There are plenty of choices in downtown Summerville, SC, to please the most eclectic tastes, with shops featuring books, apparel and accessories, home decorating items, gifts, jewelry, eatables, florals, and more.

via Delights of Downtown and the CommunityLink Cloud.

The CommunityLink street map and interactive map were created in conjunction with the Oxford-Lafayette County Chamber of Commerce.

The August convention may still be a few months off, but in the meantime you can check out our virtual booth at the ACCE convention virtual expo. The virtual expo features a variety of the exhibitors who will be in LA and gives a neat preview of what’s to come. Visit our “booth” at http://accevirtualexpo.com/#/communitylinkpublications and then navigate around to see who else will be there.

Of course, there “ain’t nothin’ like the real thing,” so be sure to make plans to visit us at the convention in person August 3-6.

There’s an “underground” organization in Temple with the sole mission of making their community a more beautiful place to live.

Keep Temple Beautiful (KTB), an affiliate of Keep America Beautiful and Keep Texas Beautiful, works tirelessly to ensure that Temple citizens can be proud of where they live. Often, their work takes place behind the scenes, as they coordinate with the city, the state, and community action groups to battle litter, educate on recycling and environmental impact, and create privately funded programs for beautifying our public spaces.

KTB challenges citizens to get involved. Their redesigned Keep Temple Beautiful website and Facebook page provide a link between residents and what the organization is doing. KTB’s programs are funded entirely by donations.
Find out more about what citizens are doing, and what you can do in Temple. Fresh off the press is the Interactive Temple Community Profile published by CommunityLink in cooperation with the Temple Chamber of Commerce.

Wikipedia contributors. “Mountain Home, Arkansas.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 Apr. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.

Enjoy an interactive map experience by clicking on the map’s cover to the left. Published by CommunityLink in cooperation with the Mountain Home Area Chamber of Commerce.

A recent discussion with Jason Hickey, of the Hickey & Associates consulting firm, about the site selection process led us to the topic of marketing venues for economic development agencies. Along with other important activities like maintaining a top-notch website and distributing materials, Hickey stressed that meeting in person and establishing relationships is also an important part of bringing new businesses to town.

“Making sure that site selectors and companies have that information top of mind – like knowing that X community is focusing on bio-science if I’m a bio-science company – that could definitely be helpful, but I can tell you that site selectors and companies get inundated with a lot information,” Hickey said. “Our firm is a little unique because we take that and actually collect it and put it into a database, which is a little bit different than most folks do. We like to trend the happenings of different economic development activity, what’s going on now to hopefully trying to predict what will be going on in the future.”

Hickey explained that while they capture the data that comes to them through newsletters, updates, announcements, and web research, what they really appreciate is the chance to spend time with the people they could potentially be working with on behalf of their clients.

“It sets people apart, the better website and the more information you have there, but nothing beats face to face. Even with all of this technology – email and cell phones – we’re still very relationship-based, and so conferences are the best venue. They’re definitely the most cost effective for economic development and chamber entities, because you’ve got a venue with a whole bunch of companies and consultants like us in the same room.

“The two largest ones are CoreNet and the Industrial Asset Management Council (IAMC). Those match up economic development and chamber groups along with actual company representatives and folks like us who are representing companies as consultants. Then there are some smaller ones, but just as important. Business Live Exchange is another one, Area Development Magazine puts on a venue, and there are some smaller ones that are mostly for economic development folks matching up with site selectors like us.”

Hickey points out that regional one and two day conferences and summits are also valuable venues that make both public and private sector decision makers accessible.

“Nowadays, for chambers and economic development agencies, you need to spend your dollars wisely, and at those venues you can keep in touch with as many people as possible for low cost,” he explained. “These are critical decisions for corporations large and small. Now more than ever they have to make sure they’re making the right investment and have the best planning both short and long term, so having these relationships with local people is extremely important because you get to know them and you build rapport with them over time… When company representatives can meet someone, even if it’s just over a cup of coffee, they’ll remember that interaction and it becomes part of their network. So those venues are important, and if a community can afford it, going to visit people in their offices is very valuable as well.”

“When we counsel our clients on incentives, we help them understand the difference between legislated incentives and discretionary incentives,” Dr. Canup said. “Essentially, legislated incentives are those that are going to be awarded to any project that meets the criteria that the state, county, or city has established for that particular incentive… Discretionary incentives, however, can actually exceed the value of legislated incentives for some projects. They are not just tax credits or tax rebates, but they may get into buying the property, building an access road, or paying for a sewer system.

“Every project we do, when we’re down to the short list of communities and we’re negotiating incentives, we’ve already done a profile on each of those locations relative to costs that are going to have to be incurred by somebody to make that particular location work for the particular project. Let’s say we determine that we need acceleration and deceleration lanes for truck traffic and to add a new traffic light. That could be a two million dollar issue, and who’s going to pay for it? That’s the kind of differentiator that eventually separates shortlisted communities from each other and the type of role that incentives eventually begin to play on these projects.”

