RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 1
Business Research Proposal: Rural Start-Up Business Struggles
Olen C. Appleton
Master of Business Administration in Finance of Liberty University
BUSI 600: Business Research Methods
Dr. Michael Walker
Author Note
Olen Appleton
I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Olen Appleton
Email: oappleton@liberty.edu
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 2
Executive Summary
The research proposal sets out to examine how rural markets and small businesses start-
ups struggle in the beginning stages. In this respect, this research endeavors to understand the
different obstacles that rural start-ups face in their markets compared to the larger urban and
business saturated markets. A review of previous small-business studies in general supplemented
with firsthand witness accounts to rural start-up struggles will be conducted thoroughly.
Thereafter, a quantitative study will be executed using surveys conducted in person at several
rural community small businesses and those results will be contrasted to the previously published
accounts of general small business start-up struggle studies. There will be first-hand collected
questionnaire surveys conducted in person with between 30 to 50 respondents in line with what
their most memorable struggles were during the start-up formation phase of their business. The
final questions of the survey will be open-ended questions seeking what the opinion of the small
business owner in the rural market believes is different about owning and running a small
business start-up compared to an urban business. Results from the study will be presented in
writing in the research report area body and can also be represented graphically for constructive
comparison. Study findings will help individuals and companies understand the most common
struggles and challenges that have faced rurally located small business start-ups and highlight the
differences in those struggles versus urban market challenges so that businesses can better
prepare, prevent, and proactively adjust company plans to avoid the common challenges
discovered in the research.
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 3
Table of Contents
Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………………….2
Introduction……….……………………………………………………………………………….4
Problem Statement......…………………………………………………………………………….5
Literature Review………………………………………………………………………………….6
Importance/Benefits of the Study…...……………………………………………………...……12
Research Design………………………………………………………………………………….13
Nature and Form of Results……………………………………………………………………...15
Budget…………….……………………………………………………………………………...17
Schedule...………..………………………………………………………………………………17
Ethical Considerations…………………………………………………………………………...19
Implications and Considerations.………………………………………………………………...20
References…...………………...…………………………………………………………………21
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 4
1.0 Introduction
The dream of many entrepreneurs and businesspeople is to manage or own a business that
earns profits hand over foot without challenges. Those people that envision themselves in the
dream believe it is possible because of the products that they trust will sell, or because they have
a super-sized confidence in their abilities to manage and lead business operations in any market.
Those dreams are often the catalyst that sparks the commitment and execution of plans to open a
small business, and those dreams can quickly encounter reality. For small businesses that expect
success in rural geographic locations, they must first expect struggles and obstacles to attempt to
derail those dreams. Opening a business without insight into the specific struggles facing a
business is the quickest way to see that dream became a failure. Many studies have been
conducted about the most common struggles facing small business start-ups across a country or
industry, but those studies do what most of America has done, and that is forget about the rural
“little-man” that serves country towns and communities without a franchise brand name to boost
recognition. This study seeks after those smaller rural community start-ups and the challenges
that are currently facing them to be relevant to those attempting to earn a living and be successful
relative to their community standards and not relative to big money start-ups in city and urban
areas.
Like growing a cornfield from seeds, growing a successful start-up in the country can
prove rewarding. Identifying the common challenges can provide the owners with knowledge to
proactively prepare and adjust to avoid falling into the pitfalls that are often unsurvivable in
these little markets with start-ups frequently having very little capital to overcome many early
challenges. Facing challenges are unavoidable, and even with this study results, challenges will
still arise that are unexpected, but this study lays the perception and understanding that all
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 5
challenges are traversable and can be countered without facing ultimate failure. Many success
stories come through those struggles. In a September 2016 article, one author named Pruitt, P
describes the success through failure when he says, success does not take a straight line. There
often are many twists, turns and bumps along the way. Life can change in an instant. What is
most important on day could totally change by the next. Look at each challenge in your business
as an opportunity, and you will realize some of today’s biggest failures will provide the greatest
foundation for future success (Pruitt, 2016). The significance of this study will help those rural
start-up owners take bold steps to detect, identify, and overcome those common struggles others
before them have faced. For instance, smaller communities mean smaller populations of
potential in-person customers, smaller revenues, and community name recognition are problems
commonly facing rural business, but maximizing customers, revenues and growing name
recognition and community trust can become priorities in strategizing business efforts for new
owners after learning the details through other accounts. To respond to the research problem, the
proposal seeks to evaluate current relevant market conditions and owners and specify what start-
up struggles are rurally impactful instead of the urban struggles often found in many prior
studies.
