Day 15: What Will Draw the Attention of a Company?

Day 15:   What will draw the attention of a company?  Nothing.  Oops, did I just say that?  While our firm is a BIG believer in marketing your community, we don’t encourage our clients to use a shot gun approach.  You must target the industries you want as I discussed on Day 11.  Based on these targets you will know what will catch the attention of a company.  If you have a site with 360v power lines, plenty of water and multiple high fiber lines going by the site and in an area that has no natural disasters and in a northern climate, than data center companies would find this site very interesting.  There are actually very few sites in the country that meet all of the requirements I just listed, so you will want to make sure information about this site gets out to the people on the data center site selection world.   But most small communities just have regular land with nothing that stands out to differentiate the location from the 15,000 other viable locations in the US. 

If you have a 100 acre site that is fully served and sitting on a four lane interstate, you will get some serious lookers.  If you have a 50 acre site fully served not on a four lane, you will need to work a lot harder to move the land.  Actually, building a spec building on a piece of 50 acres will get a lot more companies interested.  We will discuss spec buildings on a different day.  Through our work, we keep hearing the favorite expression, “the chicken or the egg.”  I firmly believe generally there is an order of things in economic development.  You must first decide what kind of community you want to be as in tourism, manufacturing, service, combination of all, etc.  Then decide your targets.  Then make sure you have the needed infrastructure is in place including land or a building.  Then market to the key industries.  This is a simplified outline and several of my future blogs will touch in more detail the steps required.  Next:  Leadership

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