04: The Small Town Business Lesson Hidden in Community

SPEAKER_00: The funny things about small towns is that people often talk about the buildings first. The historic architecture, the charming storefronts, the places that end up on postcards, and tourism brochures. But the longer I've lived here, the more I've realized that those things aren't really the story. The story has always been the people who keep showing up for them.

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 Jim Dishrow, 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 back to Small Town Stories.

I'm your host, Jan Ditchfield, and I'm really glad you're here. A few weeks ago, I sent an email about chickens to my email list for my online business. And now I realize that that's probably not the most dramatic way to begin a podcast episode. And there are entire industries built around teaching people how to write better opening lines than that.

But that's where the story begins. So here we are talking about chickens. I've wanted backyard chickens for years. They're one of those oddly specific dreams that somehow survives every stage of adulthood, like quietly following you from one season of life to the next.

It's the kind of thing that you keep imagining you'll do someday when life slows down enough, or when you finally have a little more space, or when the future vision of yourself you've been carrying around in your head eventually catches up to reality. And then, somewhat unexpectedly, this spring, it did. A few weeks earlier, we had driven over to the home hardware in Spencerville and put our names on the waiting list. And then one Saturday morning, we came home with six tiny chicks and promptly became that kind of family that spends an unreasonable amount of time talking about chickens.

Within 24 hours, our entire family had become completely irrational about the babies. We checked on them constantly. My daughter became fascinated by them. We gave them names, and almost immediately, before long, I was taking an embarrassing number of photos and sending them to people who had absolutely no reason to care about my chickens, which includes my email list.

The whole thing became a family event in a way that I hadn't anticipated, which is probably why I ended up writing about it. The funny thing is that email wasn't really about chickens, at least not entirely. What I was actually writing about was the kind of life I found myself thinking about more and more over the last few years. Not a different life exactly, but a different pace.

A life with a little more room in it, a life with more margins around the edges, a life that isn't quite so dependent on being connected, available, visible, and online every waking minute of the day. In many ways, the chickens were simply the story I was using to talk about something much larger. Or at least that's what I thought I was doing. What I wasn't expecting was a response.

Some people loved the email and immediately started sharing stories of their own. I heard from people who had chickens growing up, people who currently own chickens, and a surprising number of people who seem to have been quietly carrying around their own backyard chicken aspirations for years. But mixed in with those responses were a handful that genuinely caught me off guard. Not because people disagreed with me.

And the longer you spend writing and creating and podcasting or sharing your thoughts publicly, the more you realize that disagreement just comes with the territory. What surprised me was something else entirely. What surprised me was how much meaning people attached to the chickens themselves. Because somewhere between me writing the email and somebody else reading it, the chickens had quietly stopped being chickens.

They had become a representation of something else. For some people, they seemed to symbolize a particular lifestyle. For others, they appeared to represent a set of values or a philosophy or a way of looking at the world that extended far beyond six tiny birds living in a brooder in my downstairs bathroom. And honestly, I found that fascinating.

Mostly because while everyone else seemed to be interpreting the chickens, I was still trying to figure out why one of them was insisting on sleeping in the least comfortable corner of the brooder every single night. The entire thing left me thinking about the stories we attach to the ordinary things and the assumptions we make about people based on the small pieces of their lives we happen to see. And the more I sat with it afterwards, the more I realized that we do something remarkably similar with small towns.

Because just like the chickens, most people carry an idea of what small town life represents. They have a story about what it means, what kind of people live there, and what those communities stand for long before they spend any meaningful time inside of one. I think most people carry a version of small town life around in their heads. Sometimes it's the Hallmark version where every main street is charming, every storefront is decorated for the season, and everybody seems to know everybody else.

It's the version where neighbors are endlessly friendly, community events are always well attended, and nobody ever appears to be much in a hurry. Sometimes it's the Instagram version, filled with beautifully tended gardens and farmer markets and sourdough starters and backyard chickens, and those century homes that somehow always seem to be bathed in the perfect golden hour light. And sometimes it's the tourism brochure version, where communities become destinations and entire towns get distilled down to a handful of photographs and carefully chosen descriptions designed to convince you that you've discovered somewhere special.

And the funny thing is that none of those versions are entirely wrong. I live in a town where neighbors really do stop to talk on a sidewalk. I live in a town where volunteers somehow manage to organize an astounding number of community events every year and where local businesses often become gathering places in ways that have very little to do with whatever they're actually selling. I live in a town where people genuinely care about what happens here.

But what I've realized since moving home is that most people here aren't consciously participating in some idealized version of small town life. They're simply living their lives. They're getting kids to hockey practice, trying to remember garbage day, opening their business in the morning, helping neighbors, volunteering when somebody asks, and genuinely doing the same things people do everywhere else. The difference is in that a place like this, those small acts tend to be a little more visible.

Nobody I know wakes up in the morning trying to embody some romantic version of small town living. They're simply going about their day. They're opening businesses and walking dogs and coaching hockey teams and serving on committees and organizing fundraisers and helping neighbors and doing the countless ordinary things that quietly keep a community functioning. And I think that's the part people often miss.