2.0 Problem Statement
The thesis statement for this problem statement is this research is a study on the
challenges that are specific to rural start-up businesses to prepare for, prevent, and then overcome
those challenges by implementing strategies that can reduce the impact of these rural struggles.
The hypothesis for this research is that this research will go beyond the generic issues and
concerns other studies have packaged as a product that benefits all start-up owners and business
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 6
researchers. This specifically relevant study focused on the rural start-ups will reveal
information specially packaged for rural owners to implement.
3.0 Literature Review
3.1 The Shared Struggles of Urban and Rural Start-Ups
Business case studies and professional studies have been helpful for business students
and business owners alike to identify and understand challenges and struggles facing start-ups
for future business owners and managers to reach success by learning from struggles of others
instead of the hard way and struggling themselves against common problems. One study that has
been published in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research in 1998
attempted to highlight some factors influencing success and failure in small businesses. The
Journal states many common factors affecting start-ups across all market sizes in some points,
but also points out the difficulties of pinpointing anything specific to any one type of start-up
The first challenge that can arise for start-ups in all markets is the challenge that often is not
identified until too late after opening business. That challenge comes from the same place as the
motivation for the start-up for the owner when the journal says, the motivation for start-up is
likely to have implications for the sort of support services and training needs required by
business founders and may also have a bearing on their ultimate success or failure in business
ownership. They then go on to describe the complexities of successful business start ups when
they quote studies that posit that the probability of launching a successful business is not based
on a fixed set of attributes but on an infinite variety of combinations in which an individual’s
positive attributes might outweigh their negative attributes (Watson et al., 1998). In this study,
there were 166 respondents and some of the motivations that were common across them ranged
from the feeling of entrepreneurial factor, desire to be independent, use own creative skills, do
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 7
enjoyable work, make a lot of money, and financial needs factors were common motivators
across all the respondents in the study. This study did not break down the numbers of businesses
across rural and urban businesses, and it lists the motivations to try to see how the respondent
would quantify success potentially. Watson et al, 1998 conclusions show that marketing and
finance are problems for small business owner-managers. Finding/keeping sales outlets and
marketing/selling the product or service and dealing with the competition were important
problems for all respondents. Obtaining finance was more of a problem for those who had ceased
trading, and for those still trading keeping up with changes in the marketplace and retaining
necessary skills were more problematic (Pg. 5). This study and others like it do discover
challenges and motivators to start-ups and other factors attributable to these kind of companies in
general. For rural companies, this information is not completely relatable to them because the
respondents are from too many areas not facing the same situations as themselves.
3.2 Uncertainties in Entrepreneurship and Reactions to Them
Approaching the study of the rural community of businesses with careful considerations
of the realities of business ownership in general is effective as discussed in the previous section
of the proposal, but it is important to realize that even with other studies showing common
challenges and struggles that even the most educated on these recorded factors would still face
challenges. The certainty with business owning is that you will face uncertainties never
expected. This research is to give the tools to avoid the common ones and not all the problems
that could ever possibly exist. Controlling for the unexpected and the uncertainties that cannot
be efficiently accounted for with available resources is not the goal of the research. That is why
only the variables that are common struggles across the research will be used. The uncertainty
can be studied by other experts, but it will always be changing. In the journal Small Business
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 8
Economics, 2000, Marvo Van Gelderen et al says of uncertainty, The uncertainty encountered by
the entrepreneur can be conceptualized on the industry level, the firm level, and the personal
level. On the industry level there are forms of uncertainty the small-scale starter usually cannot
influence and just must deal with. First, there is uncertainty as caused by change and the
unpredictability of the economic environment. (2000) Large urban areas have a slight advantage
in evidence and research and the Van Gelderen research points it out by describing different
founders by saying, the new business founders often cannot calculate their future profits in
advance. For example, someone who plans a new McDonalds outlet might have a fair estimate of
the degree to which this outlet will be a success, due to experiences with all previous outlets. For
new business starters this does not hold. (Para, 1.3)
Specific uncertainties, by definition, cannot be predicted, but learning enough about how
to process your thoughts and operations to handle unexpected events can help all companies rural
and urban handle their own challenges. Van Gelderen generalizes how entrepreneurs understand
the uncertainty and lists some examples; this is how entrepreneurs commonly understand
uncertainty. As with any firm, the startup firm will try to make success as likely as possible.
