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Becky McCray

Becky McCray grew up in towns ranging from 1,500 to 350,000 and now lives in a tiny town of just 30 people. Her co-author Barry J. Moltz grew up in a small town of 30,000 and moved to the third-biggest city in America. Both are small business owners.

Becky McCray has been called “the small town Seth Godin” for her savvy combination of rural entrepreneurship and marketing skills. She started her first business venture in junior high school and has been going ever since. Currently, she and her husband own and operate a cattle ranch and a retail liquor store. Along with Sheila Scarborough, she co-founded Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals new marketing skills. Like many rural entrepreneurs, she has pieced together multiple lines of business to build a career.

Becky is a recognized expert in small business and social media and has taught nearly 1,000 classroom hours and more than 100 workshops and speeches on small business subjects. She has been featured in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Inc., Entrepreneur, Niche, Winning Workplaces, Reimagine Rural, Community Developer, and the Agurban. Becky publishes one of the top 20 small business blogs in the world, Small Biz Survival, which is focused on small town small business.

What makes all this possible is her wide experience in small-town business, community, and government. That includes work as a small town administrator, a non-profit executive with the local workforce development and Girl Scout councils, an antiques store owner, a business and computer consultant, and a newspaper reporter. For nine years, McCray spent her evenings and weekends teaching a variety of computer and business classes at local technology centers, making her the fourth generation of her family to teach. In 2004, she was an unsuccessful candidate for the Oklahoma House of Representatives. She believes we learn from both our successes and our failures, even when those failures are printed in the local newspaper.