I guess you can understand why WWASPS picks places like this community to set up shop.
Too many people would rather grasp at a straw than make the hard choice of moving someplace they can move to where they can get a job and pay the rent.
My family on my dad's side has several generations in a community that is similar in a lot of ways.
One of the things people do is get jobs as truckers. Their job is on the road, so it doesn't matter where their family lives.
Some places you have to own a large piece of land free and clear to be able to feed yourself and afford to live there. Sure, you can buy enough land to stick a house or trailer on, cheap. But you can't earn enough to pay your bills and feed yourself on---not without selling your soul to someplace like SCL.
What I want you to do is convince your county officials to go to the state and see if you can develop a plan and get some development money to get it into action.
What your county needs to do is sit down with some bright whiz kids and come up with a niche.
For example, the area where my parents live/family is from, has a lot of small machine shops. They do parts orders for various places that need parts, and since there are a *lot* of small machine shops, if an order is too big for one they can collaborate. If one goes under, the employees have other places to go. The better managed ones prosper, the poorly managed ones go out of business. But because the county has it going as a small industry, businesses who need that know where to look for suppliers to fill their various parts orders. Your usual supplier too full up to get your contract out when you need it? They can refer you to the shop down the street that can---and the shop down the street can refer overflow business back. Upgrading equipment? Somebody wants your used stuff. Can't keep the business afloat? There *is* someone to buy your assets.
You need a niche. Other than SCL.
Practically speaking, I suspect SCL probably keeps on as good of financial terms as they find necessary with your local elected officials. By which I mean that if they aren't on the take now, if the citizenry rocks the boat, they will be.
Small, rural counties often work that way. Even if, now, the benefit to the officials is just occasionally getting taken to lunch, or getting treated with respect by people who look important. And your elected officials can genuinely tell themselves they're doing "the right thing" for the county.
You need a development plan.
For one thing, there are frequently programs that provide money for vocational training. A group of enough of you together could pick up something you could set up as a manufacturing business and run for enough to pay the bills. Given foreign competition, nobody would be getting rich.
Still, you could get a bunch of you getting training with the financial assistance available to fill the needed roles in your desired business, and then get a small business loan to set it up. Put it in the names of the wives in whatever way you have to to fulfill the requirements of a woman-owned business---because it broadens your loan and grant opportunities.
You can't do it in a haphazard way. There's got to be a very solid analysis of the markets available and your competition. Then you've got to have several somebodies smart enough to do the beancounter work, several somebodies hard-nosed enough to do the management work and run it with an eye to the bottom line, not as a charity for local employment. You've got to have somebodies smart enough to keep your costs and prices down and keep you competitive. You've got to have somebodies with the sales and marketing talents to get out there and sell your products.
Failure to plan is planning to fail. You have to have a solid economic development plan.
The people orchestrating the effort and those that ultimately benefit from it also have to be prepared to make lifelong and vicious local enemies of a number of people very interested in the initial idea---interested in emotional buy in, interested in talking about it, sometimes actually getting the training to do some of the jobs.
Because a number of the ones that try will be either incompetent or won't work out as employees for some other reason. Or their wife or husband or kid or parent or cousin won't work out.
You have to have people running it who are hard nosed enough to put the bottom line first, or it will fail. You have to allow some individuals to fail to have anyone succeed.
Even among those who fail, *most* of them will be able to get some kind of job in a shop or food service or cleaning service that doesn't exist now. But they will still hate you, because especially if they went and got training, they'll feel like they deserve something better.
The competent ones who just don't fit in will leave town and get jobs someplace they do fit in. The incompetent ones will bitch, moan, complain, and hate you bitterly.
Capitalism *works*---but you have to have enough faith in yourself to get out and do it. What you *don't* have to do is already be successful---because there are a lot of grant and loan options out there to get your plan working *if* you build the plan.
But nobody can help your community if you won't pull together and plan.
You can even tell people up front (because everybody will say "it won't be me that fails") that some of the people who try won't succeed at their training or won't be able to get the job done as employees for one reason or another. That the plan won't promise to take care of everybody and won't even try. That individuals are going to have to set their sights on what they really can learn how to do, work hard to learn how to do it, and once you start up, work hard at their jobs and work hard to get along with their coworkers.
Your salaried jobs will probably be working sixty hour weeks just so you don't have to hire as many people and can put those salaried jobs in the hands of people with the talents and temperament to do them best.
You may have to bring in talent from outside the county to run marketing, sales, operations, and the top slot. If you do, it's an understatement to say that that will be an unpopular choice.
You'd have to have a cabal of the most level-headed women, and most able to be hard-nosed capitalists, to own the company and take out the loans. Women who can recognize competence and aren't afraid to hire it. Women who either don't have shiftless husbands or fathers, etc., or exceptionally hard-nosed women who will be willing to sacrifice those relationships, if necessary, to avoid putting father, husband, brother, son, son-in-law, etc. in jobs they can't or won't do right.
Or, if your only business talent is men, you may have to take the harder path of getting business loans and assistance for them to own and run your new significant employer.
Some disgruntled people will set up in competition with the main line of the project---or will try. If you picked the best talents (business savvy and work ethic are talents) for the main line effort, it will succeed. The competition will either succeed or fail depending on *their* talents.
