138. Reimagining Main Streets with Jaime Izurieta

Our guest on today's episode is Jaime Izurieta. He is the founder and lead visionary at Storefront Mastery. He and I got connected through a fellow colleague out on the East Coast. He hails from New Jersey. And the second, the moment I met him, and we've only met over Zoom, I was just completely taken by his entire approach to something that maybe doesn't seem like it would have the ability to transform people like he's proven that it does. His work around the design, the intentional human-centered design of good storefronts, it has applications for every single one of us. And we even spend a little bit of time talking about the fact that good ideas are just good ideas, you know, whether they're presented through the lens of this is big city development or small town community growth. That when we can, you know, maybe take some of the labels off, we literally specifically talk about the definitions between urban and rural and just like what the insistence on those labels potentially, how it potentially holds us back. He just gives such a lovely— it's just like the loveliest man, I swear. You guys are going to love him. And again, I think it further goes to show that all of us are more alike than different. And I'm really, really thrilled to introduce you all to Jaime and the generous, loving principles that he shares with us related to to Main Street development. So without further ado, here's my new friend Jaime. Well, hey Jaime, welcome to the Growing Small Town Show.

Hi Rebecca, thank you so much.

Oh, I'm so excited to visit with you. So tell us, tell me, tell our listeners what you're working on. Like, what's your work all about and where are you in the country too? I always think that's fascinating for our listeners.

Okay, I live in Montclair, New Jersey. This is a first wave suburb of New York City. We're about 40 minutes by car and 35 minutes by train. We have uniquely, we have 6 train stations in town and we have a major in New Jersey, major university. And it's a fun place. It has a very lively downtown. It's kind of like a restaurant hub in the area. So it's fun. It's very walkable. And I see trees when I look out my window. That is very nice.

Yes, for sure.

I am the founder of Storefront Mastery. This is what I, what I work on mainly right now. Storefront Mastery is a creative agency that creates downtown experiences. And the way we do this is we work with BIDs and Main Streets and economic development authorities to gather the energy and the contributions that local businesses make to their streets. So we try to transform the way that place managers are looking at their place And so it changes the way they manage the place. So we are trying to make business owners see their business differently. And when that happens, they start integrating and they start interacting with the sidewalk in a very different manner. They are usually more generous with the sidewalk. When that happens, it's very easy for the place managers to go and collect these amazing contributions and create great street experiences.

Okay.

This ties on to tourism, ties on to economic development, it ties on to the beauty and placemaking. So I consider myself a placemaker basically.

Yeah. Okay. Love it. So first of all, you use an acronym that I think just for the benefit of our audience, a BID, it's probably not something that a lot of our smaller communities have. And that stands for Business Improvement District. Is that—

Business Improvement District. In here in New Jersey, we have two types. We have the Business Improvement District, which are typically downtowns that have been designated by the city, by the council, and they are special— not special zoning, but special service areas where there's an organization, typically a nonprofit, that is in charge of things that are above and beyond what the city does. In the case of the Montclair Center BID, for example, which is where I live and where I consult with, there's, uh, trash collection and there's beautification and there's economic development initiatives. What they're doing. There's a different type which typically happens in smaller towns or smaller districts from cities is the special improvement district.

Okay, sure. Yes.

It, which is involves a little bit more of the community, not just the business improvement districts. It's very interesting because the way that these organizations are funded is that they have a polygon that they put on top of the, of the city map and everything that's within this area this district has an extra assessment that they pay with the property tax. So the property owners are contributing to the funding of this organization that will provide services for them. So it works. It works very well.

Yeah. Okay. And by the way, you know, for already at this point, I hope what our listeners can hear is that you're obviously very well-spoken. You're very, very warm. I told you that the first time I met you, like just a warm, lovely person. But of course, like, I have this concern when I think about pairing great, amazing humans with our listeners, right? Like, they may be like, okay, well, how does this apply to me in the smallest of towns? So we always just wanna make sure as you're think— as we're thinking through what it is that you do, what and how can it be applied in the smallest of communities? Because every single community, if they have a Main Street, I'll just say that if they have a Main Street and they've got storefronts on it and they've got business owners on it, or they have empty buildings on it that they would love to recruit and attract people to come and start businesses, your work translates. It does. And so I'm very passionate about that, that I don't believe that there's like big city ideas and small town ideas. The ideas all be adjusted and fit right-sized, if you will. I mean, so that's, that's important to me. So I'm just saying like, listeners, hang with us. Like if you're like, we don't have that and we don't have that, hold tight, right? How do you feel about that? Because again, you agreed to come on here. You know exactly who my audience is. We've talked about it.

