Shepherd Advisors

As Michigan's economic development community explores new strategies to grow the state's economy, we believe that "economic gardening" represents an exciting and innovative approach that works to boost local economic growth - especially when communities strive to meet a couple of key success factors.

Over the last three years, Shepherd Advisors has been working with economic developers in several Michigan counties to implement economic gardening programs to support revenue growth at promising growth companies.

What is economic gardening? According to Chris Gibbons, arguably the nation's foremost economic gardening champion, economic gardening ("EG") is, "an entrepreneurial alternative to traditional economic development strategies... [which] uses high end corporate level tools and cutting edge scientific concepts to help entrepreneurial growth companies identify markets, monitor competitors, track industry trends, locate customer clusters on maps, and use search engine optimization/Google AdWords/social media for marketing and various customized research."

In a recent article entitled, "Economic Gardening," published in the Summer 2010 issue of the International Economic Development Journal, Gibbons highlighted seven "key success factors" that he has, after 20 years of trial and error, learned are critical to the development of a robust and fundamentally successful economic gardening effort.

Seven key success factors can be divided, to our mind, into three arenas: People, Politics & Program. They can be summarized as follows:

The Right People

• High quality staff is first and foremost: Staff should have a high level of skills in the technical areas of service, including market research, web marketing, social media, etc. to help client companies grow in a variety of ways.
• The project director must be skilled at three scales: community politics, entrepreneur, and economy. A project director must be competent at selling the economic gardening program, identifying with management of growth businesses and the community's political/business leadership, and understanding the economic environment.

Supportive Politics

• Political support and political champions are key to long term success: Long term funding and support are vital, and communities need political leaders willing to go to bat for the program.

Design the Program to Succeed

• Staff must have training in EG principles: Economic gardening is not perfunctory business assistance; it is a multi-faceted process of providing dynamic growth support of highly variable businesses.
• Use the full set of tools: Economic gardening relies upon a broad set of databases, skilled researchers, and a high-level corporate toolkit that includes GIS, Social Networking, Web marketing, and management support and connections, among others.
• Implement at an appropriate scale: Generally, larger programs will have the scale of tools, skills, and companies that will enable the program to provide better service to more kinds of companies.
• Focus on second stage companies: Most jobs are created not by the largest or the smallest companies but by "Stage 2" companies, which are companies defined by having 10-99 Employees and $1M - $50M in annual sales.

Can economic gardening be done effectively without the right People, Politics or Program? Which are more important? Not all communities have all the necessary pieces in place - are they doomed to fail?

While all of these factors are critical in the long run, Shepherd's economic gardening experiences to date strongly suggest that having "the right people," including the right leadership and the right technical support, is the most important in the short run. The right people can be trained in the principles and tools of economic gardening, and they will bring the key competencies and flexibility toward gaining initial successes, which is the best way to gain longer-term support.

Is this article informative? Please feel free to contact Terri Schroeder 616-805-4679 or terri@shepherdadvisors.com or Loch McCabe 734-975-0333 or loch@shepherdadvisors.com to further discuss economic gardening.