Economic and
workforce development
organizations have three ways of facilitating the creation of jobs and capital investment in any market area anywhere in the world.- Growth/expansion of existing firms (
business retention and expansion
) - Creation of new firms (entrepreneurial development)
- Attraction of external firms to the market area (business recruitment)
A holistic
economic development
strategy should, ideally, include a combination of these three elements. The fundamental question in any market area becomes prioritization of these elements to achieve maximum (ROI) return on investment.
Business retention and expansion
has many labels…Aftercare, BRE
, BR+E, BEAR, Existing Industries
and Retention. Regardless of the moniker, business retention and expansion
is private-sector customer retention applied to economic and workforce development
.To illustrate this, we have taken this standard definition of private-sector customer retention from Impact Learning Systems. With very little modification, we put this definition in an
economic development
context.
“Customer retention (
business retention and expansion
) is the activity that a selling organization (
economic or workforce development
agency) undertakes in order to reduce customer defections (
loss of private sector businesses). Successful customer retention (
business retention and expansion
) starts with the first contact an organization (
economic or workforce development
agency) has with a customer (
private sector business) and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship. A company’s (
market area's) ability to attract and retain new customers (
through entrepreneurial development and business recruitment), is not only related to its product or services (
community assets), but strongly related to the way it services its existing customers (
existing private sector businesses) and the reputation it creates within and across the marketplace (
trading area, region, province or state).”