Entrepreneurial Dominion

   Debbie Kurtz

Holding the Ugly Baby

Debbie Kurtz launched a business doing what her economic development clients didn’t want to do: Work the phones to develop leads. Now her growing company is providing turn-key marketing services.

If Debbie Kurtz has something to tell you, she doesn’t sugar coat it. When you hire Richmond-based 310 Marketing to help you with economic development marketing, you sign up for her blunt, unvarnished appraisal of your strategy.

On biotech: For most communities, recruiting biotech companies is a waste of time. “Everybody wants biotech because it pays high wages. But if you’re going up against Boston or the Bay area, you have to have your ducks in a row: teaching hospitals, major academic institutions, numbers of qualified graduates and venture capital.” If you don’t have those assets, she adds, you’d better be prepared to hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives because other people are. But you'd probably get a higher return on investment spending your money elsewhere.

On California: “Everybody on the East Coast thinks, ‘If we could just get the people in California to realize how stupid they are to be there.’” When there’s a drought, people send them water bottles. When electric rates shoot up, people send them flashlights. News flash, she says: “If things were so bad there, they’d be here already! … Those people aren’t as miserable as we’d like to think they are.”

Kurtz has come a long way since July 1999, when she left her job with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), hired two employees and started her own company. “When I first open the door,” she confesses, “I was basically an order taker. I took whatever business came along, even if the client’s expectations were really unreasonable.”

It didn’t take long for Kurtz to realize that she wasn’t always doing her clients a service by blindly following their guidance. Clients often acted on hunches, or on the basis of some fat, spiral-bound report left behind by a research consultant who had no responsibility for implementing the recommendations. As she garnered success at delivering prospects, she earned the credibility to critique her clients' marketing priorities.

One of the most important things a community can do is conduct an honest appraisal of its assets and match them with appropriate target industries. “That’s what sets us apart,” Kurtz says. “We’ve got skin in the game. If we pick the wrong targets, we can’t find you leads. You can hold us accountable.”

It’s been a winning formula. 310 Marketing has grown steadily through word of mouth, picking up the Hampton Roads Partnership, Roanoke Valley Partnership and Coalfields authority in Virginia, all seven of North Carolina’s regional economic development organizations, the state of Maryland, the state of South Carolina, Mississippi Power and a slew of smaller groups. Revenues this year are on track to match last year’s 30 percent growth rate. After five years in business, 310 Marketing has expanded to 15 employees and has every expectation of adding more.

Kurtz learned the craft at the VEDP, one of the most highly regarded state economic development organizations in the country. But after a few years, she perceived needs among VEDP's local and regional partners that were going unaddressed. In the late 1990s, states and power companies, whom regional economic developers relied upon heavily for marketing assistance, were experiencing spending cuts -- not just in Virginia but everywhere. As budgets tightened, state organizations couldn’t provide the same level of support. In particular, Kurtz observed, local economic developers desperately wanted help generating their own prospects and leads.

After agonizing over the decision for a year – driving her husband crazy with her incessant talk about it -- Kurtz took the leap. 310 Marketing would provide the single thing economic developers wanted most: leads. Developing highly qualified lists of senior executives, she would schedule appointments for trade shows and marketing trips. “Working the phones – that’s the ugly baby of marketing,” Kurtz says. “That baby is so ugly, nobody wants to hold it!”

While 310 Marketing employees are adept at working the phones, they are not telemarketers, Kurtz insists. They don’t work from scripts. They develop an in-depth knowledge of specific industry sectors and become conversant enough to probe senior corporate executives for their insights. She prefers to think of them as researchers who provide “real-time business intelligence.”

“Even if they get a “no, we’re not expanding,” or a “no, we’re not interested,” 310 staffers still milk their interviews for as much information as they can. Kurtz estimates that her people hold as many as 100,000 conversations per year with CEOs and other senior executives. The researchers accumulate a lot of real-time information in the process – knowledge that can be passed along to clients.

It wasn’t long before Kurtz figured out how to leverage that intelligence gathering. 310 Marketing began offering focused research services for clients, supplementing the real-time intelligence with information culled from databases and published sources. If someone wants to target the “green plastics” plastics industry, 310 will develop a list of environmentally friendly plastics manufacturers. If someone wants to target “neutriceutical” companies, a group that isn’t classified by NAIC code, 310 Marketing will track them down.

From conducting market research, it was only a small step to providing guidance on which industries clients should be targeting. There’s no point in recruiting an industry unless that industry’s requirements match up closely with the client’s assets.

Smaller clients often have unrealistic expectations, Kurtz says. The hard truth is that the odds are stacked against non-metropolitan regions. Many speak proudly of their industrial parks, community colleges or bucolic quality of life. She often finds that she’s the one to break them the bad news: “A community college? Stand in line. Everybody has one.” Basic assets like industrial parks, training programs and four-lane highways are the price of admittance, she explains. Without those assets, you're not even in the game.

The key to marketing is to distinguish yourself from the pack, Kurtz says. That's what led her to offer yet another set of services: helping clients identify their unique assets and building their brand around them. “You can do all the research in the world, but if you don’t package it, it won’t mean anything to anybody.” As part of its turn-key service, 310 recently has begun to develop storylines around these special characteristics and disseminate them in the form of press releases, website content and collateral materials.

Her blunt advice: If you’re an urban region, dump the gratuitous skyline photos. Every city has a skyline, a lot of them cooler than yours. If you’re a rural region, dispense with the pix of grazing horses on misty fields -- unless you’re selling horse farms. Increasingly, the decisive factor is human capital. What skills do your employees possess? What companies with complementary competencies are located in the region?

Economic development is a marathon, not a sprint, Kurtz says. There are 15,000 economic development professionals chasing a finite number of expansion and relocation leads. Marketing hype can take you only so far if the product is lack-luster. The next frontier of economic development in the knowledge economy, in which the availability of workforce skills is a key determinant of where companies invest, will be to re-tool the workforce. That's one line of business Kurtz has no interest of getting into. But she'll be happy to get out the word for anyone who does.

-- September 1, 2004

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