Hey everybody, welcome back to the old-fashioned on-purpose podcast.

So as many of you know, about five years ago, we purchased the oldest operating soda fountain in the state of Wyoming.

And said soda fountain is located in a town of 175 people. Now, sometimes when I say that, people get confused and think I mean

175,000 people. And nope, it's just 175.5. Period. 175 people. So as you can imagine, it's been one hell of an adventure. And I've talked

about it a lot here on the show. So if you've been around for any length of time, you know some of

that saga. But one of the things that comes up when I talk about this, whether in person or

online, is that many of you kind of get the wheels turning and you're like,

what would it look like if you did the same thing? If you opened a business in your small town

or your medium-sized town and you start to think about possibilities, I love that so much.

And when you ask me questions and for advice, I always get a little tongue tied because I have

so many things I want to say and so many layers

and so many bits of nuance and thoughts. And so today, I finally organized it mostly-ish into

a rational stream of consciousness, I hope. And I'm going to share some of my biggest lessons

that I have learned from running a business in this tiny, quirky town. So before we get started, just a

quick reminder, I still have old-fashioned on-purpose planners available. It's not too late to get

started. I don't care if you had your beginning of the year off to a rocky start. It's still

early in the season. So grab it if you need help organizing your life, your garden, your homestead,

your kitchen, just any bits and pieces of anything that you have going in your old-fashioned

life, the planner will help you out. It's the one I use every single day, multiple times a day,

and I have for five plus years. You can grab yours over at prairie planner.com, and you can see

inside and all the details over there too.

Okay, so before I get into my list, I just want to, well, reiterate, and this is something that I've been thinking about a lot. And that is the fact that if you are starting a business,

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