Winter Greetings, CREDC Investor Community!
“Business as usual” and “business exceptional” are two resounding themes as I reflect on CREDC staff and board member activity in 2022.
Our Business Development team was back on the road for extra-regional outreach at Hannover Messe, the world’s largest industrial trade fair in Germany; Nashville for a best practices visit; San Diego for International Bio2022; in the nation’s capital for SelectUSA’s foreign direct investment magnet event, and huddling with site selectors in Ohio.
We hosted in-person site visits with foreign direct investment prospects from three countries and two continents, in addition to hosting domestic companies from our active pipeline. CREDC generated 62 percent of our business development pipeline’s actionable leads, and launched 40 new projects, cultivating 12 wins. CREDC spearheads these attraction efforts, rallies supporting stakeholders, stewards hundreds of follow-up communications, and works to help companies ‘land softly’.
This year, we ramped CREDC’s outbound business attraction efforts up with dedicated resources to systemize and monitor attraction targets with business intelligence and automation tools, and analytics. We are driving more company executives from outside the region to credc.org, and those visitors are spending twice as long clicking through our resources. [Digital web folks nodding vigorously with approval.]
Development leads are only as strong as our capacity to place them, and we witnessed an uptick in local companies sharing their challenges in finding ‘the right’ spaces to accommodate expansion plans. We hear you, CREDC’s Lands for Jobs committee continues its work to create a transparent lens into the viable industrial land and utilities footprint.
It is a remarkable time to apply for federal-level funding to support the infrastructure that will help businesses and community thrive—to that end, CREDC is proud to have rallied a high-tech manufacturing roundtable with Senator Maria Cantwell in February, and subsequently to have supported Senators Cantwell and Murray alongside industry stakeholders in their presentation of the CHIPS and Science Act in Camas, WA, in August. CREDC’s work tracking and teeing up federal grant opportunities is ongoing.
Innovation takes place in large- and small-scale bites in Clark County—which is why CREDC also stood up a 2022 Business Accelerator Pilot for scalable entrepreneurs. Nine companies took part in a cumulative 432 training hours to test out their business expansion ideas, with coaching and guest entrepreneur introductions. Two businesses went brick and mortar, two rebranded, and two companies (re)launched their concepts for greater staying power. With support, we are eager to continue this program.
Aligning with the Support People pillar of our work, summer found CREDC gathering five panels of experts together on the topics of childcare, quality jobs, leadership, higher education, including a platform where Future Leaders Project undergrad interns could share their voices and perspectives at our half-day conference. CREDC has hosted 5 interns and 1 graduate fellow since spring 2020. If we can stand up this envelope for intergenerational engagement, so can you!
Thanks to you, our shared investor community, we crested 2,015 LinkedIn followers.
It has been a big year, with much adaptability required—but meeting colleagues in-person and connecting with national and international contacts on-the-ground reinvigorates and reenergizes.
From our team to yours: we send wishes for wellness and thriving community in the New Year, and our profound thanks for your engagement in CREDC-driven economic development work.
Best regards,
Jen Baker