Yes, I think that sometimes labels work in contrary to our agenda, I guess. So we hear urban design and we are in a rural town and we think, oh, they're going to make us New York City. This is not the way it works. So urban is just a label that we have attached to looking at the way we are creating our cities and towns and villages and bringing vitality and bringing life to our spaces, right? When spaces are a little bit more congregated, a little bit more compact, which every town that has a Main Street, even though it's a single block Main Street with 5 different commercial spaces, which one may be a restaurant, one may be a general store, whatever, that area, that little area can be considered urban. Right. Doesn't need to have skyscrapers and 8-lane roads. It could be a very, very tiny, lovely, quaint place where people gather.

Right. Thank you for that. I think that's something that we are— we in rural places and small communities are not hearing enough. I think we feel left out of the conversation. And it's only because the label— the label doesn't— what we need is the subheading, you know, which you just provided. There's the overall title, you know, good urbanism. And then we go, well, that's That's not us. What you need, though— oh, and by the way, good urbanism just means— so thank you for that. I think, again, like, all I want to do is impart even little bits of hope through creativity and ideas that people can go, oh, okay, I could apply that here. So that was beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, because I think it's—

I would like to add, I would like to add a very tiny thing.

Yeah, please do.

That urban is not the opposite of rural.

Thank you.

This is something that we really need to— it has taken me years to plant that in my head. The fact that you think, and this is intuitive, you think rural is the opposite of urban, right? It is not. You could be an urban place in a rural town and the urban place could be, like I said, a very, very short block with 5 commercial semi-public spaces where people gather.

Right, right. I think that's super important. And I think to a bigger picture from even a media narrative, like it's something that we need to continue to fight against. And by fight against it, I just mean resist believing it, that there's this enormous divide between urban people and rural people. Like we're all just people. We're just living in different places.

Yes, we all gather the same.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think we all have the same size. There's a beautiful, beautiful book by an architect called Leon Krier. It's called Drawing for Architecture. What he does is he presents his sketches that he has used. He's a, he's an older architect, probably getting close to his, to his 80s. And he has a life of drawing to make himself heard and understood. And one of the things he draws is the difference between places that have kept their human scale and places that have lost their human scale. Right.

That sounds beautiful.

It is. It's a beautiful book. All humans, we have the same size. I am a very short 5'9". Somebody can be a very tall 6'7". But the door, we can both grab the door handle easily. We can sit, we sit on the same chair, right? We, we cross the same street at the same speed, probably. Right. There's not much difference. The range of sizes of humans is not that large. It's small. And the humans who live in New York City or London or Paris, these very dense, very tall, very packed cities, and the humans who live in maybe a small town in New Jersey or maybe a small town in North Dakota, We are the same size. Our doors are going to be the same. Our chairs are going to be the same. Our rooms are going to be the same. And we experience life from the human scale. And that is how things get built. If there's a tall skyscraper, for example, I walk on 34th Street in New York City and I look up trying to find the Empire State Building, and I'll be walking, I don't know, 5, 6 blocks trying to find the Empire State Building. Why? Because you do not see it from the street. You see it from far away, but you don't see— when you're standing in front of the Empire State Building, you see a 6-story building with nice storefronts on the ground floor. That's what you see because they have created this humongous building in such a way that it will not lose its human scale. So it is always possible to do beautiful things in whatever setting you are. Because the same humans are gonna be using it. So keeping the human scale.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And we'll, so by the way too, anything you mention like this, we'll make sure we link to it in the show notes so people can check it out. That book sounds lovely.

It's a beautiful book.

