By Marci Goodwin, co-founder of SmartStart Business Development

Over the past few months, the SmartStart Business Development team has been deep in the weeds researching rural entrepreneurship programs to better understand what is actually happening on the ground with local microbusinesses and how communities support them.

Microbusinesses are those with less than 10 employees and make up 96% of all small businesses in the U.S. These are the mom and pop stores on Main Street, the local hair stylists, and the maker creating jewelry at her kitchen table to see online or in local vendor fairs. These are the businesses that make small communities thrive.

The goal of our deep dive was simple: figure out what’s working, what isn’t working, and where the gaps are. A few patterns quickly became clear.

1. Most rural entrepreneurship programs aren’t designed for microbusinesses

Many initiatives described as entrepreneurship programs are actually designed for a very specific type of entrepreneur: high-growth startups that want to scale quickly. Other programs or initiatives are designed for large employer businesses or businesses who want to scale.

Those programs can absolutely be valuable, but they serve a very small slice of entrepreneurs in rural and small communities — not microbusinesses.

Microbusinesses do not need pitch decks, venture capital, or the business model templates meant for large-scale startups. Start-ups are building for speed, scale, and venture capital investments.

Microbusiness owners are building to bolster or replace their job income and provide goods and services to their communities. They need to know how to build a stable, sustainable business – not how to disrupt industries.

2. Microbusiness programs are usually temporary

In the communities where microbusiness support programs were in place, it often looked like:

• a micro-loan program
• a short training cohort
• access to a business coach during a grant year
• random small business workshops

Each of these can help, but most are pilot programs tied to short-term funding. When the grant ends, the program often disappears — and so does microbusiness support.

Entrepreneurship, however, doesn’t operate on a grant timeline. People explore business ideas, launch ventures, struggle, pivot, adapt, and grow over many years.

Short-term programs can provide helpful sparks, but they rarely create lasting entrepreneurial support systems.

3. Many small business programs focus on space or capital, not business fundamentals

Another pattern we saw repeatedly is that many microbusiness initiatives focus on providing space or capital, but not ongoing business development support.

Communities often invest in:

• shared retail incubators
• commercial kitchens
• coworking spaces
• micro-loan funds

These can all be valuable tools. But many entrepreneurs still struggle with the fundamentals of running a business – like identifying their ideal customers, pricing their products or services, and building a marketing strategy.

Without ongoing guidance in these areas, early investments in space or capital don’t always translate into long-term success. Business owners need to know how to run their business once they are in the space, not just how to access it.

In many cases, a more effective starting point is not building something new, but using what already exists.

We see this play out in simple, practical ways – microbusiness owners testing products at vendor markets, or selling through shared retail shelves inside existing Main Street shops. These low-cost, real-world environments give entrepreneurs a chance to learn, adapt, and build customers before taking on the risk of a full storefront.

Instead of investing heavily in new incubator spaces, communities can often get better results by creating more of these opportunities for microbusinesses to test and grow within the systems that are already in place.

This could free up more funds for microgrants and microloans for those business owners within the support system who now know how to invest the money wisely in their businesses.

What this tells us

Taken together, these patterns reveal something important.

Many rural and small communities genuinely want to support entrepreneurs, but the programs designed to do that often miss the majority of entrepreneurs who actually exist or aren’t available long enough to make a lasting impact.

Meanwhile, the microbusiness owners who make up the backbone of their communities need practical business education geared toward microbusinesses, guidance, and support that exists over time, not just during a grant cycle.

The bigger opportunity for rural communities

In a recent conversation with Mary Athey, VP of Entrepreneurship at the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, she shared what she’s learned from overseeing the Rural Entrepreneurial Venture (REV) program that perfectly summarizes what we’ve seen as well:

Rural entrepreneurship programs work best when they are embedded in local or regional economic development strategies — not treated as one-off projects.

In most other areas of economic development — workforce development, business attraction, and downtown revitalization — communities have built permanent support systems and institutions, not just short-term programs.

Workforce development has workforce boards, training institutions, and ongoing funding streams. Business attraction has dedicated economic development organizations, marketing strategies, and incentive structures. Downtown revitalization has long-term programs like Main Street America that provide ongoing coordination, promotion, and business support.

These efforts are not treated as temporary experiments. They are embedded into how communities approach economic development.

Microbusiness support, however, rarely has the same level of permanent infrastructure with a cohesive system behind it. Instead, it is often delivered through short-term projects that appear for a year or two and then disappear when funding runs out.

