Wabash wins national Small Business Revolution and $500,000

That announcement was broadcast live in the Eagles Theatre to hundreds of Wabash residents and small business owners, many of whom temporarily shut down their stores to attend the celebration.

“You guys really stood out,” Amanda Brinkman, chief brand and communications officer for Deluxe, told the crowd. “We originally talked about doing this as a sort of Main Street makeover, but what I’m really touched by with Wabash is that you guys don’t need a makeover. You perhaps need a little enhancement. You need more of the world to recognize the incredible community this is and that’s what this project will do.”

The $500,000 prize will be used primarily for marketing and downtown refurbishment, according to Steve Downs, executive director of Wabash Marketplace, Inc.

“Part of the money is used in the form of services and products going to small businesses,” he explained. “So we think most of the money will go for that purpose, but some of the money will also go directly for the City for the purpose of refurbishing the downtown area. We don’t have any particulars yet. We have brainstormed a lot of ideas, but we haven’t settled on anything yet. We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves and put together a wish list before we knew we could satisfy it.”

Last week, Wabash was named a finalist in the competition alongside west-coast community Silverton, Oregon. The public was then asked to select the winner by voting online over the course of seven days. According to Brinkman, Wabash was able to come back from behind Silverton this week and received more than 183,000 total votes.

“We were the underdog and within a day had almost an 8,000-vote swing and it was incredibly empowering,” Christine Flohr, executive director of tourism at the Wabash County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB), said on Thursday.

Flohr was a primary advocate for Wabash on social media alongside local business owners and regional celebrities.

“To officially know that Wabash won is a release of a lot of stress, but a lot of sincere joy has come about from this and I am just honored. I’m humbled. I’m amazed by the people that live here,” she said. “And really what I think the byproduct of this is that the word community has changed for us…our community has grown by the tens of thousands because our community is now people all over this country and that’s incredible.”

According to Brinkman, the purpose of the competition is to highlight the importance of small businesses.

“We really recognized that nowhere are small businesses more under siege than in our small towns,” Brinkman said. “We’ve got big box stores and national retailers coming in and they’re pushing out some of your neighbors who have perhaps been in business for a couple of generations and that broke our hearts. We couldn’t let that happen. So we wanted to start the conversation around the importance of supporting small businesses in our small towns.”

While Wabash was able to win the popular online vote, Downs said he believes that the city has a compelling story that helped drive it to the top of Deluxe’s list.

“One of the questions we had was ‘Why Wabash? How did we get to the top all of a sudden?’ And we just have a compelling story to tell and we were in a position where we could respond quickly to (Deluxe’s) requests,” Downs said.

“Hopefully we can inspire other small towns throughout the state to strive for things like this,” Mayor Scott Long added. “It’s just a great thing for our city and every citizen in this city.”

Brinkman will return later this month with a camera crew and Herjavec to begin filming.