We know that Searcy recently hashtagged and voted its way to winning a $500,000 "marketing and business transformation" and starring in the next season of streaming series Small Business Revolution -- Main Street.
Now we want to know: When does Ty Pennington get here?
Pennington of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition fame, is a host of the show, as is Amanda Brinkman of Deluxe Corp., which provides small-business marketing services. Brinkman appeared at the Tuesday night watch party at Harding University to announce that Searcy beat out the other five finalist cities.
By how much? We asked Brinkman by phone Wednesday. She said, "We don't publicly disclose exact vote counts, but we did receive 1.6 million votes this year, which is the highest we've ever seen. And the race was very competitive."
The same day, we spoke with a thrilled Amy Burton, Main Street Searcy's executive director who described the watch party that an estimated 4,000 attended: "I just looked out there and thought this -- this -- is my hometown. ... It still just warms my heart the way that the people rallied and fought for Searcy."
Burton said, "Right now the drive is to get small businesses to sign up for consideration to be on the show. So any small business in Searcy -- downtown or not in downtown -- can go to MySearcy.org and there is an application form that they can fill out."
Immediately. Because very soon, members of the Small Business Revolution team will narrow down the contenders to 30 businesses and then to a dozen.
Brinkman said: "We'll be back the week of March 18. ... We'll interview about 12 on camera, and from there we narrow it down to the six that will be featured on the show."
She continued, "During our next shoot, Ty will actually be joining me as well and meeting with the town leaders. We'll be doing another town tour. We'll have a community rallying event to really bring everyone together and officially celebrate the kickoff of filming. So it will be a fun busy week."
Filming continues through the spring, Brinkman said. "Then we move into editing and Season 4 will launch in the fall, and it will be on Hulu again and it streams at SmallBusinessRevolution.org and then we're even looking at some additional distribution action, and we hope to have a fun announcement about that soon as well!"
So Small Business Revolution might be getting bigger.
Watch video from the announcement: arkansasonline.com/33sear/
SundayMonday on 03/03/2019