think those quieter moments might be some of my favorite versions of this town. It's those moments before doors open up and before the visitors start coming in. You can actually still feel the rhythm of the people who live here.

And all of the memories I hold about this beautiful small town that I live in. What's changed for me hasn't been the village itself. It was me. We moved out of the village many a year ago now, and I actually left to go to theater school.

And then I went off to university. And eventually, like so many people from small towns, I built a life and a career in the city. And I've done marketing and podcasting and been deep in the entrepreneurship world for a very long time. And it's a world that's moved really quickly.

And it's a world where I find that I'm always immersed in conversations about scaling and visibility and growth. And then somewhere along the way, I became a mom later in life. And then almost immediately after that, I feel like my entire career just suddenly moved online. And I think many of us who went through the pandemic, we know what that feeling is like.

And suddenly it was all about Zoom calls and Instagram and podcasting and online courses and content calendars and ring lights. And I own more microphones and cameras than any reasonable person should be allowed to own. And what I found is that when you spend enough time in that world, something strange starts to happen. You slowly stop interacting with people in real life, or at least not in the same way, because everything suddenly becomes mediated through a screen.

So your work becomes digital, your relationships become digital, even your personality sometimes, I'm going to say this with quite a lot of honesty, starts kind of partially optimizing for digital consumption. And I'm not criticizing at all because the world has changed my life and it gave me a career that I genuinely love and opportunities I never would have had otherwise. It's the reason I was actually able to move back home in the first place. But I bring this up because when I came back and started trying to reintegrate into small town life again, I realized pretty quickly that I brought a very online understanding of business into a world that operates differently.

Because that online world teaches you to move fast and optimize and scale. And small towns don't really work like that. You can't shortcut trust here. And one of the strangest parts about coming home was realizing that I felt somehow deeply connected to this place and completely unfamiliar with it at the exact same time.

Because on one hand, it w this was still home. I know these streets, I knew what the village sounded like after the tourists left for the evening. But at the same time, I had left as one version of myself and I came back as an entirely different one. And suddenly I found myself looking at this town differently as well.

Not just as somebody who grew up here, but as someone who's observing it. And one of the things that I kept noticing over and over again was that no matter how much the town evolved, the businesses on St. Lawrence Street, which is our main drag here, these businesses still somehow held the pulse of the community together. Yeah, the names have changed and storefronts have changed, and some businesses have disappeared while new ones have arrived in their place.

But the role they played never really changed at all. They were still where people gathered in the mornings, still where the conversations happened, still where people quietly kept community life moving forward. And I think that's where I started realizing that businesses in small towns feel different than it does in most of the worlds that I come from. And it's not better or not worse, it's nothing like that.

It's just more human somehow. Because in small town, businesses become part of the emotional infrastructure of the community itself. They shape routines and relationships and memory and belonging. And maybe it's because I'm a podcaster, but the more I noticed it, the more curious I became about the stories underneath all of it.

And not just here in Merrittville, where I come from, but in small towns everywhere. Now I've been podcasting for six years now, and somewhere along the way, podcasting stopped being the thing that I did. And it started becoming the way that I see the world. Everything comes to me through conversations and stories and observing people and listening closely.

That became my work. And over time, I started to realize that podcasting and small towns actually have a lot in common. They both require a slower kind of relationship building. You don't instantly become the fabric of someone's life because trust gets built gradually.

And then belonging gets built gradually, and relationships get built gradually. And there's no playbook for it. And I think maybe that's part of why I became so fascinated with the idea of creating this show. Because podcasting felt like the only medium spacious enough to hold the conversations like this properly.

And we're going to have those conversations here, but not just about business, but also about people and reinvention. And about the communities that we love. Sometimes we leave and sometimes we find ourselves pulled back into them again later in life. So I'm going to say, while this show is being recorded in Merrickville, it was never really meant to only be about Merrickville.

It's about small towns everywhere. Because these are the places trying to balance growth and preservation all at the same time. And these businesses quietly hold communities together in ways that most people don't fully realize unless they've experienced it. And honestly, I don't think there's ever been a more important moment for these conversations.

And I say that from the lens of being someone who's worked in the online space for a very long time. Because people are exhausted. Not necessarily with technology itself, but with that pace that modern life tends to bring with it. There's the pressure to optimize everything, and this feeling that bigger somehow means better, which we all know is not true.

And meanwhile, small towns still seem to remember things the rest of the world seems to have started to forget. How trust gets built, how relationships matter, how businesses become gathering places, how word of mouth still carries more power than any algorithm ever will. And maybe that's what this show is really about. Not just small-town businesses, although we are talking about that quite a bit, but the things that they still have to teach the rest of us about connection, community, and building something that people actually want to keep coming back to.

So that's what we're gonna do here. We're gonna go looking for good stories, and maybe along the way we will rediscover some of the things about business and about people that we've forgotten somewhere in the middle of the internet gold rush. Anyway, just something to noodle on until the next time we talk. I'm really glad you're here.

Thanks for listening to Small Town Stories. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, make sure you're following the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't done so yet, I'd be really grateful if you left a rating and review. It really helps more people discover the show.

You can follow along on Instagram at the Small Town Stories Podcast and visit us online at the Small Town Stories Podcast.com. All right, I'll see you next Thursday for another conversation about the business behind Main Street.