This has been another interesting week in next year country.
Farmers last week were sitting-in at the Saskatchewan legislature, disrupting politician’s schedules to the extent that a tea for retiring lieutenant-governor Jack Wiebe was cancelled.
A farmer himself in another life, one can only wonder what His Honor
privately thought of the cancelling of his tea under such circumstances.
On the home front, in less than a week I attended no less than three separate sessions on economic development.
In all cases, the message was the same: Be proactive. Find your strengths and build on them. Change will happen and it can be good. There is a lot of scope for rural development. Work together as families, groups or communities.
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I spent last Tuesday with about 100 rural women at “Agrowoman” in Kindersley, Sask. The afternoon was given over to the Meridian Community Futures Corporation, a 21Ú2 hour session, which I thought looking at the program was just a tad long for listening to a talk on rural development.
How wrong I was.
Vickie Newmeyer of Meridian told us that being a successful entrepreneur has five elements: Product, what we are selling; Place, which is all about “location, location, location”; Price, or how much we need and the consumer can afford; Promotion, which should connect to the customer’s emotions of what they need or want and; people, who, after all, are the business.
Marketing, she said, is the most important element and in our rural communities, we haven’t done a good job of marketing. We constantly underrate what we do.
This echoed the words of Monica Coney of Gravelbourg, Sask., heard a few days earlier, who said rural Saskatchewan is entrepreneurial heaven because there is so little here, and of University of Saskatchewan professor emeritus Red Williams who, in Eston, Sask., the night before, said the state of our development and sale of our primary products is a shame.
Newmeyer said we have to learn what people want and do better than anyone else in providing it.
To prove we could do it, we were divided into groups of 10 and had to build a lemonade stand business from the ground up – the stands were there, but with play money provided we had to buy our location, decorate it, make our lemonade and decide how to advertise.
It was a lesson in working together, on some of the pitfalls of starting a business and of the satisfaction of seeing a job well done. Or, to put it another way, a living example of the expression “when you’re given lemons, make lemonade.”