Okay. All right. So tell me more, tell us more about Storefront Mastery and like what your work really entails. You know, you gave kind of a, a high-level view, but what, well, cuz again, I'm, I don't even try to hide the fact that my goal is gonna be to get you to North Dakota. Because you've never been, right? This would be a state we could— yeah, we could check it off the list, which I think is always great. So thinking about what your work looks like day to day and what's really transformed through good storefront design. Just talk a little bit about a little more of the nitty-gritty of your work, if you would.

So before the show, we were talking about how the lived experience of people brings different colors to the things that they do that are not necessarily related to what you do. So I'll tell you a story. My family in 2005 decided to open a bookstore. One of my aunts, she had been a bookseller employed by different bookstores for maybe 10 years already. And she said, okay, I'm going to open my own service. At first, it was a very basic thing in which she would order a book. Someone would come to her with, I need this book. I am originally from Ecuador and I was living there at the time. She would order the books and deliver the books to her clients. 2005, we decided to open the bookstore and my aunt found this show event festival that had a course of this is how you make storefronts, this is how you design bookstores. So she sent me to Buenos Aires in Argentina and I was sitting across this guy who's teaching and this is the guy who had made these amazing bookstores. In Singapore and Milan, working the English bookstore chain Waterstones and the Italian bookstore chain Feltrinelli's. This was a very knowledgeable guy who is talking, and he's not talking about design. He's talking about usability. He's talking about this is how people feel when they're in your bookstore. I'm listening to this guy. This is very interesting, but I would like to know how to design the bookstore. He never talked about design. He talked about details. He talked about how people are looking at the books. And there's, for example, there's a very slight slant in the bookshelves which allows people to look at the names of the books without kneeling. And this improves the usability of the place incredibly. So all these things that I'm hearing and I'm like, okay, this is a very interesting angle, a very interesting side of design that I had never experienced. I am a trained architect. So this is why they chose me to do the design of the bookstore. I came back, we designed the bookstore, and it was an immediate success because we did not design a bookstore. We designed a place where people could gather and where people could look at books and where people could interact with not just the books, but all the conversations that are happening in this place. We were looking at the customer journey. This is how people come in. This is what people see. This is where people stop. This is what we want people to look next when they sit here. This is what we want them to look at.

Right.

And it worked wonderfully. It was a user-friendly shop. It was not a bookstore to sell books. It was not about the transaction. It was more about the time. I want to keep you here for a few hours. You're looking at books and so you're not coming, buying a book and leaving. You're coming and interacting. People become advocates of the brand. It was just a beautiful experience. It's still open to this day. And to this day, I'm very proud to say that it's the most beautiful bookstore in town.

And that's fantastic.

All this story, all this story. Why? When I moved to the US, I was looking for my next venture. I had my architecture firm when I was in Ecuador, and when I moved here, I'm like, okay, so what am I going to do? And I decided I was going to make these beautiful coffee table book. I think I may have told you about this.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Table book of— this is the contribution of local businesses to placemaking. So it was a placemaking book. It was going to be funded by crowdfunding, a Kickstarter campaign, and then beautiful photographs. I have already lined up a photographer and everything. And then for whatever reasons, I couldn't start the GoFundMe or the Kickstarter campaign and it went on a shelf and I was having a regular job. And then eventually I decided What if I don't do this as just a book that comes out? I do it as a service.

Mm-hmm.

And I started working with local businesses, looking at their storefronts and trying to maximize the contribution that they do to the streets. And then eventually, when pandemic hit, I got in contact with my local business improvement district and we decided to create these materials to help people reopen.

Sure.

The lockdowns were over.

Yeah.

And this was, this was the main breaking point in the story. This was what basically what made Storefront Mastery. I started working with them and trying to get them to reconnect with their passion and their original idea for opening the business. And then their lives transformed. They had time, but they were devoting that time not to their business, but to work on the the PPP, I think was the loan they were offering and the loss of stock and restocking for when they opened. And what are the new requirements for when we open, you know, social distancing and everything? What do we have to install? We have to install these, these plexiglass chambers to separate people and whatever.