Questions worth asking

Microbusinesses are the backbone of the rural economy and make up 96% of all small businesses. We discussed their economic impact here.

These entrepreneurs need support beyond random workshops and a website full of links and videos with no direction.

Entrepreneurship isn’t like a job that you start and stop in a specific timeframe. People need support when they explore a business idea, launch their business, struggle, pivot, and grow. Those needs don’t happen on a grant timeline.

This raises important questions for communities:

• Are we launching one-off entrepreneurship or microbusiness projects, or building systems that support entrepreneurs over time?
• What would it look like if supporting microbusinesses became a permanent part of our local, regional, or statewide economic development strategy?

Guest post by Mark Gross, A Cheerful Giver

I run A Cheerful Giver out of Elmer, New Jersey. The population is about 1,300. We make candles. Been at it since 1991.

January 11, 2025, I got the phone call. Our building was on fire. Two-alarm. They had to bring in trucks from Gloucester County to help put it out. By morning there was nothing left. Thirty-something years of equipment, raw materials, finished product. Gone.

So yeah. That happened.

The first call I made wasn’t to the insurance company

I picked up the phone and started calling our workers.

We have a partnership with CODI that goes back over 20 years. Adults with special needs hand-wick every candle we sell. That’s not a marketing line. That’s literally how our candles get made. These people are part of our operation.

I had to tell them we still had a company. That they still had work. Honestly, I wasn’t totally sure how we were going to make that true yet, but I said it anyway. Figured we’d work out the details later.

Turned out to be the right call.

The immediate support I didn’t see coming

Orders started rolling in within days. Not normal orders. People buying candles because they heard about the fire and wanted to keep us going. Retailers calling to say they weren’t going anywhere and to take whatever time we needed.

I wasn’t expecting that. But looking back it makes sense. We spent 30 years putting out a product we were proud of. We load our candles with fragrance. We don’t cheap out on materials. We never have. So when the building burned down, people felt like they had a stake in us making it back.

You can’t fake that kind of loyalty. You either built it already or you didn’t. We got lucky that we had.

Getting back to work without a building

Some people would have spent six months planning the comeback. Drawing up blueprints, ordering equipment, getting everything perfect before making a single candle.

We didn’t do that. We cobbled things together. Found space. Got creative. Started pouring candles however we could. It was ugly and it was definitely not how we’d normally operate. But we had orders to fill and people counting on us.

Customers don’t care if your setup is perfect. They care if you’re still open. So we were.

What nobody tells you about rebuilding, long-term

The hardest stretch wasn’t the first week. The first week you’re running on adrenaline, people are rallying around you and it actually feels kind of hopeful.

The hard part is month three, month four. When you’re grinding every day, costs are through the roof, revenue is half what it used to be, and nobody’s writing news stories about you anymore. That’s when it gets lonely.

I don’t have any great wisdom for that part. I just showed up every day and made candles. Some days that’s all you can do.

What I wish I’d done before the fire

Real talk. If I could go back:

Write everything down. How we mixed our fragrances, which suppliers we used, how the equipment was set up. All of that lived in people’s heads. When the building burned, we had to reconstruct it from memory. That was brutal.

Read your insurance policy. Not skim it. Actually sit down with your agent and ask hard questions. If the whole place is gone tomorrow, what exactly happens? You want that answer before you need it.

Build your online sales now, not later. We had a strong wholesale business but when production slowed down, our website, Amazon, and TikTok Shop kept money coming in. If those channels had been bigger before the fire we would have been in much better shape during the rebuild.

Keep a backup supplier list. When you need materials fast you can’t spend three weeks finding vendors. Have the names and numbers ready before you ever need them.

Where things stand now

It’s early 2026 and honestly we might have our best year yet. We’re shipping to thousands of stores around the country and our CODI team is back doing what they do best.

The fire was the worst thing that ever happened to this company. But we came out the other side. Not because we had some brilliant plan. Because we had good people, a good product, and customers who gave a damn.

If you’re dealing with your own disaster right now, all I can say is keep showing up. It’s not glamorous advice. But it’s the only advice I’ve got that I know actually works.

Mark Gross is one of the owners of A Cheerful Giver, a candle manufacturer based in Elmer, New Jersey. Founded in 1991, A Cheerful Giver produces over 1,400 fragrances and partners with CODI to employ adults with special needs. Visit acheerfulgiver.com.

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