Staff from the Northfield Area Chamber of Commerce and the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation met this morning to continue the forward progress on several shared initiatives. Here I am with Kathy Feldbrugge at Bittersweet.
Our topics included Market Analysis: updating the Retail Trade Analysis, reviewing existing market studies, gathering more detail on the markets for retail, tourism, culture, and business recruitment, and website enhancement. We’re preparing for an upcoming meeting focusing on this matter.
At that point, the third of the four Economic Development Partners, Blake Abdella of the Northfield Enterprise Center, stopped by to see us. He added input on the Retail Trade Analysis and updated us on his efforts to help apportion the workload for economic development.
Kathy and I then moved on to our Business Retention and Expansion work. We discussed assuring that we got a representative sampling of businesses, reporting important information to the EDA, fostering informal mentoring, identifying common business needs, and educating business people about existing programs (…which took us back to the website discussion). We also agreed that the EDA needed to serve as the advocate for business within the structure of municipal government.
Finally, we talked about our Shop Local Campaign. We may have come up with a clever approach to unifying our efforts with a subtle but powerful message, but we need to “talk with our people” before announcing it.
Thanks to David Ludescher for the amateur photography work. Not bad for an attorney, David!