June 26, 2026

By Lisa Abelar

It’s not unusual for Jessi Burg to make a five hour drive to present a business development workshop for just a handful of people. That kind of turnout would hardly seem worth gas money in many places, but in the rural towns where Burg works, a few invested folks is all it takes to make a difference. 

Living in the small Colorado city of Delta, and supporting small business owners in other rural communities across the state and country, long drives are part of the territory for Burg. The wide expanse of separation from one rural community to the next, coupled with spotty internet accessibility in rural communities, often means that the old school, in-person workshops are the best way to connect with people.  

“I live in a rural area, so I kind of ended up specializing in more rural areas,” Burg said. “Very few people who are working in small business education and economic development really understand rural concerns.”

Burg has had a mixed-bag of life experiences. She grew up in a metro area that had a small-town feel, attended school in a rural part of New York, grew a landscaping business in Denver and ultimately launched her current endeavor, Outgrow Your Garage, after leaving the city for a more rural lifestyle. 

“I understand the problems of rural and a lot of people don’t,” she said. “Any town of less than 5,000 people, no one is coming in and putting jobs there. It’s easier to take an existing business and hire three people than it is to have someone come in and create jobs.”

For small towns, and the businesses that support those economies, job creation is just one challenge. There’s also succession planning, and the need for sustainability and resilience. Getting started at all is yet another challenge, especially when access to capital and informed, rural-focused guidance is limited. Burg has found that the business owners who need help the most, the ones with limited budgets in rural areas, don’t have the cashflow to hire a consultant. Without support, the problems persist.

Burg’s workshops equip businesses with tools that help them grow, allow them to hire more staff, keep the doors open and ultimately keep money moving through the local economy.

“By definition, most people have never lived in a rural area. Most people don’t have the cultural understanding and it’s hard to create programming for a problem you don’t understand,” Burg said. 

Her business and her lived experience bridge that gap.

Instead of being available for hire by individuals businesses, she partners with community organizations, which then make her services and programs available to the business community, many times using grant funding to cover the cost. Burg then works with those community partners to find ways to make her Outgrow Your Garage programming available to the business community once that grant funding expires.

“I never want to be the whole solution. That’s not sustainable, for me or for the community,” she said. “We are a tool in the toolbox.”

The most popular workshops she offers teach business owners how to build a spreadsheet or how to post something online, either on a business website or on Facebook. For one small town movie theater, she helped the business owner with succession planning and suggested the development of new revenue streams, from hosting events to partnering with community organizations, to keep it sustainable. 

The theater is now testing a variety of events throughout the busy tourism season to see what might work best moving forward.

Her clients include municipal entities, chambers of commerce, main street alliances, and other community support organizations. Her approach has allowed her to work with rural businesses that are typically viewed as non-investable, such as small service-based businesses, small manufacturers or product-based businesses, and food service businesses that don’t intend to scale. Burg’s programming with Outgrow Your Garage sets these businesses up for long-term sustainability.

“The reason people don’t work in rural business development is it’s actually hard to do in a way that makes a profit and isn’t grant funded,” Burg said. “Grants are a really important tool to get programming started. Instability…has made that process really hard.”

In fact, when a large number of federal grants were frozen in early 2025, Burg thought she may lose her business. Eventually, some of the funding was unlocked, but in 2026, much of that funding just wasn’t renewed. It hurts her business revenue and sustainability, but it hurts rural communities even more, by limiting their ability to invest in the local businesses that drive their economies. 

“It impacts a lot of the rural communities because a lot of that programming has been consolidated into urban areas,” she said. “These smaller programs and grants are just not as common and are disappearing. It’s harder to meet the threshold for funding and have to roll projects together just to meet requirements and then they don’t get approved because they’re disconnected.”

As a business owner living in a rural community herself, Burg said she appreciates the value of federal investment, specifically when it comes to internet connectivity. When she moved into her home, she didn’t have access to the internet. But federal infrastructure funding allowed crews to run fiber to Delta, improving internet accessibility for everyone. That allowed her to grow her rural economic development business. 

“I would not have been able to do it,” she said. “That type of infrastructure upgrade is something rural economies can’t do. You create access in ways small communities can’t.”