Because when you're looking at a place from the outside, it's easy to focus on the visible things the historic buildings, the cafes, the shops, the architecture, and all the little details that end up in photographs. Those are the things visitors notice first because they're the easiest things to see. But the longer I've lived back home, the more I've realized that the buildings and the shops and the cafes aren't really the story at all. They're simply the setting in which the story takes place.

The real story has always been the people. Particularly the people who decide to participate in the life of the community instead of simply passing through it. Because every community is filled with people who could choose not to get involved and yet somehow do anyway. They're the people who volunteer, who organize, who show up, who contribute, and who quietly invest pieces of themselves into the place where they live.

Most of the times they aren't doing it because they're trying to build community. They're doing it because someone has to. And when enough people keep making that choice over and over again, community becomes the result. I was thinking about this recently while working on a project for a local organization in Merrickville that's celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

60 years ago, a group of volunteers looked around Merrickville and noticed there was something that felt worth saving. Historic buildings were disappearing, and pieces of the community stories were quietly being lost, one building at a time. And instead of assuming somebody else would step in and take care of it, they decided to do something themselves. So they organized, and a new volunteer community group was created, and they spent their time, energy, and effort working to preserve the places that would eventually become some of the most recognizable parts of this village by buying the buildings that would be torn down and preserving them.

And they didn't do this because there was money in it or because anyone was waiting to hand them an award. They did it because they cared about what happened to the place they called home. And the more time I spend telling small town stories, the more fascinated I become by people like that. Because when we talk about history, we usually talk about big stories.

We talk about major cities and famous leaders and moments important enough to make their way into textbooks. But that's only part of the story. The truth is that history is being written every day in places most people never think to look. It's written in community halls and volunteer meetings.

It's written on main streets and inside local businesses. It's written by ordinary people who decide that something they love is worth protecting. And maybe that's what those volunteers understood 60 years ago. That communities don't preserve themselves.

Someone has to care enough to show up. Somebody has to decide that the story is worth saving. And the more I thought about that, the more I started noticing the same pattern everywhere. I noticed it in the local business owners who quietly unlock their doors every morning and create places where people gather.

I noticed it in the volunteers who somehow managed to keep community organizations running year after year. I noticed it in the artists and committee members, firefighters, coaches, and all the people whose names rarely make the headlines, but whose fingerprints are somehow all over the communities they help shape. Small towns aren't sustained by a handful of important people. They're sustained by hundreds of ordinary people who decide to keep participating.

And maybe that's why I become so interested in the businesses here too. Because the more stories I've collected, the more I've realized that local businesses aren't separate from the community. They're one of the ways that community gets built. They're gathering places, they're landmarks, they're often the backdrop for relationships, memories, and conversations.

Which, if I'm being honest, is a very different understanding of success than the one I've spent years surrounded by online. Online, success seems to be measured by things that could easily be counted: visibility and reach and growth and followers and metrics, the endless collection of numbers that tell us whether we're moving forward. And while those things certainly matter, I've started wondering whether some of the most meaningful parts of life are the things that resist measurement altogether.

Trust doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet, and neither does reputation or belonging or that quiet feeling that your presence matters to the place where you live. And maybe that's why people seem so drawn to small town stories right now. Not because everybody is secretly wanting chickens, although I'm gonna say, based on my inbox, there are clearly more aspiring chicken owners among us than I originally realized. I think people are drawn to the stories because there's stories about connection.

There's stories about participation, there's stories about belonging. Because for all of the incredible things the internet has given us, it has also made it remarkably easy to move through our lives without becoming particularly connected to the people around us. And I've lived that version of life too. For years, most of my world has existed online.

And there was absolutely nothing wrong with that to a degree, because in many ways it's built the life I have today. But somewhere along the line, I forgot how good it feels to run into somebody at the post office and spend 10 minutes talking about absolutely nothing important. I forgot how much I enjoy the conversations that happen on the sidewalks and in the coffee shops and in the line at the grocery store. The conversations that aren't content, the conversations that don't scale, the conversations that aren't trying to accomplish anything except being conversations.

And maybe that's what this show has really been about from the beginning. Not Merrickville, not even small towns, but belonging. Because every message that's been sent to me since we've launched the show over the last week has reminded me of the same thing. People have written from communities across Canada, from cities, from villages, from places much further away than I ever expected this little podcast to reach.

And I want to say a special hello to my listeners in Morocco. You've shared stories with me about towns you grew up in, businesses you still remember decades later, neighbors you miss, and communities that left a permanent mark on you. And at the time of recording this, Small Town Stories has been in the world for barely a week, and somehow it's already become a top 30 entrepreneurship podcast in Canada. Honestly, that feels slightly surreal to say out loud.

And I am deeply thankful to you for helping to make this dream come true for this beautiful little show. But if I'm also being honest, the charts aren't the part that's been the most meaningful to me. What matters are the stories. Because every one of those messages has reminded me that the thing connecting us isn't geography.

It isn't whether you live in a small town or a big city. It's the desire to feel connected to the places where we live and the people we share them with. Communities don't survive because of tourism brochures or Instagram posts or charming main streets. They survive because people keep showing up for them and creating the things like the brochures and the posts and the stores and even the podcasts that celebrate what we love most about them.

And maybe that's what we're all longing for. Not small towns, just the feeling that we belong somewhere. Anyway, just something to noodle on until next time we talk. 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.