Redevelopment Resources - Blog

Where’s the Love for your Community?

rrAdmin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:36:51 +0000

For a Christmas gift this season I gave my business partners Peter Kageyama’s book, “For the Love of Cities: The Love Affair Between People and Their Places”. Peter was a featured speaker at WEDA’s Governor’s Conference on Economic Development, February 9 at the Monona Terrace in Madison, WI. He gave a dynamic presentation and got some great reviews at the conference.

I read the book in preparation to hear him speak at the conference. Kageyama covers a lot of ground (from functional to emotional relationships, and what can be done to foster all) and I found myself more than once saying, “Yes!” in agreement with a point he was making. As practitioners of economic development and/or as citizens of our community, we can contribute to the loveability and the connection others feel with our community.

Many of the examples in the book relate to large cities but the same can be applied to small cities and even the smallest of communities. Is your city pet friendly? Does it have a nickname? Does it have great food? Does it have fabulous events? Is there a “green” effort? Does your community have popular public gathering spaces? Are there active social media vehicles? Are there co-creators in your community? If there is a passion among business owners, elected officials or employees for your community, how can that be exploited for the good of the whole so others can fall in love with your community too?

You don’t have to overhaul and redevelop the entire downtown, but a few strategic efforts can do amazing work at getting the ball rolling. One redeveloped façade leads to another. One planted flowerpot, one public bike rental facility, one active Facebook page, one pet friendly event, one group of inspired small business owners…….. it all gains momentum and pretty soon your community is picking up steam and creating (and feeling) the love!

This book emphasizes something the team at Redevelopment Resources has been overheard saying and blogging about: Do something. Quoting from page 215 of the book: “Start small. Make a simple gesture. Then another. Then another. Make it easier to make your imprint. Open your hearts and make up new things. This is our work, and frontiers are all around us.”

What Comes First in Downtown Revitalization?

rrAdmin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:45:29 +0000

As unique as communities are from one another with respect to their special geographic locations and cultural heritage, communities are also common in many respects by their infrastructure, provision of services to residents and keeping an eye on their budgets and spending. As community economic development advisors, we are often asked what downtown things should communities invest in first with the available downtown dollars they have.

The answer: It depends…..on where your community is on the revitalization continuum. It generally follows that an early assessment, organizational and planning phase is essential to revitalizing a downtown, but beyond that what’s the initial step communities can take to move forward? Improve basic infrastructure, examine the conditions of commercial building inventory, create urban amenities, attract an interesting mix of retail and commercial business, eliminate blighting influences (including environmental remediation), and the list goes on.

An initial downtown assessment and planning phase will outline strengths and needs and also offer suggestions on priorities. But to begin actually implementing plans and ideas, how do you move from where your downtown is currently?

Maybe you focus first on improving existing strengths in your downtown; maybe you work with properties which are currently available, affordable and ready to be redeveloped (the low hanging fruit opportunity); or identify and work first with an interested entrepreneur who wants to open a downtown business; or work with an investor who wants to in-fill, build or buy and renovate a building.

Other answers to the question, “What should my downtown invest in first?” include: evaluate the entry to the downtown (improving your gateway); concentrate on renovating one historic or other prominent building based on budget and scope; work with local business to create excitement in one (or a group of) retail storefront(s) (others will follow!), acquire and raze one blighted property, create and market a downtown event.

The answer to the question, “Which comes first?” is: All of the above! Ideally a community should work simultaneously on as many opportunities as practical, but in the alternative…. at least do something!

In Search of Excellence, or Beyond Mediocrity

rrAdmin — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:02:57 +0000

In so many of the communities Redevelopment Resources has worked, there is a desire to be excellent. We see it across the communities and organizations where projects begin and either proceed or become stalled. Many economic development practitioners, municipal employees, Main Street employees, board members and volunteers have a desire to do the best work they possibly can.
So why are there communities with incomplete projects, struggling downtowns, languishing industrial parks, a glut of vacant commercial real estate? And at the same time other communities are thriving with “NOW HIRING” signs on many of their businesses; have vibrant downtowns; and business owners are expanding?

It could be said that a lot of it has to do with attitude. The desire to be excellent, even in uncertain times is a force to be reckoned with. To excel at something means to be better or greater than another. Mediocrity on the other hand is the state of being neither very good nor very bad. In this challenging economy, there is no room for mediocrity. One must ask him/herself, “What else can be done?” “How can this problem be solved?” “How can this project be moved forward?”
It would be easy to say, “There isn’t money for that”, or “there is nothing we can do until the economy turns around”. Another common excuse is that a project won’t get the required votes from a council or committee.