Can I just stop you real quick? All I want to say is just stop for a moment and acknowledge So again, I'm in the middle part of the country. We definitely saw some of those, those restrictions. It was tough for everybody that had a business, but your restrictions were, they were tighter, they went for longer. I mean, that you were coming in and working with these business owners at such a tremendously challenging time. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that from the human perspective that, I mean, again, your work and you're gonna get to what it, what it is and like how it works and what you did with these folks, but everything that they were required to do limits connection with humans.

Oh, yeah.

Because that was a point, you know? So it's just, it's crazy to me that that was kind of a catalyst part of your work at that time. But man, am I happy for those people that they got you. Because honestly, somebody needed to come in and remind them of the humanity. And like you said, reconnect to the purpose. Everybody needed to do that. And I, I think having somebody with your heart and your passion and your dedication to the human part of this conversation, I think I really believe they probably excelled through it faster because they had you there. So just wanted to pause and say, I mean, thank you. What an incredible—

I would love to think that.

Yeah, please do.

Please do. So it really destroyed the connections. And one, I tell a lot of stories. I don't know if that's good.

That's perfect. It's perfect. I love it. I think we all work through stories.

There is. Thankfully, she's still there. There is a lovely Ethiopian restaurant in my town, and Ethiopian meals are very elaborate, so they're not cheap. When the lockdowns were going, people were ordering takeout or delivery all the time. Every day people were, you know, partly to feed themselves, partly to support the local businesses going.

Yeah, for sure.

So this lovely woman was not having that much business because the options are, you know, getting a hamburger or pizza or fried chicken. And this is easy. And you're sitting on the same table with the same lights and everything is pretty much the same that it has been for the past 2 months. We've not been out. It's crazy. And so she was not happy, not having that much business because it's more expensive. To order that. And if you're going to pay $15 for a hamburger or you're going to pay $55 for an Ethiopian meal, which will be consumed in the same exact—

Yeah, right. Like you don't get that benefit of the entire environment to shape and mold and yeah.

Oh, you don't get the experience when you go to a restaurant. The first thing that happens is you sit down, it smells like all the spices and the Ethiopian music is going on and she has artwork from her country and she comes and she starts to talk to you about, have you been here? Oh, you haven't been here before. This is how we eat. We eat with our hands. This is the bread. It's called injera. This is how you consume the bread. This is how you consume. This is how we eat. These are the foods. This is our culture. This is our language. This— and she explains—

beautiful—

creates this human connection, right? So she didn't have any of that. And we created this amazing package for delivery. Which was the Ethiopian experience. She found baskets, like traditional Ethiopian— they were not, but she found something very, very similar. Sure. Traditionally Ethiopian baskets where she would put this amazing kind of dish that people take on trips and had all the different meats and all the different everything from the Ethiopian cuisine. And we sent it home with the tablecloth, with napkins, with the coffee and tea for the, for after the meal, with the little coffee cups and the mugs for the tea. And it had a few cards. And these cards were explaining everything that she did when she does when you come to her restaurant. So one card was explaining about Ethiopian culture. One card was explaining about the Ethiopian language. One card was explaining about this is how we eat in Ethiopia. This is our food and this is what you're going to eat today. And the crown jewel was a QR code where you can scan and takes you to the playlist that she had created that you could put on while you were eating this.

I was hoping you were going to say that. I was like, is there a QR code that like goes to her in her face or something? Or like, what comes next? You know, oh, that's so—

we were not her in her face, but it was the music. Yes, that's awesome. The music that she was playing in the restaurant. So now you can have this meal, which is different than what you have every day. And it has an added value, a little bit of added value that was so valuable during the lockdowns because even that little change made the world of difference.

Oh my God. So I just, again, I can't help it, but like what I love about this is that what she did was it wasn't, I mean, I think the ingredient is love. That's personally, you know, that's what I, I think it is. It's her pouring, you know, again, reconnecting to the purpose. Why did you start this restaurant? It can't ever just be because I know how to cook, right? Like, if there's gotta be something deeper, and if you— I, I just say this right now to any business owner listening, if you're feeling either burnt out or tired or spent or emotionally disconnected somehow, spend a little time and think about why you started your business. Get back to the root of that. Find the love for it. Because it's what I really do believe. It's when we can ground ourselves or anchor ourselves in our love for it, and then that becomes what we either steward forward or give forward in a way that people get to experience. It's just so beautiful. I would have loved— I would have loved that. I mean, what a unique and special thing.

