Shepherd Advisors

Shepherd Advisors has been working on economic gardening projects with growth-oriented entrepreneurs and community economic developers since 2007.

Economic gardening is a form of economic development, which targets local, growth-oriented companies, and offers technical and strategic services to help them grow. By providing small, but promising, companies with world-class market research and sales strategy support, local entrepreneurs can grow and create jobs at much faster rates than most "economic hunting" work (i.e. search for external companies to open operations in the local area).

Economic gardening was pioneered by Chris Gibbons in Littleton, CO. Mr. Gibbons' approach includes three pillars of economic gardening:

• Information: tactical and strategic market information
• Infrastructure: physical assets, quality of life, quality of job pool, etc
• Connections: to trade associations, colleges and universities, peers, and CEOs

Shepherd Advisors focuses on the "information" pillar. Working with companies, we identify a specific, quantitative goal (in terms of growing sales, employees, or other key metric). Through some combination of primary and secondary research, along with Web marketing support, we aim to enable the company to reach their articulated goal. Projects typically include one or more of the following:

1. Primary research: interviewing customer and/or potential customers to identify key needs, suppliers, areas of pain, etc.
2. Secondary research: accessing market research reports, databases, industry information, and web searches to better identify and target key customers or competition
3. Web marketing support: Web site analysis and improvement suggestions, suggestions to improve "search engine optimization", and launching online advertising campaigns

We have documented a few of our sample economic gardening client success stories for your reference.

Please feel free to contact Terri Schroeder (terri@shepherdadvisors.com) to learn more.