1. Be encouraged to push beyond those excuses. Brainstorm solutions with coworkers.
2. Research like projects; chances are the same challenges have been met elsewhere in the world!
3. Find the money: consider non-traditional sources including private foundations or individuals in the community who have money and want to invest it in the right project. Put together an investor group of junior investors who want to get started developing projects and portfolios in the community.
4. Succeed in spite of the economy. Don’t be swayed by the reports in the media hype about the negative economy. Somebody’s doing well somewhere…… make it be your community!
5. A solid project needs a champion and a majority of votes, not unanimous support.
6. Be as clear and concise about your project, highlighting (and focusing on) the benefits to the community.
7. Look for financial and technical support in nontraditional places. Take on private sector advocates for projects like local bankers, real estate agents, utility representatives, private foundation representatives, attorneys, accountants, other stakeholders standing to benefit from the project (directly or indirectly).

Be BOLD, and be diligent! Your community will benefit from your efforts!

Vacant Storefront Makeovers

rrAdmin — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:57:43 +0000

No one gets uplifted or inspired when passing a vacant storefront. It’s depressing. It doesn’t bode well for the image of the community, and certainly isn’t fun for the adjacent business owners. So what can be done to bring some life back to these dark voids? If you can get permission from the building owner, here are some quick tips:

For those buildings with window displays:
Post a calendar of community events on an easel in the window and illuminate it well. If track lights are not an option, buy a floor standing light fixture that allows you to position the spot light(s). [see photo attached]

Create a fun window display using merchandise from neighboring stores. Place a sign acknowledging the merchants and where they are located. Illuminate the display and sign.

Buy some temporary paint and have an artist paint a large seasonal graphic on the window. Change the graphic monthly.

With all of the above suggestions, be sure to make room for a sign that describes the benefits of the space to entice passing pedestrians. You never know who might be interested in leasing the space, or who KNOWS someone interested in leasing a space like it.

For buildings without window displays, round up volunteers in the building trades and:

Remove ripped or damaged awnings. No awnings are often better than old tattered ones.

Paint window and door trims an attractive color that coordinates with the rest of the building.

Get an exterior light working and on a timer so the façade is not dark during the evening hours.

Post a weatherproof sign on the outside that describes the space for lease and/or contact information.

Place a large urn on the sidewalk with seasonal flowers/greens in it. Make sure it is well maintained.

You’ll be surprised how much these improvements/enhancements can help boost community morale and expedite getting the space occupied.

Now, if the owner is not open to these ideas, and no amount of sweet-talking will change his/her mind, then there is a bigger problem at hand and one that needs a different kind of attention. This is when some serious negotiating needs to take place regarding the future of the building. And if all attempts meet staunch refusal to move forward in any matter, then it’s time to surrender the fight and wait. Eventually, the scenario will change. In the mean time, you can find comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. All communities have a curmudgeon or two in their mix. It’s what makes the world go round.

Lyn Falk
Registered Interior Designer
Consultant – National Main Street
Strategic Partner – Redevelopment Resources
President – Retailworks, Inc. www.retailworksinc.com
lfalk@retailworksinc.com
262.238.1860 ext 101
414.840.1244 cell

Where is Your Commitment?

rrAdmin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:28:34 +0000

I’ve recently had the opportunity to see inside a few organizations to understand just exactly where the commitment lies. It’s been eye-opening, and has caused me to really understand how people are motivated differently, and how effective, or ineffective it can cause the organization to become.
Commitment to the organization, its mission, vision, goals and objectives should be expected from all members of the organization. As an organizational leader, it’s important to make sure you provide a clear aiming point. Be specific about explaining the standards of commitment you are personally adhering to, and you expect them to adhere to. This commitment should be communicated to board members, city council members and other stakeholders as well. If you clearly outline your commitment to established goals and objectives, stakeholder buy-in is much easier to attain.
Focus on the possibilities that are created with the goals and objectives you’ve developed and behave consistently, demonstrating your commitment through your actions. Many times it seems so much organizational focus is placed on putting out fires, solving problems, or dealing with naysayers or negative attitudes. To quote a line from a book by Price Pritchett entitled, “Firing Up Commitment During Organizational Change”, “Too much respect for problems kills our faith in possibilities.”
Problems come up, sometimes daily, but by focusing on the problems and not the possibilities generated from achieving your goals and objectives, you will spend an extraordinary amount of time spinning on those problems, and often will lose sight of the direction you’ve set for the organization, community or business.
If you are dedicated to the organization and demonstrate that through commitment, holding your standards high for your employees, colleagues and external stakeholders, behavior starts to matter. Attitude and performance begin to make a big difference to the people involved. It’s then that you must reward your people for their commitment, or the commitment will start running on empty. In an effort to legitimately expect more commitment, make sure they have a true vested interest in the results. Provide an opportunity for shared recognition, a psychological paycheck so to speak, or other tangible or intangible reward. A sense of ownership in community revitalization work goes a long way to a shared feeling of pride. Being able to stand back and see the skyline or landscape changed and see people enjoy and appreciate the changes is very rewarding.