Yeah, and of course it had a premium because it came with the box, it came with, uh, with everything. So it had a premium and she was not selling before because it was too expensive. And after the premium, she sold the packages for Mother's Day in the middle of lockdowns and it was an incredible success.

I was going to say, because she was all during— yeah, all during the lockdowns, Mother's Day happened, anniversaries happened, birthdays happened, you know, all these things that people couldn't commemorate the way they wanted to. And now she gives them this beautiful all-in option to do so. I mean, how special.

It was amazing. So by those stories, you can see more or less the type of thing that I do. I feel like I'm like an emotional coach sometimes.

I bet.

Yes, because it's a, it's a transformative thing more than any design or specific economic development things that those are serious things that I try to incorporate. But it's really more of a coaching thing.

Right. Oh, I love it so much. This work, this podcast, I just have to say for me is absolutely about love because I, I love meeting people like you, first of all, that do your work differently again and do it in such a, a grounded and human connection, people-centric kind of way. Just means you're my people, right? You belong in my sphere one way or the other. And I just, I think it's so helpful because those of us that have seen the results of what you're talking about, where we're focused more on how the user interacts with it or what people feel when they walk in or experience something. I really hope that it's a shift that can continue to kind of catch up to these more traditional outlooks on some of the industries that drive community development. Because, you know, I still— in North Dakota, maybe. I mean, again, it's not uncommon for, you know, the middle part of the country to adopt things a bit slower. I mean, that's not uncommon. That's just things kind of start— trends start on the coasts and they slowly work their way in. That's just facts. But I still will hear people say things like, well, that's just fluff. You know, like they minimize the social-emotional aspects of all of these things. And that's actually at the core of life, I think, for all of us. And so it's very validating to hear, you know, that you see it this way too, because if that's not the case, then I don't really know what we're all doing here. You know, like—

No, I think it is the case. There's an economic component or components of the economy that and how the economy works right now that explain this. So when the economy starts, we are just gathering things, right? Well, I'm not processing anything. I just gather carrots, for example, and I trade the carrots with you. And then we go to the— when they start customizing that, I start making carrot juice and I sell you the carrot juice. Of course, it has an added value. Now you don't need to process the carrots. You can, you can save that time to do whatever else. And I will sell you the carrot juice. And then when we customize that, we customize it for the people who are making the carrot juice. So now I am delivering a service of I will gather all the carrots and I will process the carrots and bring the carrots to you so you can sell some, adding more value, right? And then we move on to the experience, which is how I am adding this value. What part of my adding value is valuable to you as a product? So now you come to tour my industrial plant, and that is an experience that I'm offering you because I'm customizing that process so you can see it. And the last one, which is happening right now, is what you talked about before. It's the transformation part. It's what we do is we don't stage the experience anymore. We don't just gather the goods anymore. We guide people through that transformation. And that is, that is your work. That is my work. That is most of our friends' works is they are not coming to places and telling, hey, this is what you do. They're coming to places and listening and learning and exploring and basically guiding people to transform the way they do what they do. And that's an economic— it's a fact of the current state of the economy that I think explains very well what we're doing. We're guiding people, we're staging great things, and we're guiding people to, to find the transformation in those things.

That's the whole thing, right? That humans are emotional and psychological creatures. And so if we really want change to happen, change doesn't happen without that transformation occurring.

Correct.

You know, like we kind of talked about, people come into things with a certain set of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about that thing. Or about your store or about your town. And if we need them to take different actions, like if that's ultimately we need them to do something different, anybody can stand at a podium and tell everybody what to do.

Yes.