Anyway, capitalism works. But only if you're willing to put in the skull sweat, develop a viable plan, and implement it without being a soft touch for schmucks, micromanagers, abrasive assholes who do more harm than good, and other bad employees/managers.
But it obviously has to be an industry that can sell goods or services to the people outside your community, at a profit, and bring an influx of cash.
The Chamber of Commerce, Lion's Club, or Rotary Club--that kind of thing, anyway, in Helena would be a good place to find successful businessmen who might be willing to take on helping you put together a development plan as a charitable project and a way to "give back" to the state. The business-oriented departments of state universities also might have graduate students willing to take on helping you develop a plan as a project for academic credit. Or you might be able to get one of the professors to make helping your county develop a plan a class project for one of their courses.
Instead of leaving it to county government, what you'd really want to do is organize your friends and neighbors into an economic development club.
Blah-blah County Economic Development Society or somesuch.
I suspect SCL will see it (correctly) as a threat and try to sabatoge it. I suspect they'll play dirty. Just don't let them. They can't stop you if you start the club yourself and don't let their influences in the door.
You can develop a business plan for whatever size group of people you get to buy in---from one or two to hundreds or even thousands. Profitable enterprises come in all shapes and sizes.
Your county's biggest problem is the same as the biggest problem of all rural, poor counties. Laying down and giving up and believing the lie that you can't do it. People need stuff. People want to buy stuff. People want to trade with you if you will figure out what they need and want and bring it to the table.
With educational and small business assistance available for government, the only reason for a community to fail in the US is if everybody moves out and leaves it a ghost town (which truly isn't a failure---the *people* are fine, just elsewhere), or if they give up and don't try.
Take the damn grants and loans. The worst that can happen is that you'd have to declare bankruptcy. Go for the grants as much as possible, of course, because student loans are almost never dischargeable in bankruptcy---but there are ways to fiddle with that a lot to ease the pain.
On business grants and loans, the worst that can happen, if you incorporate, is that the business fails.
And if someone learns a useful trade and the business fails (or they get fired or not hired), they don't necessarily have only the option of bankruptcy---they can move and get a job somewhere else in their field.
Your worst case on getting your friends and neighbors together in an economic development club and getting help with a solid business plan is better than your best case of just sitting there and waiting for some business from outside the community to come in and rescue you---or worse, just giving up altogether.
Warning: Don't let the Chamber of Commerce or the elected officials run the thing. It leaves your organization too susceptible to any sabotage efforts SCL might choose to try. Understand in advance that in *some* counties, county officials could be persuaded to fuck with you with zoning problems, construction permits, and other red tape. I don't know if your county is like that, but in some counties there is corruption that is so entrenched that moving is the best choice there is.
Anyway, don't just say how poor your county is. Change it. *You* can do that. All you have to do is stand up and lead---and know *where* to lead. Which I've just told you.
BTW---I ran a just-me consulting business, incorporated, at a very solid profit and just dissolved it when I wanted to do something else. I'm now running a just-me small business as a writer. Again, profitable. It *is* possible to run both kinds so badly you run at a loss or go out of business. Both small (very small) businesses were/are net contributors to my community because they bring in money from outside. In both cases, the difference from being an employee is having to deal with the paperwork and business decisions yourself.
My uncle ran a successful machine shop small business. My mother in law ran a small business that failed. My husband's grandfather has run multiple successful small businesses, some very small, some at the upper end of "small"--he was a developer building condos in Florida. I've seen friends run small businesses that failed, and some that succeeded.
Do your market research. Keep your expenses down--especially unnecessary business trips. Don't buy or rent facilities or office space you can manage without--not until there's a *strong* business case for renting/buying the space. Don't turn away work just because it's uninteresting. Don't run it as a charity. Don't make hard luck loans. Don't make people part owners unless they buy in with cash---but be damned careful about who's holding the controlling interest and who could potentially buy it up. After you're up and running, you can potentially offer valued employees opportunity to buy in at a discounted share price as a reward (new issue shares), but keep the discount small and limit who you offer the opportunity to. Don't hire people who you don't need or who are bad business choices because of family ties, domestic pressure, or friendship. Don't undercapitalize. Don't mistake spinning your wheels in the office at something that's "work" (like sitting at your front desk and answering the phone) if it's not the thing you could do that most contributes to or preserves your bottom line. Don't hesitate to fire deadwood. Don't hire people with red flags of deadwood in the first place. Don't hesitate to hire from outside if those are the talents I want you to have---but make wise cost/benefit decisions about it. Know the difference between salary and profit. Be damned careful who you have doing the books and touching the money, and watch them like a hawk. Sales and marketing are your lifeblood. You can have the best product in the world, and if you can't or don't sell it at a sufficient profit margin, you're screwed.
Ginger may agree or disagree with me on some of this. Listen to her. She and her husband are also running an apparently successful small business. That is, I assume she's in the black and not the red---if you're going to ask her, might be tactful to ask privately. She could always tell you to go to hell, but she seems pretty nice so I wouldn't be surprised if she could give you some good advice.
But don't roll over and play dead and say the county is poor. Fix it. You're obviously smart. Running a business isn't rocket science, it just takes finding out how and exercising the self-discipline to do it.
Julie
