OLAF GROWALD
Fort Worth is an interesting problem. Its pipeline of business relocation and expansion prospects has long been full, and the city historically has let the market play in terms of what business comes to town and what kinds of jobs it’s bringing. Yet despite being one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, Fort Worth is home to only 30% of the jobs in the DFW area. The city has few of the high-profile corporate headquarters that Dallas has. The percentage of the city’s population with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 30.7%, lower than the U.S. average, 31.3%. Fort Worth also spends significantly less on recruiting new business, resulting in the city being one of the nation’s least identifiable big metros. The 2020 budget for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce — the city’s de facto marketing agency — is $5.1 million, well short of the $8 million four-year goal it set two years ago, after launching an ambitious economic development plan called Fortify in collaboration with the city. That budget compares to $16.1 million for Oklahoma City and $10.7 million for Kansas City.
The funding shortfall — executive Brandom Gengelbach, who will assume the president's post in July, says the Chamber was unable to sway enough new contributors to support sponsorship from longtime partners — prompted the organization to rethink its strategy and retrench through 2019. Fortify’s four “pillars” remain — business retention, expansion and attraction; talent development, retention and attraction; small business and entrepreneur support; and advocacy — but only two of the four vice presidents recruited two years ago to head them remain. The focus will be on business retention, expansion and attraction, Gengelbach says. In January, the Chamber promoted Vice President Chris Strayer to executive vice president of economic development, the No. 2 post in the organization.
The chamber is “doubling down,” Gengelbach says, on transforming itself into a marketing agency that focuses on business attraction but works efficiently across all four pillars, developing and levering proprietary data for use by members and the selling of Fort Worth. It’s working on establishing a joint economic development website with the city and minority chambers of commerce and is working with Schaefer Advertising on a rebranding, both expected to be rolled out in 2020.
“For us to be successful in business attraction, we have got to do a better job of being the marketing agency for the business community,” Gengelbach says.
Importantly, Fort Worth’s economy continues to move ahead. The city is well ahead of pace on new job creation targets the chamber set in the Fortify plan. The community has coalesced around critical workforce issues like early childhood learning and third-grade literacy. The rate of new college grads moving into the city is increasing by itself. A Craftsman factory is under construction at AllianceTexas, to open late 2020 and bring 500 jobs, supporting a major distribution center in Northlake. Mid-States Distributing Co., a $6.5 billion-a-year farm store retailer, is moving its corporate headquarters from Minneapolis to the Mercantile Center in north Fort Worth, bringing more than 100 employees.
“We have got to get leaders off the sidelines and help us grow and develop the community the way we want it to look,” Gengelbach says. “Because if we don’t, we’re just going to look up one day with all the growth that’s coming here, and whatever happens, happens. We have the ability to help dictate it.”
FW Inc.: Let’s start with this broader point. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm in the business community about you.
Brandom: That's great. That's encouraging.
FW Inc.: But there also seems to be a lot of skepticism that we can pull off all of these goals. Why do you think that is?
Brandom: I just think that the challenges and issues that we face as a community are broad. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to be able to address the issues. It's not something that's going to happen overnight. It's something that's going to take some consistent work over time.
FW Inc.: When Fortify was launched, the chamber said, “We've been gambling on business as usual and keeping up with our growth.” How would you characterize business as usual? What needs to change?
Brandom: Over the last 30 years, with all the phone calls and people wanting to move [to Fort Worth], it really shrinks the bandwidth you have to be strategic and be out there marketing Fort Worth to specific companies. I think that has been the biggest challenge. We've experienced growth, and we're sitting here answering the phone. It has created the Fort Worth you see today. But in the next 30 years, do we want to just create the Fort Worth that comes through the door? Or do we want to play an even more active role in determining the type of community that we become?
FW Inc.: How does Fortify change that?
Brandom: The big piece for Fortify is really transforming the Chamber of Commerce to an economic development agency that leverages marketing and that leverages data. That leverages business development to grow and develop the economic landscape. The data helps us to figure out how to target businesses and other industries that we think would be successful here and would raise our economic profiles. The data can help determine the marketing, how and what's being done out there to communicate Fort Worth. Then business development is the third. That's basically having staff on the ground whose sole job is going to Chicago, L.A., New York. Those are the top three net in-migration markets.
FW Inc.: What industry are we most interested in?
Brandom: The Department of Defense and aerospace and aviation is a huge opportunity for us [given the area’s big existing base]. That's a market we are doubling down on in terms of spending time out there trying to promote Fort Worth. We have an aerospace and aviation taskforce — business leaders from these organizations that can give us advice and direction on how we can go about and promote Fort Worth to companies. For example, supply chain. Okay, Lockheed. Bell. Elbit. You all are large companies [with] thousands of suppliers. Can we meet with your supply chain folks and find out the companies that you think would be open to hearing the Fort Worth story? What trade shows and events are you going to? Can we attend those with you? Can we work with you to host a reception or a party? Those are the conversations that we've been able to have, that have resulted in the introductions. These are, as you can appreciate, long sales cycles. There’s oil and gas. Although currently the market is a bit challenging, we have a huge oil and gas presence here. How can we leverage that? There's quite a lot of IT and technology that's in this space; it's located across the country. There's no reason why those individuals couldn't be here in Fort Worth.
FW Inc.: To what extent has this yielded fruit already?
Brandom: We are already two-thirds of the way to our four-year [Fortify] goal of jobs that are above the country average.
FW Inc.: Not just normal growth?
