When I was asked to write a column for a rural paper, my honest first reaction was to wonder whether I had any business doing it. I currently live in Edmonton, a city of more than a million people. It felt a little presumptuous to type up advice from here and send it out down highways twelve to sixteen where everybody already knows how things work and don’t need someone from the big smoke telling them.

But my current address doesn’t really tell the whole story. I grew up in Coronation and once upon a time used to help out in the photo lab at the Coronation Review. Before I went back to business school my first job was fixing combines for Case in Lethbridge and I've owned and operated a business in a hamlet with an official population of 87 people where I had more than 20 staff. Today I run several business in a city where I could meet 87 people a day and never see the same face twice. Having lived and done business on both sides of the urban rural divide I've had the opportunity to think about the differences between the two.

So rather than pretend to be something I'm not, I thought the most useful thing I could offer is the comparison itself. Because the two experiences taught me almost opposite lessons, and the gap between them explains a problem I get asked about constantly when I work with companies in smaller centers.

The hamlet experience

In a small centre, growth came from breadth.

When you're serving a community of a few hundred people, or a trading area of a few thousand, you cannot survive on a narrow slice. There simply isn't enough volume in any single slice. What worked was offering a wide enough array of overlapping services that whatever a customer walked in needing, I had some version of an answer. One job led into the next. The person who came for one thing found out I could also handle the other three things they'd been putting off.

And here's the part that people who've only done business in a city find hard to believe: it was actually possible to capture an entire market segment. Not most of it — all of it. If you were the person in the region who did a thing well and answered your phone, you were the person who did that thing. Reputation travelled at the speed of conversation, and there was no competitor two blocks over.

Being general wasn't a weakness there. It was the strategy.

The city experience

In a city, that same approach quietly kills you.

The analogy I keep coming back to is this: imagine somebody standing at the top of a skyscraper, looking down at the crowd on the street, trying to find you. Thousands of people down there. Every one of them a small grey dot. If you're not waving a red flag, they will never pick you out. Not because you aren't good, not because they don't want what you're selling, but because you look exactly like everyone else from that height.

Your red flag is your focus. It's the one specific, unmistakable thing you say about yourself that makes a stranger stop scanning and point. "We do a bit of everything" is not a red flag. It's grey.

The math is different too, and it's forgiving in a way rural business never is. In a city, you don't need the whole market. Capturing three to five per cent of a segment can build a large, successful, genuinely prosperous business. You get to give up ninety-five per cent of the room. But the price of that math is that you have to actually give it up — out loud, in your messaging, in a way that lets people self-select toward you.

That's the trade. Rural: wide net, whole market, or close to it. Urban: narrow net, tiny slice, still a great living.

Where people hit the wall

Here's why any of this matters to somebody reading a rural paper.

A lot of people in surrounding communities ask me the same question in slightly different words: how do I draw more business out of the larger centres? They can see the customers there. They know their work is as good as anyone's. Often it's better and cheaper. But they can’t get traction in a bigger center and they can't figure out why.

Almost every time, the wall they've hit isn't quality, price, or distance. It's a communication barrier. They're describing their business the way they've always described it — the way that works beautifully in a place where people already know them and where being able to do everything is a genuine selling point. Then they aim that same general message at a city, where it reads as grey.

If you want to pull customers out of a larger centre, your messaging has to get dramatically more focused than it needs to be at home. Uncomfortably focused. Focused enough that it feels like you're leaving money on the table — and then trust that the three to five per cent is plenty, because it is.

You don't have to change what you do. You have to change what you lead with. Pick the sharpest, most specific, most findable thing in your lineup and wave it like a flag.

Somebody up on that skyscraper is looking for exactly you. Make it easy on them.