As published in the January 1, 2006 Toledo Business Journal
Steven W. Weathers
Regional Growth Partnership, president and CEO
RGP prepares strategic plan
for development
Toledo Business Journal recently met with Steven W. Weathers, president and CEO of the Regional Growth Partnership. He shared the following thoughts.
TBJ: We understand the RGP is currently preparing a new strategic plan. Can you discuss key elements of the plan?
SW: Our five core strategies are: maximize economic value of business expansion, attract investment in targeted clusters, build the capacity of business to innovate in a knowledge-based economy, market our competitive advantages, and partner with community advocates to improve competitive factors.
TBJ: Can you elaborate on the strategy of partnering with the community?
SW: When I was in San Diego, we worked with the people that put together an index for Silicon Valley, which is really a community report card. Business, quality of life, academia, infrastructure, per capita income, productivity, research dollars – how these things rank compared to other communities. This starts to paint a picture of where are you in a competitive matrix form.
Doing this will do two things for us. It gives us a document somewhat like the Silicon Valley document that we can use to show individuals that we’re marketing to. We can also use it to show people already in this community what we’re doing well, and if we’re not doing well in a particular area, we can work to improve it.
Once we get through with our strategic planning, we’ll need a lot of support and commitment from other parts of this region. We want to put together a document like this, but we need community partners to step in to help gather this information. If we can get enough players that support this idea, we’re looking to put something like this together this year.
TBJ: Can you elaborate on the other core strategies?
SW: Maximize economic value of business expansion – We’re trying to do what we can with our partners here to add value to their retention efforts. We cover 11 counties in northwest Ohio – and we’re trying to partner and do things with southeast Michigan – we have limited resources and staff here at the RGP. We can’t be in all places and do all things. But if we can let our economic development partners lead the way to retain or expand companies, we need to figure out what we can do to support their efforts. It might be different in each area.
Attract investment in targeted clusters – With limited resources, we can only talk to a certain number of people. We need to decide which areas bring the greatest value, based on what we are trying to accomplish, and focus on those areas. We’re getting into that discussion now, of what clusters we should focus on, because again, we can’t be all things to all people.
Build the capacity of business to innovate in a knowledge-based economy – We’re still working with the traditional industries that have been here, but what are those next industries? That’s my question for this region: are we taking the skill sets that we have today and translating them to the jobs of tomorrow?
Market our competitive advantages – Not only marketing outside of our area and why this is a good location for business, but also local communications planned to make sure people know why they want to be here and stay here.
TBJ: What level of the RGP’s efforts and resources will be directed to helping existing businesses retain and expand employment versus attracting new companies to the area?
SW: We’re still discussing that and doing our planning, as to the amount of resources that we put to those. Financially, we haven’t quite gotten down to the division of resources. As a general rule, what you find is 80 percent of jobs are created by existing industry, and 20 percent are through your business attraction efforts. If we followed that, 80 percent of our funds would go to retention and expansion and 20 percent to attraction. We will have to weigh that against if the industries here are doing pretty well – if they need as much assistance. We’ll know that later on as we do research, and we’ll be able to direct our efforts accordingly.
TBJ: Can you discuss specific programs that will support retention and expansion efforts?
SW: We still have some work to do on this, but we are calling it a business connectory program for now. These have been done before. It’s a local buy campaign, but what makes it different is we want to use the technology we have with the Internet to have companies around the region register what they do – what product they make or service they provide – so we can start to promote them to other businesses within the region. To make this work we need all of the economic development partners to work within their regions to get their companies to put their data on this site.
I’m hoping this tool will provide us – if it works like we’re envisioning it – we’ll be able to measure and show what companies are buying and where they are. It will show very strong economic interrelationships between all of our partners, and they can see why they need to work together.
TBJ: Have a set of metrics been established to enable you to monitor success?
SW: There was a national study done here a while back of economic development groups around the country. The traditional measures that you’ll see in just about any economic development program that we’ll be using include: job creation, capital investment, average salaries, company visits, prospect generation, payroll generation, square footage absorption, and meetings with site selectors. This is a real dynamic model; this is not static in the marketplace. We might tweak these a little, but right now these are the ones we’re starting to use.
The non-traditional measures we’ll use may include number of patents issued, commercialization, number of business start-ups. If we do a community report card as we discussed earlier, we’ll get a lot of this information. I’d like to get a base structure to the report card the first time around, and update it every two years.
TBJ: Can you discuss the resources needed to implement the strategic plan and if any major changes are needed in terms of staffing and funding?
SW: I don’t believe we’ll have any changes in staffing. We might do some retooling and shifting. On the funding, it’s been reduced substantially. It’s going from approximately $2.5 million in 2003 to approximately $1.5 million. We have a lot of things to do with a substantially reduced budget. The other side of that coin is we are not encumbered by public dollars now, which allows us to truly be more regional. We can be quicker and more agile in our actions; we don’t have to move within political boundaries.