Develop a Network and Learn from Friends

rrAdmin — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:40:03 +0000

Redevelopment Resources is encouraging you to attend our upcoming half-day seminar, Tough Love and Downtown Revitalization, Tuesday June 14 in beautiful downtown Neenah. The event has been carefully crafted to meet your needs as a practitioner of economic development, community development and downtown revitalization. We are going to focus on issues facing your community in today’s economic environment, and what you can do to spur interest from developers, retailers, service related businesses and especially your elected officials.

Don’t miss the most helpful half-day session on downtown revitalization available! Learn from experienced practitioners, what you can do TODAY to start revitalizing your business district and other areas of your community. Sometimes it takes tough love to deal with a challenging city council, absentee or myopic property owners, and local business owners facing challenging times. Learn how to shift mindsets and incorporate transition.

Do you have vacant storefronts in your downtown? Do you have absentee landlords who don’t share your concern for the community? Do the business operators in your downtown need a spark of excitement? Learn techniques to exploit your assets and minimize your liabilities.

Attend “Tough Love and Downtown Revitalization” and learn how to approach business recruitment aggressively to fill your vacant storefront. You’ll hear approaches to dealing with blighted property that you can take back to your community and implement immediately. Discover how to be bold and deal with absentee property owners in an impactful way. Gain ideas for sparking enthusiasm and ownership in the downtown among small business owners.

If you cannot attend, send someone from your community. We will be announcing a very special giveaway at the event that you won’t want to miss! Visit our Events page on our web site and sign up today! Space is limited.

Internal Marketing

rrAdmin — Wed, 04 May 2011 19:49:16 +0000

Internal marketing is defined as a management philosophy of promoting the community and its policies or goals to employees or other stakeholders as if they were customers. It is critical for change management and political support for any project or economic development/redevelopment effort. As an important implementation tool, internal marketing aids communications and helps to overcome any resistance to change. It informs and involves staff and other stakeholders on new projects, new initiatives and new thought processes.
The internal customers need to be marketed to just as external customers. In a community, internal marketing may pertain to municipal staff, other organizations’ staff members, elected officials, and private sector stakeholders. With any project or effort, supporters and detractors will exist. It is important to solidify the message and have other internal “customer” accept it so there will be support to the other internal stakeholders.
Internal marketing can be executed similarly to traditional marketing. There is a message and it needs to be communicated. Public meetings, newsletters, information session, postings on web sites, and small group discussions are all ways to communicate an internal message to community stakeholders. Before the community markets its offerings to outside entities, it’s important to make sure the internal stakeholders are singing out of the same songbook. Communicate economic development goals, redevelopment goals, workforce development goals, and even marketing goals to the groups of individuals and organizations which will help carry that water when there is a prospect in town. We have probably all heard stories of the prospect that slipped into town unannounced and asked a gas station attendant something about the community and received a negative impression, thus choosing to locate their business elsewhere. It has happened in personal experience where a certain municipal department almost unraveled a deal for a new development because they were set on enforcing the certain flow of storm water and weren’t interested or able to provide optional solutions, just one way of doing something that would have cost the business too much money to make the deal feasible. Fortunately we saved the deal, but this is the perfect example of internal marketing. All staff members, Chamber of Commerce representatives, and other related parties understand the goals and are willing to contribute to the achieving of those goals.
The cultural climate needs to be willing to accept the concepts and processes behind the goals. It’s not necessary to have everyone on board before beginning to execute an external marketing strategy but it’s very important not to forget the internal customers.

