Building a town's first Small Business Saturday, and the machine to run it again

Goal

I was consulting for a local wealth advisor who wanted to establish herself in a tight-knit community she was relatively new to. Her target clients were local business owners and community leaders, so she came up with the idea of throwing a first-ever Small Business Saturday for the public. She had never planned or executed a large community event.

Approach

I started by walking her through what an event like this could look like — what makes sense for a first-time event, what would be too ambitious, what the real goals were, and how to stay focused on them. We built the concept for a one-day event, and while she and her volunteer worked contacts and resources, I built the brand, the campaign, and the infrastructure.

I set them up with a WordPress site, Google Workspace, and Mailchimp. I designed the site as a landing page with a small business participation signup form, integrated Mailchimp, and built an automated email workflow so that the moment a business or vendor signed up they entered a sequence carrying them from welcome through registration and fees to reminders and final event prep — without anyone having to chase them.

Then the assets: banners, posters, postcards, Instagram posts, and day-of materials. I tied the graphics to the community deliberately — a custom map of Old Orcutt, the Old Orcutt Water Tower — so the materials felt personal to the people who live there rather than generic.

The Small Business Vendor Map did real work. I designed it to shape the flow of visitors so they were incentivized to reach not just the obvious main-street vendors but the ones tucked into the far corners of town. I sketched the main businesses by hand and made it as fun to follow as I could.

Results

Hundreds of families came — a large number for a small town — and moved exactly as designed, visiting every region on the map and competing for raffle prizes.

More importantly for my client, participating business owners gave rave reviews for how the whole thing ran: registration and onboarding, promotion for the event and for each individual business, and the sheer foot traffic every vendor saw in an otherwise sleepy town. She gained a large number of new contacts and established herself as a capable community leader.

Best of all, the infrastructure stayed in place. In the following year and beyond she was able to run the event again without rebuilding any of the setup — which was the actual design goal.