Costco Connection - August 2006

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PAUL & SARAH EDWARDS: LIFESTYLES FOR THE MILLENNIUM

Paul & Sarah Edwards are pioneers in the home-business field. They can be reached on the Web at www.working fromhome.com.

Think local, think global

”I LIVE IN A SMALL CITY where there isn’t enough business for me locally, but competition on the Internet is such that I can’t live on what I earn from international jobs,” one of our readers explained. This is a dilemma we hear often these days. The global village is here, with newfound opportunities as well as a new set of challenges. We believe the flexibility of having an independent career can be an advantage in riding the waves of a changing marketplace.

Often that means having one foot solidly in your local community and the other in the broader world of national and international commerce. Recast your businesses so that you can

tap the vast cyber-world with a specialized niche offering, while providing basic services or products to your own community.

If you are creating Web sites, for example, it’s important to find a specialized industry you can serve that requires a high level of personal communication and understanding based on your experience. Such a specialty can attract clients from anywhere who are willing to pay well.

Then, within your community, you can be more generalized, serving clients and customers in a broader range of industries, from a local writer to a local dry cleaner, who appreciate the hands-on person-to-person touch of working with someone face-to-face.

Sometimes a novel niche can thrive both on the Internet and regionally, such as Nancy Coonridge’s free-range goat cheese with locally grown spices from the wilds of New Mexico. You can also repackage what you offer to suit local needs so it will serve a broader national or international marketplace, like Michelle Dunn, who operated a local collection business in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and then wrote an e-book and developed a member-based Web site, www.credit-and-collections.com, as a resource for others in her profession.

In other words, today’s economy can reward those who think both large and small. C

Wanted: Smart
businesses

WITH THE ECONOMY shifting in the face of worldwide competition from glob-alization, automation and higher energy costs, have you started a business or changed an existing one to respond to these challenges?

For example, have you found ways to localize your business to differentiate it from global competition? Or have you started an energy-related business?

If so, The Connection and Paul and Sarah Edwards would like to hear about what you’ve done and the challenges you experienced. Your story may be featured in an upcoming book by the Edwardses and in a future Connection article.