Marketing Part II – Differentiating Your Community

rrAdmin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:15:08 +0000

There have been a number of articles and books published which address a company’s need to identify its competitive advantage. It’s not only important for companies, but it is also important for communities to develop and promote competitive advantages, as marketing plans are developed and businesses are courted. One definition of a sustained competitive advantage: “when a firm is implementing a value-creating strategy not simultaneously being implemented by any current or potential competitors and when these firms are unable to duplicate the benefits of this strategy”.
Similar to a competitive advantage is competitive positioning. You may not have a competitive advantage at all, but if you make a claim first, and loudest, your competitors have all they can do just to keep up. Although these concepts have been applied in the private sector, the ideas can also be easily transferred to the public sector. Your competitors are all the other communities hoping to lure the same new businesses away from your business park or downtown and to their doorstep.
A good place to start is with an analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). A SWOT analysis won’t point out your competitive advantages however. It may help you narrow your focus on a few ideas, but to really drill down into the competitive advantages that will sell your community to any prospective businesses you’d like to locate in your city, you need to translate those strengths and opportunities into something meaningful to the prospect. To have a competitive advantage relative to other areas in attracting and serving a target industry, a community must have more of the attributes needed or preferred by the target industry than any other community.
Keep in mind if you are touting a competitive advantage that you believe is important but it’s really not that important to a prospect, it will mean nothing to them. Also, you will want to present your advantages on the basis of your region, the state, and the nation if applicable, as your prospect may be comparing sites on any of those levels. Resources, infrastructure, research connections, available workforce housing, complex clusters of related supply/product chains, available skilled workforce, networks of industry experts all could be positioned as competitive advantages for a community. The list could be endless but is only valuable if it is what the prospect wants.
Once the competitive advantages or positions have been identified, a focused marketing plan must be developed to communicate the advantages. You have to communicate them to all the stakeholders in the community who may come in contact with prospects and all of your existing or potential prospects. Where and how these should be marketed will be addressed in a future post. Stay tuned!

Marketing Can Be a Squishy Thing

rrAdmin — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:39:11 +0000

You’ve got to start marketing your community to attract business, right? It sounds easy. Advertise in some trade journals, go on a few marketing missions with the region or state, create a cool community logo and bam! Companies will be calling. Maybe the solution is a $50,000 branding campaign. Hire a marketing firm and they’ll come in and figure out your brand. Then you put your new logo on a few letters and THEN the companies will be calling.
What will you market? Most communities have charming downtowns, improved business/industrial parks, and available workforce. Most communities also have some incentives; a revolving loan fund, TIF districts, and possibly others to encourage and entice a company to locate within their community. But what sets your community apart from the others? It’s important to know the competitive advantages of the community, including local and regional assets, strengths and weaknesses, what types of companies already exist in the community and what makes them successful there.
Who will you send the letters to? Have you defined your target market? Is your potential audience reachable on a national level, are they international….or are they already in your very own backyard? If you’ve answered all of the above, that’s good, but then is the message going to be the same to all three groups? What are the needs of the target audiences? What will be appealing to them…. And do you have it already?
Understanding the community and the target audience are very big important tasks on the road to marketing the community. Economic development marketing can be very high tech and high level but the basics still apply. Know your community. Know your target market. Then, and only then should you attempt to reach out to the potential businesses or companies which you’d like to attract.
Applying all of the proper marketing strategies in the appropriate order may help to draw some attention to your community, but there are many things that are disregarded when considering marketing the community. There are things every municipal employee, Chamber of Commerce member, even resident citizen can do every day to be marketing the community.
For the next few weeks we’ll examine Economic Development Marketing, and the things each community can do to strengthen their position in terms of being reactive AND proactive with marketing efforts.

Outlook for the Economy

rrAdmin — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:54:20 +0000

I was traveling on an airplane last week and the gentleman sitting next to me told me he was in the steel industry. He had some reading to catch up on so I didn’t visit too much with him until closer to the end of the flight. He was reading several reports: “Construction Materials Outlook”, “Automotive Sector Outlook”, “Recovery Economics; Threats and Opportunities”. They sounded very interesting and before the end of the flight he asked me if I wanted them because he was going to recycle them.
So I took the reports. One never knows where some useful information may come from. I thought I’d read through them and then recycle them myself. Before I do, I’ll share the summary of what I read.
The auto industry seems to be more hopeful than the construction industry. The short-term outlook for the auto industry is positive but constrained. The long-term growth trajectory is robust, yet will take time. These seem like fairly safe projections to make. And I like that they are positive statements. In the construction industry, it appears power related construction and the hospital/higher education categories are the only ones showing measurable growth. Single family residential is “up a bit” and multi-family residential construction is “accelerating”.
Both industries are watching regulations and government activity. In the auto industry the concern is about stiffening emission and fuel economy regulations. The construction industry is concerned about the decreasing momentum of federal stimulus funded projects, and the squeeze on state and local government spending and its affect on infrastructure.
What struck me most were the parallels to things we’ve been writing about in this blog for the past several months. Underlying themes include new business models of “seeking joint ventures/partnerships/strategic acquisitions”, a focus on flexibility, and my personal favorite… “Integration and implementation are the new differentiators”.
There will still be ways to get projects done, even if private sector funding is tight. Developers will be more strategic about the projects they choose to undertake. The projects that happen in your community will need to be carefully analyzed for the positive impact and their ability to pay the community back, versus the “cost” to participate. Oftentimes it’s a perspective issue with elected officials. Make sure you present the project from all angles…. “If we don’t do this project…” “If we do this project……”. As a good friend and colleague of mine says, “My favorite project is….the next one”.