Columbus Chamber Looks to 2020 and Beyond

The Columbus Chamber’s Annual Meeting took place last week, and over 1,100 business and community leaders were in attendance. The focus of this year’s event was on the rollout of the new Columbus 2020 project, and how the Columbus Chamber will continue to support our existing business base.

Columbus 2020 is a new collaborative economic development strategy for the region, spearheaded by the Columbus Partnership. The program will place a new focus on attracting businesses to Central Ohio, while the Columbus Chamber will continue to work with growing existing businesses.

We recently sat down with Ty Marsh, President and CEO of the Columbus Chamber, to find out more about various economic development efforts throughout the Columbus region.

Walker Evans: When looking at future economic growth in Columbus, are there any specific business sectors or industries that the Chamber is focusing attention on, or are there areas that hold the most promise?

Ty Marsh: There are several areas. One that the Chamber is particularly interested in is the logistics industry. It’s primarily about moving goods and services faster and more cheaply to their destination. Columbus was originally founded for its location on the National Road. We’re currently within one day’s drive of 60% of the North American population and manufacturing base. Our location is our asset. Ever since Rickenbacker was converted from an Air Force Base, we’ve worked on turning it into an industrial park and logistics center with both air and rail development. A few years ago, Norfolk Southern came in and announced that they wanted to build an intermodal facility for $40 million, and that’s when everything really took off.

Just to give you some examples of the type of opportunity we have here, and why this is important to our region… Right now, we’ve got a direct Northfolk Southern line from the port of Norfolk, Virgina that terminates at Rickenbacker. Norfolk Southern has made that investment here because through our congressional efforts, the line is being enhanced this year so that they can have double-stacked cargo arriving to Rickenbacker. At the same time, Norfolk has undergone a “deep dredge” operation, so that it will be able to handle a new line of larger cargo ships. It will be only one of two ports on the entire Atlantic Seaboard that can do that. Currently, you can ship goods from Norfolk to Chicago faster and cheaper by bringing them to Rickenbacker by train, unloading, and taking it by semi the rest of the way to Chicago. The reason for that is because freight rail is so congested in Chicago that you may be able to get it there, but it can’t get unloaded and to the markets in a timely manner.

To add to that… a few weeks ago there was a big announcement about the State of Ohio getting some federal funding for the “Gateway Project”, which is a CSX freight rail project. CSX has told Columbus that our region is their number one growth market for cargo containers. They had previously announced that they were going to take over and expand the Parsons Avenue switching yard to make it a full service multimodal facility. The economy slowed that down a little bit, but now it’s starting to pick back up again with this federal funding. That rail line heads south, and their new terminus is at Savannah, Georgia, which will be another new deep dredge port.

Now, if we look on the other side of the world at the Asian markets… The port of entry for Asian markets on the west coast is Long Beach, with the secondary port being Seattle. The congestion at Long Beach is beyond extraordinary and that was one of the reasons for recently expanding the Panama Canal. So, when your first boat comes through the Panama Canal, the first port will be Savannah, which is a CSX line and comes right through here, and your second port is Norfolk, which again has a direct terminus line here. So you start looking at all of these pieces and you can see the global ramifications for where the Columbus region sits right in the middle of all of that.

All of that requires strategic development, and it requires a lot of infrastructure investment. Under our logistics initiative, we have an effort going on that includes Tech Columbus, Ohio State and Battelle who are partnering to apply a new level of technology to our logistics, which will put us in a whole other category. For once, when people complain that Columbus has no mountains and no ocean, I can say that our flat land serves us very well for this purpose.

Logistics isn’t the silver bullet for our economy, but it is an important element that can produce jobs that pay far above the national average. A second focus area is technology. We’ve had very good work going on in the past few years, but now it’s being accelerated with Tech Columbus and OSU and Battelle all working together. Forbes recently gave us the rating for the #1 Up and Coming Tech City. We’ve worked with Tech Columbus to really market that. For example, we bring out reporters who write for trade industry associations. We did this for logistics and we did this for technology, to let them see what’s here and we get a lot of national publicity back from that.

A third area that we’re seeing tremendous growth right now is in our healthcare services. You’ve got a $1 Billion expansion underway at Children’s Hospital, and a newly announced $1 Billion expansion at The Ohio State Medical Center. And that’s in addition to our other hospital systems. We have some real growth opportunities in that area, and when you combine it with the growing strength of The Ohio State University as a global research institution, then all of a sudden you get a lot of companies saying that they want to be located close to the Ohio State campus.

WE: One question that gets raised from time to time on Columbus Underground is in relation to the services provided by the Chamber to smaller businesses. Can you tell us a bit about what the Chamber is doing for entrepreneurs?