Brandom: Some of it is a combination of knocking on doors. Then some is a combination of just the phone ringing off the hook. Our goal is 2,000 jobs from existing business and 2,000 [from new business], each above the country wage average. As we sit here on Dec. 12, we have 1,400 existing business jobs that were created above the country average and 1,300 new jobs. So, we'll blow through [the goals].
FW Inc.: When you look at our counterparts on the other side of the Metroplex, have they just done a much better job of this? To what extent has the large corporate base over there been accidental? Or was it intentional?
Brandom: No. 1, they have had greater financial means to go about and execute the strategy. No. 2, they are much more of an economic development-centric organization and do much less chamber of commerce work. The Dallas Regional Chamber, their entry membership level is $3,000. Ours is $499. The number of members they have is a lot less, and those investors have much more of an expectation around economic development functions. The majority of our members join because they're looking for services that can help them grow and develop their business. Third, the market that exists in Dallas is much more conducive toward the attraction of a corporate headquarters than the market is in Fort Worth.
FW Inc.: As you say, things are already changing in Fort Worth on their own.
Brandom: As we grow and develop our market, we will have to do less. The percentage of the population with a four-year degree in Fort Worth is below the national average. The encouraging thing is that from 2012 to 2017, we were the third fastest-growing city in the country of college-educated adults.
FW Inc.: People moving in?
Brandom: Yep. Third fastest. So, guess what's going to happen in a few years? That population piece is going to get larger and larger, and that population piece starts to change the market. People are moving here because of low cost; quality of life; our authentic, laid-back nature; and these are educated people that are moving here.
FW Inc.: Let’s go deeper on what you can do to make chamber membership more relevant.
Brandom: We have the ability to celebrate business in Fort Worth. With 1,800 members, with our size as the Chamber of Commerce, we want to be able to tell the stories. Smaller community associations and organizations don't have that pull that we do. We’re going to market talent solutions. When Junior Achievement or Workforce Solutions has a great thing going on, not everyone is going to know about it. You bring it to the chamber, and we start shouting from the rooftops all the different programs going on; that is a huge value proposition.
FW Inc.: Let’s talk more about how the chamber plans to develop and use data. Obviously, you’ll be using it to pitch prospects.
Brandom: We want to be able to leverage data to be able to identify issues, solve problems, be a resource for our membership. So, for example, Hope [Moon] in our talent department just finished a college and career readiness report where she looked at every ISD in the Fort Worth region [Moon in January left the Chamber for a post at the Mackenzie Eason executive search firm.]. I think there are 48 ISDs, and she compiled maybe 30 different data points on all these different ISDs to be able to show what percentage of students, when they graduate high school, are going on to get some sort of postsecondary attainment and how many of those students are then finishing their postsecondary within six years. If we can get this out to the business community and they see this data and some of the challenges we're facing with college and career readiness, hopefully, they can move to action. That positions us as like a knowledge leader and is something that can help drive revenue for the organization, and it's in alignment with our Fortify strategy. We want to be able to help our members grow and learn through the access to data that they wouldn't get on their own. For example, you are a small business, located at a certain intersection. What is the per capita income of the people in that intersection? What are the spending habits of those people in the area? What is the education level? It's being able to leverage the data that we have, as well as bring on new data partners.
FW Inc.: So, is that a benefit of membership?
Brandom: We're having those discussions now. There would be a baseline that would be included with membership. Then there would be greater accessibility to the data, based on the level that you would pay within the organization.
FW Inc.: And a big part of the strategy is to work across the four Fortify pillars.
Brandom: So, when you look at our service offerings and what we want to do moving forward, it's going to be very marketing-intensive. We're building this team and staff for business attraction, and we're going to share it across all those pillars.
FW Inc.: When did you realize you were going to fall short of the Fortify funding goal?
Brandom: After the first quarter [2019]. We had a $500,000 goal for 2019 of new revenue. After the first quarter, we started to have great concerns. Because the fundraising was coming up short. We knew that we needed to look at making tweaks during the middle of the year.
FW Inc.: Okay. When you guys were out there fundraising, what were you hearing? What kind of response were you getting?
Brandom: I think there was general support for what was going on. I think the challenge was a couple of things. Business is going well for most people. They're profitable. They have more cash than they've had before. It's challenging to communicate [the chamber strategy] when times are good. We’re also such a big community and have so many different community players that it puts businesses in this community in a bit of a challenging situation. We've got 22 chambers of commerce in Tarrant County alone. So that splits up the pie. Others, we just didn't have as close enough a relationship as we would like. Dickies was purchased by VF Corp., and that's a new relationship. Justin [Boots] got their new leader when I first moved to town in 2017. Alcon divested from Novartis, and they got a new leader.
OLAF GROWALD
Big Climb: The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce’s four-year goals
Business Attraction
- Draw four Fortune 1000 HQs
- 2,000 new jobs with wages above the country average
- 2,000 jobs created by existing businesses, with wages above country average
- Draw 20 Inc. 5000 relocations
Talent Development
- 5% increase in population age 25+ with postsecondary degrees, licenses or certifications
- 10% increase in talent supply of targeted industries
Small Business and Entrepreneur Support
- Increase business startups by 10%
- Achieve Top 20 status in national entrepreneur rankings, one category
Advocacy
- Aid in increasing funding to implement the Fort Worth Transportation Authority’s Master Plan
- Increase business sector diversity on advocacy committees
- Promote Fort Worth as a center for political issue discussions
