In this episode of Breaking Down Barriers, McKenzie sits down with Becky McCray to unpack why the old lines between "business" and "community project" don't hold up anymore, especially in rural America. Becky has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of entrepreneurship and small-town community building, and she brings that experience to life through real examples: an engineer wrestling with whether a timber festival makes him a "greedy capitalist" or a "community do-gooder," a divided building in Colfax, WA that became home to microbusinesses, and a beautification project in Freedom, Oklahoma (population under 200) that's using duct tape and cardboard mockups to let residents co-design their own downtown before a single dollar is spent.

Becky and McKenzie talk about:

• Why the for-profit/nonprofit divide is a legal classification, not a reflection of how communities actually think about value
• How Freedom, Oklahoma is blending history, public space, and economic development into one active-living and beautification project
• The "idea-friendly method": gather your crowd, build connections, take small steps
• Why bigger towns tend toward silos and how smaller towns can model a better way
• Why standardized entrepreneurship curriculums fail, and what happens when programs start with intake instead of a lecture outline
• The new cohort model Becky and Deb Brown (SaveYour.Town) are building with Andrew Button of Mashup Lab, bringing entrepreneurial and community-minded participants into the same room

Becky's closing advice: Start looking around your own community. The blending of business and community thinking is already happening. You just have to go find it and start the conversation.

Connect with Becky:

• SaveYour.Town
• LinkedIn: Becky McCray
• BeckyMcCray.com
• Small Biz Survival newsletter
• 2026 Rural Challenges Survey

In this episode of Breaking Down Barriers, David sits down with Marci Goodwin, co-founder of SmartStart Business Development and creator of the SmartStart Navigator, to talk about the "hidden entrepreneurs" quietly reshaping small-town economies across the country.

Marci shares how a SaaS platform originally built for high-growth tech startups found its real audience in microbusinesses—the makers, side-hustlers, and mom-and-pop owners who make up the vast majority of U.S. businesses but rarely walk through the doors of an SBDC or chamber of commerce. She and David dig into why these owner-operated businesses (fewer than 10 employees, many with just one) are the true engine of local economic activity, especially as rural Main Streets lose their traditional employer businesses.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: how SmartStart's bootstrapped, community-embedded model works; the baby-steps approach to getting microbusinesses "bankable"; real stories of downtown revitalization sparked by a single entrepreneur pulling others up behind her; and why traditional KPIs like jobs created and tax revenue don't capture the real impact of this work. Marci introduces the concept of KIIs—Key Impact Indicators—as a better way to measure success before the traditional metrics ever show up.

In this episode:

• Why so many U.S. businesses are microbusinesses, and why that matters
• How SmartStart Navigator helps communities find entrepreneurs who don't yet see themselves that way
• The customer-development-first approach to getting a business "bank ready"
• Two Main Street revival stories—from a single-storefront herbalist to a six-vendor maker community
• Why traditional KPIs fail microbusinesses, and what Key Impact Indicators (KIIs) look like instead
• Advice for the next generation of economic development practitioners: get out from behind the desk

Connect with Marci Goodwin:

• LinkedIn: Marci Goodwin
• SmartStart Business Development
• SmartStartNavigator.com

Guest: Deb Brown, rural economic development specialist and co-founder of SaveYour.Town Host: McKenzie Dial-Fritscher, SVP of People, Economic Impact Catalyst

Episode Summary Deb Brown has spent over a decade working with rural communities across the country through keynotes, workshops, and site visits. As a former chamber director in a town of 7,800 in Iowa, she led an empty buildings tour that helped fill vacant downtown buildings in 18 months, and she's since built that experience into SaveYour.Town, a workbook, and network built around the "idea-friendly method." In this conversation, McKenzie and Deb talk about what actually moves the needle in small towns. Not big grants or outside investment, but small, community-owned steps that build trust, ownership, and momentum.

In this episode:

• What "small town" really means, and why Deb lets communities self-identify rather than using population cutoffs
• The five barriers that keep resurfacing across a decade of rural community surveys
• The idea-friendly method: why gathering a willing crowd beats forming a committee
• Reframing setbacks as data instead of failure, with real examples from the field
• Practical ways to build trust with reluctant or resistant building owners
• Why storytelling and self-reliance are the through-line of every successful small-town project
• The empty buildings tour that turned around a town: how it started and what it produced
• AI as a capacity tool for overstretched rural leaders, not another thing to fear

Resources Mentioned:

• SaveYour.Town free weekly newsletter
• Deb's speaker site and workbook