So is it best to begin the process of investing in infrastructure before marketing a site? Not necessarily. Depending on the opportunities that come along, certain infrastructure investments may or may not be necessary, or the scale of the preparation may not be sufficient. The important part isn’t necessarily having the infrastructure in place, but being able to exhibit the capability to do so.

“It’s not always necessary that a prospect walks up and finds the sewer line, for example, adjacent to the property line, but it is necessary that there be a plan, a schedule, a budget, and a cost allocation to get it to the property. If I need it there in eight months, can you do it? The standard answer is always, ‘Oh yes, we can do that.’ My follow up question is then, ‘How are you going to do it? Show me the plan.’”

Dr. Canup concluded the conversation by pointing out that each situation is different, and the best decision on whether to take the investment plunge in the beginning or simply create a plan for investment if the opportunity arises depends on the nature of what is being attempted.

“I consult with a lot of states and communities, for instance, on mega-project sites, and the question I get most often is, ‘Should we own the site?’ Well, if you want to go out and buy 1,500 to 2,500 acres of land, you’ve got the money to do it, and you’re excited about it, maybe you ought to do it. But at the same time, why not just go out and negotiate with a property owner and get an option to purchase in place. When I come along with a prospect and say, ‘Show me clear title on the property, how long it will take to do the closing, when we can have possession, the environmentals, and the geotechnicals,’ those things can be done ahead of time at minimal cost up front, but at the same time the community has positioned itself to respond to an opportunity with professionalism and proficiency. Demonstrating the ability to do it can be just as good as owning it.

“It’s a tough balance for a lot of communities to find. If I’m going to do a 500-acre industrial park, should I own all of the property? That’s an easy answer. Yes, you should own all of the property if you’re going to have and market a 500-acre industrial park, because you’ll have sub-parcels and options on the location of access roads and utilities. But maybe there’s another site, a 2,500 acre mega-site, that you don’t need to own. Maybe you just need to have an agreement with the property owner. So every situation is a little bit different.”

Our sincere thanks to Dr. Canup for sharing with us in these two posts. For other articles containing interviews and quotes from Dr. Canup, or to learn more about Canup & Associates consulting and speaking engagement services, visit their website at www.canup.com.

“One of the key things communities need to understand is that every site location study really is a custom study for a specific client based on the specific project requirements,” Dr. Canup began. “The process we go through is to help our client define the criteria of the project, and then that criteria drives where we search, how we search, what we look at, how we evaluate it, and how communities stack up against each other.”

Meeting these criteria is the first hurdle for a community to clear in order to be in the running, and while communities can prepare for some, others are more innate and are based on the geographic location.

“Typically, the driving factors relative to the project requirements start off with labor, meaning labor availability, quality, trainability, and productivity. There are a whole lot of different elements of labor that we look at there,” Canup continued. “If it’s a transportation-sensitive project, logistics typically will drive the project, and that may relate to proximity to interstates, ports, or airports. In some cases, the project criteria is specifically related to customer proximity. We go through a whole series of processes like that – screening, analyzing, and evaluating – and eventually we qualify specific geographical areas that meet those criteria and eliminate all those areas that don’t.”

Once this first hurdle is cleared, the communities identified will enter the RFP stage where the prospect sends out requests for proposals specific to the project. Arrival of an RFP means that the community has been pre-qualified for the project, yet many communities fail to put their best foot forward at this point.

“The most important thing that communities can do at that point is to be prepared to respond to the RFP with strong information and data relative to the community, region, and assets such as raw land, existing buildings, or whatever the particular project is looking at. That’s where most communities fall short – they’re just not prepared for the opportunity that knocks on the door.

“Preparedness also relates to your allies, support teams, and having your support systems tuned up to respond to those opportunities, because the next step after you’ve passed over this second hurdle is that you’re likely to get a community visit. A lot of times the community visit is the “go / no-go” type of deal where the community is either ready with the information and has all of the people lined up that the prospect needs to meet with, or they drop the ball. It’s unfortunate, but that happens in some cases where they’ve done everything really well up to that point and then all of a sudden they can’t get the right people to the table at the right point in time, so they get eliminated.”

And what about incentives? Despite what you might think, incentives aren’t what gets a community into the running for a project, but are actually saved as a factor for the final decision once the search is near it’s conclusion.

“Candidly, I’ve had a few clients, but very few, who started off with part of the project criteria targeting specific incentives,” Canup said. “The best prospects are those who identify regions and communities that will work in the absence of incentives, and then the incentives become discriminators between the locations that you know are going to work. We always start off asking about incentives that are available and how they are applied, but it’s generally not until we get down to a short list of maybe three of four communities that we really drill down into the incentive side of the business. Every one of those communities could work and the client can’t make a bad decision relative to where they will place the operation, so at that point in time incentives really can be the deal maker or deal breaker. If a community gets to the shortlist stage, which is really the third hurdle, that’s when they need to put their best effort on the table.”

Along with site selection consulting work for major global corporations, Canup & Associates also does reverse consulting and presentations to help communities prepare themselves for new opportunities. In our next post, we’ll share Dr. Canup’s comments on incentives, investment, and site planning as it relates to being prepared.