By Ron Bancroft
MaineToday.com Business
Tuesday,
July 17, 2007
On a flight to Chicago last year I struck up a conversation with my seatmate. He was a consultant, like myself, and had recently moved to Maine from San Francisco.
In fact, he had moved all of his eight-person firm from the Bay Area to Portland.
He told me he and the other owners of the firm had grown dissatisfied with the high cost of living in San Francisco. In particular, many of their employees could not afford to live in any proximity to downtown San Francisco and were forced to commute long hours to get to the office.
His firm had undertaken a nationwide search for a place that, similar to San Francisco, was an attractive city with accessibility to both mountains and ocean.
The place had to have affordable housing within easy commuting distance, good public schools and an airport that allowed reasonable access to their clients scattered across the country.
By these criteria, Portland rose to the top of the list.
Now, it is true that most cities in the country look reasonably priced when compared to San Francisco. Nonetheless, I think we are on to something here in the area of economic development that needs more focus.
Clearly, the notion of a quality place to live is becoming more significant to many professionals whose jobs allow them flexibility in location.
Portland is a wonderful place to live. Not for nothing does the city rise to the top tier of "best small cities in the United States."
Portland has a surprisingly strong cultural community for a city its size, anchored by a wonderful symphony orchestra, the envy of many larger cities, and an excellent theater company.
We have good schools, a good airport and a spectacular setting on Casco Bay.
We also can get to Boston with relative ease, particularly important for baseball fans.
RUNNING WITH IT
Quite obviously, there is a strong fit between certain kinds of mobile professionals and the greater Portland area. How do we build on this advantage?
It probably makes sense to concentrate this kind of development effort on the major metropolitan areas that are in close proximity, namely, Boston, New York and Philadelphia.
What might we focus on? First, any potentially mobile professional who has some Maine connection -- such as growing up here, families who now live here, having gone to summer camp here, having a seasonal residence here. All these factors might provide leads.
In addition, we might focus on large professional organizations like Goldman Sachs, IBM, or my old firm, McKinsey & Company. We could approach this type of firm with the advantages of setting up a small satellite office in the Portland area.
IBM, for example, has pioneered the concept of the mobile remote office. IBM provides office space that any of its systems consultants can access as needed. The IBM personnel basically work out of their homes and use these field offices on occasion for connecting.
Having this sort of facility in Portland would be an ideal way to attract more IBMers to live in southern Maine.
TARGETING AND ENTICING
In this era of data-mining technologies, I have no doubt the state economic development folks could come up with a good list for a targeted mailing outlining the benefits of a move to the greater Portland area.
Perhaps we should even think of incentives we might offer to encourage such in-migration. One incentive could be a tax credit if one could show the move brought at least one more independent job to Maine.
To do this may seem too focused on individuals and not on cluster kinds of development. We certainly want to continue our efforts to develop industry clusters, well-documented in the Brookings Institution study of the state.
However, while continuing to pursue our cluster strategy, I suggest we expend some effort to tap the sort of person who joined me on that flight to Chicago. Technology is there to do this at modest cost.
We could also approach specific firms, as I have suggested, to leverage their base of mobile professionals.
I believe such approaches would be effective new arrows in our economic development quiver.
Ron Bancroft is an independent strategy consultant based in Portland. He can be contacted at:
ron@bancroftandcompany.com