Efforts to do so concern the control of resources, resulting in a smaller amount of resource
uncertainty. Unfaithful customers, unreliable suppliers, lack of finance, opportunistic employees
are all examples of resource uncertainty. Resource uncertainty measures the uncertainty that
remains when the firm starter has dealt with these sources (Para 1.4). Intuition, creativity, and
imagination will help supplement the incomplete information one has when they face
uncertainties. Developing the knowledge base about your business, market and target customers
reduces the struggles an owner will face due to uncertainty originating in a lack of knowledge
about a particular market factor.
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 9
This knowledge gap is where this research seeks to fall into a currently broad void of
information. Currently, there is a lack of specific studies only about the start-up businesses in
rural communities, and rural business owners continue to fall into difficulties because no one has
studied them and recorded a collective report about these issues for rural owners to read and use
to guide them when they face what is currently an uncertainty, but with a published study, may
become a familiar situation with previously learned solution ready for implementation upon
problem recognition.
3.3 Rural Start-Ups Deserve Dedicated Research
Rural America has never gotten the attention that they need for hard work that they do
without any of the recognition that large corporations and city business owners receive. A truth
that is common knowledge, yet largely ignored in America is that our entire country could fail if
it were not for the types of businesses that operate in rural America. Agriculture businesses
across rural communities that grow and provide most of all food consumed in America are what
keep Americans full and happy and able to focus on their other desires without fear of where
their next meal will come from like many second and third world countries. A century ago, and
before, most agriculture business was owned by local rural farmers and their families, friends,
and community hires doing all the work in the field and on the office table to become profitable
and successful for their family and themselves. As the decades passed, and attention was paid to
what the city could do to make being successful easier, more and more rural farmers, and the
businesses in their communities that supported them, begun to disappear to be replaced by large
agriculture companies ran like a corporate manufacturing system that cared less about the
community and more about the profit. These rural business owners fled for the city chasing that
success, but also because they began to face challenges and struggles running the businesses that
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 10
they did not know how to overcome. This research is different than most company’s research
because it does not seek to profit just one company dramatically, but instead it seeks to help rural
communities and rural businesses across the United States to make their own little piece of the
pie more successful by using them to contribute to a collective data set and understanding of
common challenges that others face so that they too can overcome or avoid the information.
Some limited studies have been conducted highlighting this difference between the city
and the rural start-ups, but not extensively enough to publish as a product with recommendations
and a readability that rural America can adopt and relate to. In a study conducted by Steven
Deller, Matt Kures, and Tessa Conroy in Rural entrepreneurship and migration journal
highlighting some differences like, Rural areas within the U.S. tend to have lower levels of
formal education, older age profiles, limited access to financial capital, and lower rates of
entrepreneurship, as measured by business start-ups. In addressing the challenges facing rural
economic growth and development, policies have often centered on exogenously bolstering
perceived asset deficits by attracting investment from metropolitan areas (2019).
Data from that study suggests that an unreported problem that is probably common across
rural businesses may exist that has not been collectively solved and shared. In the same study
from 2019, data suggest that from 1977 to 2014 the average annual gross job creation for rural
counties from new business formation was just over 739,000 and almost 1,255,000 from existing
businesses. Unfortunately, at the same time, many existing businesses are shedding jobs and even
ceasing operations. If we look at net job growth from existing businesses over the same period,
there is an average annual net job loss of just over 569,000 (Pg. 2). This data suggests a problem
exists in rural communities and rural start-ups that contributes to an inability to create jobs and
thus reducing growth and sustainability for these companies. Job growth and losses in cities
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 11
rarely come from a population shortage of potential employees, and potential employees in rural
towns possibly value different job incentives, benefits, etc. than urban employees do, and a study
into the rural community could help to identify and solve these issues that are common across
rural America.
While researching rural start-ups, its possible that the urban cities do play some part in
the specific struggles the rural business faces. Without reaching out to respondents in varying
rural businesses across America, it cannot be known if certain factors have been experienced
commonly across rural communities nationally. However, Niclas Lavesson, conducted some
prelimary research into how cities could affect the rural start-ups specifically in ways they do not
affect the city start-ups equally. Lavesson wrote, it is not only those better opportunities for
entrepreneurship exist in cities but also that better resources for firm start-ups are offered. Other
– often rural – places have fewer of these resources and generally the supply conditions are poor.
In these communities, there is a lack of jobs and individual unemployment spells are longer.
