The Local Storecast: Recent Episodes
The Local Storecast
The Local Storecast dives into the challenges and issues facing local markets. We tell the stories of business owners, politicians, community leaders, and other stakeholders in local marketplaces, to gain perspective and share best practices with those who want to build better connections with Main Street USA and keep up with changing local economies.
In this episode, they take some of the guiding insights of CoLab and offer them to local business owners who are trying to navigate the multiple dimensions of successful business operation.
In this episode, you'll hear:
- The Importance of Mentorship and How to Find It.
- Whether and How to Invite Investor Capital into a Company.
- Validating Ideas and Converting Them Into Business.
Check out all this and a ton more on today's The Local Storecast.
In this episode of the Storecast, Chloe Morrison, reporter at the business beat of Nooga.com, unlocks a treasury of advice on how business owners can forge healthy relationships with local media.
Making those connections leads to new customers, strategic partnerships, and the necessary feedback a business needs to make adjustments in changing local marketplaces.
Along the way, she drops nugget after nugget about the importance of connection and new contacts in general for a business. Whatever the connection, there are several keys she identifies to successful communication.
As a reporter, Chloe literally connects for a living. Her expertise on the topic is forged in experience, and her suggestions will inspire your creativity about how to develop your business with important new contacts.
When she was serving tables and bartending to pay her own bills while not taking a paycheck from her new restaurant, it might have seemed that Monica Smith was failing.
Don't tell her that.
A 20-year veteran of the restaurant business, Monica knew that in the early days of a business, success and failure look a lot alike.
Now, 5 years after opening Mean Mug, Monica lays claim to one of the most popular joints on Chattanooga's growing Southside, as well as one of the 10 best biscuits in Tennessee!
In this episode, we delve into the secrets of Monica's success, some of the most important lessons she's learned (hint, empower your staff and delegate or slowly lose your mind!), as well as what her plans are for Mean Mug and for Chattanooga.
On March 27, 2016, at 1:30 am, a southern Minnesota entrepreneur tweeted, “My greatest idea yet is coming to me in pieces.”
Less than two weeks later, she had appeared in Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The Today Show, and Huffington Post. Millions of women had read her post, and over 17,000 people had commented on it.
She’s Rachel Pedersen, social media strategist, educator, and viral-on-purpose mother of two.
16 months ago, she had a handful of followers on Instagram, a Facebook group she was struggling to get members into, and a social media management agency just getting off the ground.
Now she has 20,000 followers on IG, her facebook community has almost 6,000 people in it, and her agency has tons of local businesses and larger brands as its clients.
And today she appears on our show to help local businesses use social media to grow their communities and bottom lines.
The paradox, says Rachel, is that by backing off of saying their own name, and focusing instead on the values of their customers, they can create a brand story that builds customer love and makes sales!
And she should know.
For a few weeks in early 2016, Rachel's incredible love story (not her business!) was a topic of national conversation. Hard as it might be to believe, she called this shot.
Her viral post was the culmination of more than a year spent learning about the architecture of social media communities, and how users cooperate to tell stories that matter to them.
For this show, we polled our audience and took a handful of questions about social media strategy. Rachel was kind enough to give us strategies as if our business owners were her own clients!
Today, we welcome Eden Prairie's Rachel Pedersen to The Local Storecast.