Or even tell everybody what to think. I think there's a lot of that that happens in kind of traditional learning environments, whether it's educational institutions or, you know, conferences. We were having a conversation about conferences where there's somebody that's a subject matter expert telling everybody in the audience what to think about something. And thought leadership is certainly important. So I'm not, I'm not in any way trying to minimize that. The challenge though is that we can tell people what to think. We can tell people what they should feel. We can tell people what to believe and we can tell them what to do. That's not the catalyst to get them to do any of those things.

Correct.

Right. That transformation happens inside. And so if we design experiences where we're setting the table that, that those things are naturally going to happen, they come to it on their own. It's theirs to own. And absolutely, we don't take credit for their transformation. We celebrate the transformation with them. That's the guiding part of it, right?

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. That's so, so good.

I think, I think that is what happens. I mean, in the old days, there would be an expert that comes to town and really actually tells people what to do. This would be the same way that an expert in the university would teach a class would not be an interactive class, would not be— it would be someone who was really knowledgeable about something, was telling people how to do things. And now it's shifting. And if you look at it, everything is shifting. So the news, people are looking for news elsewhere because the anchor telling them this is what's happening, I'm not believing that. I'm trying to find, I'm trying to read, I'm trying to look. Everything is the same way now. What we can do, the extent of what we can do, is to guide the transformation and to help them ask questions. And first question is, why? Why are you doing what you do? Why do you think it's a good idea to pursue this? Why is this your purpose? And the most important one, why is this a good idea to share with everyone else?

Right, right. Yeah. Oh gosh, it's so good. Okay, so as we kind of naturally come to our— to the end of this conversation, which I hope you come back and again, not just come back to the show like You're coming to North Dakota. I'm going to figure it out. Yeah, one way or the other, we're going to figure it out. But so to our friends that are listening to this and they're again, like, maybe they're not public officials, maybe some of them are. There are some really great public officials out there. So in no way do I ever want to disparage the entire lot of them. But a lot of times the people listening to this show are really, truly people that genuinely care about the vibrancy, the future of their communities. Right. So if you could give all of those folks one thing to do, what's something that they could do to maybe start inching their— again, maybe their Main Street or whatever they deem to be kind of that their version of a business improvement district or a special interest district, right? What could they do to spur this activity, you know, especially if they don't have what they think is proper authority? Is there something simple that they could do?

100%. So yes, I figured you'd have an answer to that. They have the proper authority over their, for example, if they're business owners over their business where they can just step out the door and look at their sidewalk and say, how am I going to make this sidewalk amazing? And that may involve the winter, maybe a heater and a rocking chair with a blanket. In the summer, it may mean, I don't know, flowers, a nice flower bed and a bench. Maybe it's a little plate of, well, water for the dog or something. Maybe it's— I just saw this in Florida last week— a little basket of Chuck with a chalk— the chalk.

Yeah, like sidewalk chalk where they're—

yeah, yeah, right.

Yep, yep.

With a little message that said, please leave me a message or something like that. So everyone came and drew with the chalk on the side. So you were walking on top of lots of colors on the sidewalk. So that little— this is a very tiny— what's the typical length of a stork? It's going to be maybe 12 feet, maybe 20 feet if it's huge. It would be like, yeah, 8 maybe.

Yeah, right.

If you're walking on the sidewalk and then suddenly you see this very tiny part in front of a very tiny storefront that is super colorful and super inviting and it's creating this kind of outdoor room as you are walking, the entire block lights up.

This is so good and it's so true. I mean, it's so true. It's almost like you create little moments of magic. And people feel it, you know, people feel it.

As I tell you, are you feeling it?

100%. And I imagine it's taking me back, you know, to where I experienced that. Imagine there's two, right?

Not one, but two. Yeah, right. As you're walking, you see the one with flowers, and then you see the one with, I don't know, maybe a basket of apples. Take one. And then what if across the street there's the third one? The entire block now has become this amazing receiving hosting place that changes the entire city, that changes the entire way people experience the city. And it costs maybe $20, $30 for a basket of apples, maybe $10 for a box of chop, and maybe $50 for a little chair or bench. So it's not a huge expense. It's not a— it doesn't take people out of their way. It's just a way of providing color, way of providing different, maybe color, maybe, maybe a smell. What if you— if it's the fall is coming, so you start putting out a tank of hot cider so it smells like apples and cinnamon and it just changes the entire way people experience the place.

