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Friday, 16 November 2007 |
State businessman says city has development appeal
By WILLIAM LANEY
Managing Editor
Wapakoneta fulfills well the most pressing needs of a company looking for a site to locate a business or plant, an executive with a state business coalition says.
Marlon Cheatham, brand manager for the Ohio Business Development Coalition (OBDC), outlined five needs identified by executives for site selection during the Wapakoneta Area Economic Development Council’s annual luncheon held Thursday at the Eagles Hall in downtown Wapakoneta.
Cheatman said the five needs identified most are labor cost and availability, highway access and proximity, cost of doing business and a community’s tax structure, availability of land and buildings and quality of life.
“I think Wapakoneta fits well with those needs I listed on the chart,” Cheatham told the Wapakoneta Daily News after the luncheon.
“From a labor availability standpoint, this region has 350,000 people working which shows there is an available and willing work force.”
He said a company may be required to do some retraining of those workers.
“It is also a big deal to be located where you are because company executives
want to get their product in and out and they don’t have to drive through a lot of rural areas,” Cheatham said. “You are located on two major highways — Interstate 75 and U.S. 33 — and you have easy access so that makes it a lot easier for them to get their product in and out.”
Cheatham, a former senior manager at Procter & Gamble, also noted the quality of life in Wapakoneta, an issue OBDC personnel stress when promoting Ohio and the communities within the Buckeye State.
“You have a very safe community, and while executives do not voice that a lot, when we did the research it showed that safety is the No. 1 thing they want,” Cheatham said. “Having a very safe community, having a low cost of living really speaks a lot about the community because executives and their employees can enjoy the same or better quality of life than they previously had living in a major city or in another state.”
Cheatham, who earned his bachelor’s degree in computer information systems from Florida A&M University and a master’s degree in business administration at The Ohio State University, said company executives also investigate travel time for employees to and from work.
He said one executive, who worked on the East Coast, cut his travel time from 90 minutes to 20 minutes when he moved to the Dayton area.
A reduction in travel time coupled with Ohio being on the western edge of the Eastern Standard Time zone permitted him to be with his children while there was still daylight.
Cheatham, who developed the OBDC’s brand “Build Your Business. Love Your Life,” helped WAEDC board members develop their new Web site with MidNet Media of Minster.
The WAEDC Web site includes links to the OBDC Web site and builds off of the “Why Ohio?” tagline with “Why Wapakoneta?,” Cheatham said. He also likes the “Roads. Rails. Ready.” tagline associated with the brand.
“People need to understand what we have here,” Cheatham said. “You also need to brand yourself or the world will either forget you or define you.
“There are a lot of things going on here (Ohio) that people are not aware of,” he said. “From a brand perspective it is quite simple because whenever you have declining share and increasing competition there are two things you can do — differentiate or brand. You need to determine what separates Wapakoneta from every other city, every other community and promote it.” |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 19 November 2007 )
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