Generally, rural populations are aging, which causes depopulation, and education levels are
lower than in cities. Seemingly, rural regions are likely to raise necessity-based firm start-ups
(Lavesson, 2017). In the research proposed in this project, quantitative questions can be
developed giving some idea if the rural business owners have faced challenges or faced
advantages due to the city nearest to them. The issues with attaining supplies, training,
customers, and other things from the city nearest a community or the inability to attain those
things easily could be rural specific, but business owners’ answers to the survey will give insight
into how much it has attributed to success or failure overall of the company.
Success of a business owner in a rural community contributes to success of others in the
community through the benefits the company provides others. Some rural businesses can
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 12
provide jobs for people when employment opportunities are slim to none, and some rural
businesses provide resources that were previously difficult to obtain, and those are just a few
examples of why caring about the success of small business start-ups in America is important.
Studying the rural businesses does not detract from the importance of studying the city business
start-ups but reviewing literature and data about start-ups cannot give the information necessary
to directly relate and connect to individual business owners in the country. Current, accurate,
and relatable struggles that others just like them face will give them something that is more
trustable than studies conducted from outsiders perceived to come from the city that is taking out
all the “little guys.” It is time to give back and helping one business in a rural community may
seem small, but sometimes one business is a large percentage of all business transactions in a
rural community and the success and failure of that business impacts a far larger percentage of
those towns than any one business could in a city. This research gives back to those that give so
much for our country.
4.0 Importance/Benefits
The study will help to understand how rural start-up companies differ from urban start-
ups regarding the challenges they face and how to overcome them. This would then provide
evidence that comes from respondents directly, all relatively similar in socioeconomic
conditions, that supports the claim that rural challenges are different and then give rural owners
solutions and recommendations that have been tested or used by others facing the similar
challenges. The study will equally help businesses take responsibility of any adverse effects they
face if they read this study, but do not accept and follow the recommendations for problems they
may face. By distributing the final product across rural businesses, there should be plenty of
companies that are able to implement change and make management choices proactively to
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 13
avoid these common problems altogether. This study will also raise awareness to the problems
facing rural communities in a way that the readers from the city may never have known existed,
and potentially create opportunities for collective solutions from overreach and partners in the
urban areas.
Through this study, future studies will be able to dig deeper to try and understand more
locally specific issues affecting areas as small as counties and individual states and create the
common agreement that working together with others and sharing information helps the success
of each other. Start-ups in rural areas will be able to evaluate and assess their operations to see if
they are on the path to these problems, or are currently facing them, and contribute knowledge
that alters the trajectory of the business using the results. The findings will not only help current
small business rural start-ups, but equally help future business start-up owners prepare prior to
launching the business using the most up to date and relevant information before any of the
challenges can begin to manifest.
5.0 Research Design
5.1 Sample Design and Participants
A total of 30 to 50 rural start-up owners will be selected to respond to the research issue.
The users will be selected from different states across the United States with some controls such
as similar populations, similar distances to cities, and then randomly selected from within the
rural community businesses. When selecting the participants its important to remember some of
the lessons learned through the textbook reading like, the participants or participants selected for
the experiment should be representative of the target population to which the researcher wishes
to generalize the study’s results (Schindler, 2021).
5.2 Data Collection Design, Instrument and Procedure
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A questionnaire will be designed that will need to be conducted in person to truly grasp
the environment, the emotion, and the processes that these owners use to reason and react to the
questions of the challenges they have faced. The questionnaire design will consist of 15 closed-
ended questions and 5 open-ended questions. The 15 closed-ended questions will be used to get
a prioritized style list of factors they face identified and ranked from most difficult to overcome
to least difficult in their experience. The 5 open-ended questions give the respondent the
opportunity to expound on any additional challenges and advice they can contribute to other rural
start-up owners that would have been good to know before they faced the issue themselves.
These open-ended questions will help to develop recommendations for common challenges when
the solutions to open-ended questions become similar and common. Prior to departing for these
towns for the interviews, phone calls will be made to give a brief overview of the purpose and
objective of the study to gain approval from the businesses prior to departing for the towns to
eliminate some costs from travelling.
In addition, a brief description and purpose of the survey will be provided to the
respondents in their preferred medium prior to arrival, and then again at the beginning of the
survey informing the respondents about the goal and process of collecting their information for
the survey. The survey will accept up to 50 respondents that agree to participate in the study.