TM: 90% of our Chamber membership comes from companies that are 10 employees or smaller. So our membership is predominantly made up of small businesses. What we try to do is make certain that we have the programs and the opportunities that fit their needs. We offer a variety of health insurance programs, discounts at OfficeMax, and a lot of those member services that are really important to small businesses because it helps them save cash. Really, a lot of our small businesses get great value on their membership dollars just by participating in those programs.

The other thing that small businesses look to us for is the opportunity to connect with their next customer. Networking and connection is one of the most important things that we do. Our biggest event is our annual meeting, but we have so many other events that don’t rise to the top of awareness unless you’re a Chamber member. We also have very specific events for specific types of industries. Last year we held a retail summit to focus on retail activities in the region. We’ve offered very specific training seminars for social media usage. We have training seminars for networking. We have a plethora of programs, and they’re all designed through our Small Business Council. We also have a Small Business Leaders Award every year, so we’re honoring those leaders as well.

So there’s the visibility, the programming, the training, and the bottom-line savings that we offer to the small business community.

What we’re working toward for the future is a more high-level existing business strategy. According to the Ohio Business Retention & Expansion Initiative, existing businesses create 60-90% of all new jobs. So we work with our existing businesses a lot, and we need to get better intelligence from them as to what their obstacles are, and what it’s going to take to keep them located here. There are 40,000 companies in our region, and over 70% of those have less than 100 employees. We want to find out who those folks are, how are they being served and how can we help them. We’re doing this, like we do everything else, in a collaborative manner. Through our regional collaboration, we’ve got 22 communities and county governments all in contract with us for baseline economic development. We are all working together to help bring in some very significant data that we can all share with the suburban chambers as we all work together.

So again, for our small businesses I think we’ve got excellent programs, great value, we’re very focused, and we’re going to take it up about three notches over the next couple of years as we finish developing this strategy over the next few months. We feel that we’re providing good value, but we can always provide more.

WE: Many Midwest economists have been pushing for a regional approach to economic development. Can you tell us a bit more about the partnerships that you just touched upon?

TM: About five years ago we laid out a regional economic development vision. We felt that the only way this region was truly going to succeed economically is if it started talking and acting like a region. There had been a lack of collaboration in the past… partly because nobody ever had to collaborate. Everybody was just doing fine. We started to change our approach by going out and talking to our peers in other Central Ohio cities and counties. We talked to elected officials and businesses in those other communities. We invested heavily in some research with these partners at a level that they wouldn’t have been able to invest in on their own. Through that, a level of trust started building up and then we grew that into developing a regional marketing plan.

Just to give an example of that collaboration… when Chase announced their new job intentions, we knew that we had a strong opportunity for those jobs. Chase is one of those horror stories where they have three facilities located in four governmental jurisdictions here in Central Ohio. But because of this trust and collaboration, our economic developer got everyone on the phone, and we all came together within 12 hours to put the deal together. That’s something that doesn’t show in the statistics, but continues to work towards establishing that inclusiveness and trust.

WE: Over the past few years we’ve seen a growing interest in traditional and nontraditional business incubators, such as Tech Columbus, the North Market and ECDI’s Kitchen Incubator. Do you think Columbus has room for additional types of incubator within specific growth industries?

TM: Yes, and many more currently exist. Columbus State has one. There’s several business incubators around that may not necessarily be called incubators, but that’s what they are. For example, Dublin has the DEC. I think we can do a better job collectively of identifying where incubators would work, and where they wouldn’t. I think a lot of groups want to start them, which is fine, but you really do need to know what you want to do up front. I don’t think there’s been any effort to collectively bring business incubators together to talk about things either. We’re not directly involved with any incubators other than TechColumbus, and while we help them with a lot of things, the incubator is not one of them.

WE: In closing, I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to share this information with us, and wondered if there was anything else you wanted to share about the future of Columbus?

TM: I’m excited because we truly do have a future in this city. Our best days are still ahead. If you look at the demographics and the youth of our region… if you look at the success we’re getting with our tech start-ups… if you look at how Ohio State is coming into its own on a global stage… if you look at our opportunities with Rickenbacker… if you look at our 22 institutions of higher education in a seven-county area with 120,000 students… if you look at our solid workforce… we’ve got a lot of great things going on right now. We just need to make sure that we have a continued effort to stay synchronized. We have to make sure that the sum is greater than the parts. That’s what was tied into our annual meeting message with Columbus 2020. The economy is tough there right now, but we’ve got such a great future ahead of us. Of course, I’m supposed to say that because I’m the Chamber President, but I believe it too, and I think most other people do too.

More information about the Columbus Chamber can be found online at Columbus.org.