You know what else this does? So a couple of things are coming to mind. So that's a perfect takeaway because again, it's cheap. The only permission you have to make sure of is that you have control over your sidewalk as long as you do. So this is again where people go, well, who do I have to ask? Most of the time, nobody. We think we have to ask a bunch of, get a bunch of permission, and most of the time that's not the case. So I'm thinking of two things. This is reminding me of, again, our friend Jeff Ziegler, who introduced me to you. When he and I were walking around together in Richmond, Virginia, we came— we were walking just through a neighborhood. This was just a residential neighborhood. And when I say just, it's like the most— arguably one of the most beautiful residential neighborhoods in the entire country. So I mean, it was pretty spectacular. But there was a person who had on their— in front of their home, again, not a business. So when we're talking about your ability to do this as a business owner, there's really no excuse. They had a just like a little sign that was sitting out there and it had a question on it. And it just, all it did was encourage you to walk by and answer the question. And the question, one of the ones I took, I'd taken a photo of it 'cause I was so, it was so charming to me. The question was, where would you never wanna live? That was just the question. Just where would you never wanna live? And so Jeff and I stopped of course, and we looked at it 'cause we're both like community placemaker people, right? And so you just, and we kind of, you chuckle and you kind of laugh. And so it just something like that too, to get people to engage. And you, the cool thing is what you're talking about is do whatever is an extension of what you're giving them inside too, potentially like you, not, not just your stuff, not just your merchandise, not just your services, but you as a human. What would, like, I'm absolutely gonna do this, by the way, the, the sandwich, the little, you know, sandwich board that you can just write questions or answers on. I'm all about, I love knowing what people think and what people feel. So that was the other thing I thought I would add because your list was amazing. And I think the second thing this does that we— maybe it's, it's a really amazing ancillary kind of secondary benefit is it actually draws more people onto the sidewalk.

Oh yeah.

So like if people are thinking, because again, I— our town is small and you might say, well, so I just— if you sit out there or if you're actually physically out on the sidewalk, you might think, well, What if I only see 2 people in an hour or whatever? The truth is, the more of us that would do that, the more people we'd see. It actually generates interest to come out onto the street, which is so special. And that's also where community happens.

Correct.

That walkability, we can increase our walkability of a main street or whatever area we deem to be where this stuff is gonna happen. We can increase the walkability simply by doing that.

Correct. And one thing that is unique to downtowns or main streets or even your small little single block of shops in a very small town, what's unique about them is that the actions of one that brings people to the sidewalk will benefit everyone else because it's, it's such a geographically constrained area that if I water my plants and someone comes to my shop,, they will inevitably come by my neighbor's shop because that's just a physical reality. You cannot escape that. You cannot materialize inside of my shop and then just materialize out. You need to be— even if you park right in front, you will experience my neighbor's shops, right? So that is an incredible opportunity. And two things that I keep, I keep telling people is that, number one, they need to want to be the reason why people come to the town. You be the reason why people want to come. And then the second one is that if you have a shop, if you have a store, if you have a business in town, your project is not your business. Your project is the downtown. Your project is the main street. Your project is the district, because this is how you grow, by growing everything around you.

Right. Oh, it was so fun to chat with you, Jaime. Thank you so much for, for coming on the show and again reminding all of us. I think a big takeaway for me is just that we're all more alike than we are different. And, and even if we're in completely different places, completely different sized communities, we're at the end of the day, we're humans and humans have basic core fundamental needs. And I think the only role that we have, those of us that talk about these things. You know, not everybody gets excited about the things we're talking about. People that are listening to the show do, which is exciting.

You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.

Right. The only role that we really have is to make our places better for humans. That's it.

That's it.

No matter what, no matter what lens you're looking at it through. Right. So I just— it's just so, so great to know you. And thank you for that beautiful takeaway, because that's something that everybody can do. Oh yeah. So I hope they feel empowered to do so.

Shop, business, house, whatever. Everyone can do that.

Thank you, sir. Come back and see me again.

I will. Thank you so much.