The questionnaire design is selected because it is possible to use information gathered from some
of the literature reviewed supporting this deeper study as starting points to begin discovering if
challenges are like those in literature or if the challenges have evolved from the last research in
the literature reviewed. The small sample size of only 50 respondents may be deemed too small
for highly reliable data, but one way to maximize the trustworthiness of this study is to reduce
the possibility of survey lying and inaccuracy. Using professional advice about surveys is part of
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 15
the reason why these questionnaires will be conducted in person, but mTab professional survey
advice will be implemented during those surveys and those controls are; not waiting too long to
ask about issues people may forget, avoid leading questions steering people toward a desired
answer or one that is polite or hip or politically correct, eliminate language that is embarrassing
or publicly demoralizing, and one last major advice to follow in the survey is to give the
respondent adequate time to think about their responses without being rushed by having a time
limit set and known before the survey (mTab, 2018).
5.3 Ethical Requirements
In research, it is important to consider ethical considerations that are relative to the
environment and any personnel connected in any way to the research. Since there will be more
personnel assisting with data gathering and combining than just one-person, ethical requirements
should be communicated to all research project personnel to ensure the ethical standard is known
throughout the study. Studying rural communities could face some backlash for varying ethical
observations to include a small variety of diverse start-up owners’ ethnicities and other ethical
factors to include the cultures associated with rural communities compared to cities where some
researcher workers could be from. The ethical requirement should follow Dr. Eugene Fram’s
advice to emphasize ethics and conduct a review of existing ethical standards during the research
program orientation process of every new member or employee-and then reinforce briefly in
regular intervals (Fram, 2018).
6.0 Nature and Form of Results
The results of this study will be cultivated after review of relevant literature regarding
start-up studies in general and in specifics for rural businesses combined and heavily dependent
on the outcome of the in-person survey findings. This nature and form of the results will be
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 16
found using computational methods. Other studies have used the quantitative methods that this
study will utilize to find information and present it effectively, and to keep the results of the
literature review more consistent across comparisons to new survey data, all results will be
presented in these quantitative ways. The dependent variable in the study that is similar was
conducted by Greenberg, Farja, and Gimmon was job growth, but in this study, the success is
measured by challenge survivability and financial growth. Just like our survey, they developed a
quantitative questionnaire in collaboration with rural economy experts and tested on a pilot
sample. Surveyors went through training aimed to familiarize them with terms related to rural
regions and their unique characteristics as well as understanding the questionnaire and its
objectives (2018). Those things are like the way that this survey and surveyors will be collecting
information and the results will be presented similarly.
Since the study seeks to find the common challenges facing start-ups in rural markets that
are specific to those markets primarily, discover similar challenges that are relevant across rural
and urban start-ups, and lastly provide feedback and recommendations from the respondents on
how they overcame or failed while facing the challenges; results will be presented with tables
showing percentages of respondents that have experienced different challenges, and then ranked
in order from most to least common followed up by feedback and recommendations that were
common from multiple respondents in the open-ended questions. By collecting and evaluating
challenges perceived by respondents, and evaluating previously published literature and those
challenges, the study will be able to construct the results in data that identify and describe the
challenges faced from participants like the rural business readers of the study. Results will help
start-up owners and managers become aware to challenges they may face and help them enact a
plan to prevent those challenges from coming for them.
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7.0 Budget
Since the quantitative study will be fulfilled in person using physical surveys across all
50 states potentially, there will be some cost for travel expenses. The plan is to utilize university
connections by reaching out to other business students in Universities across the United States to
find a volunteer surveyor that can conduct meetings, and training virtually, that can travel to the
town in their state to conduct that states survey. Most states can be travelled across within an
average of 4-6 hours with a range of 240-400 miles travelling distance by car. This would
currently put an estimated high end for travel expense at 30-50 dollars of fuel for the average
fuel efficiency rating in the United States. Multiplied out to 50 states, it will potentially cost
between 1500 and 2500 dollars for car travelling cost. The cost for developing the survey is
relatively non-existent if developed by myself and the volunteers through virtual meetings but
will cost a few dollars for ink and paper of professional quality to distribute. The consultant
expenses that may be necessary can be budgeted for up to $500 depending on the number of
experts in different locations throughout the United States would be needed to get a good feel of
useful questions and survey advice for different states cultures. In addition to those known
expenses, it is safe to keep budgeted an additional $300 in the event some books or journals cost
money to access that have information that is vital to the research this survey seeks to compare
against published literature.
8.0 Research Schedule
This survey needs to have information that is current and valid when published and the
schedule will need to meet checkpoints to ensure the information is collected, analyzed,
extrapolated, and delivered without missing any key points. To make the schedule simple, the
major phases that will exist as natural checkpoints will be three phases that include preparation,
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 18
execution, and validation/verification. The preparation phase needs to last no longer than one
month from the time all-volunteer surveyors from the 50 states are identified and the first
meeting occurs laying out the objectives of the study. The schedule does not start officially until
those 50 have met and that is acceptable to start at that point because rural businesses will always
have differences than the city ones regardless of how long it takes to find 50 volunteers.
Therefore, once the 50 volunteers are identified and meet, the preparation phase begins where
surveyors will research literature to find previously published challenges that face rural
communities in their geographical locations and review generic studies that claim to address
challenges all start-ups could face. In addition to that initial reading during preparation, the
analysis of towns and markets in each state should be identified and businesses contacted that all
meet the agreed acceptable criteria with controls for population and distances from city within
range. Within that month of preparation, all literature will have been reviewed and the
businesses will be selected in towns to travel and conduct the survey. The execution phase
begins at the end of the first month when all preparation phase tasks are complete. The
execution phase should last less than two weeks because it only consists of conducting the
survey in person. After the survey is complete, the surveyor immediately enters the
validation/verification phase for their portion of the data. The last phase of
validation/verification is to review the findings of the survey and compare the data to any of the
literature reviewed in the preparation phase to find valid challenges that are supported in this
research and others. This phase also includes sharing the data and the results at weekly meetings
with the rest of the team virtually with the leader consolidating all the results to complete the
final product in the format required and then distribute it to the 50 volunteers for review. The
final phase of validation/verification should take no longer than one month similarly to the
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 19
preparation phase. The total time from start to finish that this project should take is two and a
half months.
9.0 Ethical Considerations
Ethical issues will be brought up during any survey because people see different things as
ethical concerns in different cultures. This research project spans 50 states and by using
volunteers that are from the state that they are surveying, most cultural issues should be
controlled because respondent and surveyor have cultural commonalities coming from the same
state. Additional considerations for this study that could arise when focusing only on rural areas
is the fact that rural communities have populations with very little racial diversity. In fact,
PewResearch shares the diversity percentages and shows that in America rural counties having a
population that is made up of 79% whites (Mitchell, et al 2020). This lack of diversity likely
will be shown in the random selection of business owners and may seem to outsiders as a study
that is meant to only help white business owners succeed. It will be important to show the
correlation of accurate racial representation of the current statistics by having minority
representation included in the states where there are the highest populations of minorities in rural
areas. Anonymity is a key ingredient for getting the most accurate truth from surveys, and to
protect against any discrimination or privacy concerns, anonymity will be maintained so that
privacy will be protected. Fairness and transparency will be goals and will be communicated in
the agreements signed by surveyors and respondents before and then during the survey.
10. Implications and Considerations
The proposed research will provide insights for identifying and preventing the failure of
many rural start-up businesses by consolidating results from surveys and literature study about
common challenges that are specific to their types of businesses in their types of communities.
RURAL START-UP BUSINESS STRUGGLES 20
The study will provide the ranked list of challenges in difficulty to overcome ratings and provide
open-ended response opportunities for respondents to contribute to the group by providing
potential solutions or guidance for anyone that faces a challenge they have already faced.
America is always trying to help the economy and ensure it does not collapse. The popular
desire among entrepreneurs is to become as wealthy and successful as those in the likes of Elon
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, but the truth is that these too big to fail corporations and our
infatuation and tips to become like them have hurt the rural community that is just trying to
survive and succeed in their areas. This study gets back to helping the common rural companies
to succeed in ways that are achievable and acceptable to the owner by filling the knowledge gap
that currently exists about relevant challenges facing those owners and ways to overcome or
avoid them. These results will have some limitations and the biggest is the relatively small scale
with only 50 respondents spread across the entire 50 states, but this data can provide support for
more extensive studies once the information presented is used and businesses start becoming
more successful based off this limited research project. The benefits to many communities with
this information to implement outweigh the limitations and the study will help communities
across America.
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References
Deller, S., Kures, M., & Conroy, T. (2019). Rural entrepreneurship and migration. Journal of
Rural Studies, 66, 30–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.026
Ethics start with the board. (2018). Board & Administrator for Administrators Only, 35(3), 4.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ban.30782
Greenberg, Z., Farja, Y., & Gimmon, E. (2018). Embeddedness and growth of small businesses
in rural regions. Journal of Rural Studies, 62, 174–182.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.07.016
Mitchell, T. (2020, May 30). 1. Demographic and economic trends in urban, suburban, and
rural communities. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project.
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