Missouri Partnership’s Janelle Higgins Talks Marketing Missouri, Economic Development, and Taylor Swift on OUTdrive Podcast
- November 28, 2023
It takes a village for a state’s economic development representatives to come together and assist site location consultants and business executives with the site selection process. In Missouri, the village is a tight-knit group of colleagues from across the state ready and willing to work together to simplify the process and make the state stand out among its competitors. Missouri has several local, regional, and statewide economic development organizations to assist companies looking to grow in a number of capacities. Missouri Partnership works with all of them in an effort to handle business attraction projects.
Janelle Higgins, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Missouri Partnership, sat down with Cliff Callis, host of the popular podcast OUTdrive, to discuss Missouri’s collaborative spirit, the business attraction process, and even Taylor Swift’s recent interest in the state.
Cliff Callis:
So for those people who are not familiar with the Partnership, tell us all about it.
Janelle Higgins:
Missouri Partnership has been around for about 15 years. We just had our 15-year anniversary celebration. We’re a pretty small team. We only have about 13 team members, but everybody is a total all-star. I’m so lucky to work with the people that I do. We have a great team and we do a lot. We focus on attracting new businesses to the state. Our target audience is businesses that are not already in Missouri. We focus mostly on expansion. Who we’re trying to connect with and bring awareness about Missouri to is businesses that are in growth mode. So we’re not necessarily working relocations. We’re not trying to take businesses from other states, more so trying to help businesses as they’re looking for expansion locations to show them why Missouri might make sense for an additional location. Our target audience is business executives at these high growth companies. There’s another audience that is a pretty niche audience. It’s site location consultants. These are people who companies can hire to help them identify the best location for their new location. So those are really our two audiences that we’re focused on. If you’re in the state listening to this, maybe you don’t know much about Missouri Partnership because we’re not necessarily trying to reach an in-state audience. The Missouri Department of Economic Development, who are wonderful partners of ours, work with the businesses that are already here on retention and expansion.
The way we approach business attraction is really by breaking it down by industries. So we take a look at where Missouri is doing well and where we can really help businesses find the most success. And those industries are corporate services, R&D, distribution and manufacturing. Manufacturing is a big one for us. So we help these companies as they’re evaluating states for expansion. And essentially we show them why Missouri is a good fit for their next location.
Cliff Callis:
Your partners would be state economic development and local regional economic development organizations?
Janelle Higgins:
Exactly. We’re called Missouri Partnership. Partnership is in our name. We don’t do anything alone. And we could not do what we do without the partnerships that we have throughout the state. It’s a bit cheesy, but in economic development, we always say economic development is a team sport. And it really is true. We have the Missouri Department of Economic Development and they are another state partner, and we’re working really closely with them. I would say we talk to them daily about different projects that we’re working. We also have really strong regional and local partners who play a crucial role in all these projects that we’re working. If a company or a site selection consultant comes to us with a project, then we’ll send out what we call a real estate search to all of our partners throughout the state. And then if those sites or those buildings are identified as being top contenders for that company and for the client, then we might have the client come into the state and go and do a tour of the site and do tours of the buildings, and we rely pretty heavily on the people that live in those cities to help us put together what we call a site visit, because they know their community better than anybody, and they pull in all the right players. It’s important for us to have a good showing at those site visits, and we lean on our partners to help us pull in all the right people and pull it together and put on an impressive show for the client at that time.
Cliff Callis:
Well, you know, as a marketer, I have to ask why? Why is the pipeline full?
Janelle Higgins:
I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. It goes back to that relationship building I was talking about earlier with consultants. Consultants know that if they call the team at Missouri Partnership, we either have the answers for them or we can get the answers for them very quickly, because we do have a lot of collaboration in the state. And that is something that I think is really unique to Missouri. We have partners throughout the entire state, and we know that we can pick up the phone and get the answers that we need, or they can help us find the right resource for these consultants right away. And everyone kind of stops what they’re doing and we focus on projects. Project work always comes first. I think it’s that level of customer service that we offer that really helps set us apart from the other states. There’s no project that is too small or too big for us to work on. We give the same attention to every single client that contacts us. And I think it serves us very well and helps us keep a pipeline that’s very full. We also have a lot of industries that are doing well right now. Food and beverage is one of our top industries. We just had a great win in rural Missouri in this space. In Warren County, American Foods Group has a meat processing facility that is currently under construction. That will have a ripple effect throughout the state. When we keep winning projects, success breeds success. And people see that and people want to be a part of it. And there’s a lot of good reasons to be a part of it. Missouri makes sense for companies due to multiple factors, and I think that businesses are seeing that and we’re just getting a lot more projects.
Cliff Callis:
So we’ve talked a little bit about rural America as a part of the greater Missouri geography. The focus of our podcast is marketing rural America. Rural America, we think is more of a mindset than a geography. And it’s kind of a way of life. It’s a lifestyle. When I say the words rural America, what kind of thoughts and images come to mind for you?
Janelle Higgins:
The first thing that I think of is beauty, just natural beauty with the landscape. Rural America is beautiful, and there’s no denying that as far as marketing is concerned. I was lucky enough in my role at Missouri Partnership to work with the team in northeast Missouri, which we now refer to as Missouri Northeast. They were working on creating a brand for their region. I got to go there, and I spent several days there filming and meeting with businesses and community leaders. I was stunned by their collaboration. It really felt like everyone there was family, which I found to be beautiful, too. They all knew each other. Everyone wanted each other to succeed. Whether or not they were in the same city or county. They all lifted each other up, spoke well about each other, helped each other, were very complimentary of each other, and at the end of the day, they were all rooting for everyone in their region. So I thought that that was just really neat to see. And quite frankly, I see that across the entire state of Missouri too, which makes me proud to be doing what we’re doing.
The other thing that comes to mind is rural America is so tech savvy. I think that rural America is much more tech savvy than some people realize. Some of the most high-tech equipment and technology is being used on farms, and I don’t think that the general public is necessarily aware of that or expects that from rural America. Here in Missouri, our agriculture industry is a $94 billion industry. And there’s so much happening within that sector. Missouri really shines in the ag community, and we’re seeing a lot of interest in rural parts of the state. As I mentioned, the American Foods Group project that just landed in Warren County, that’s a rural part of the state and an $800 million investment. So rural America has a lot to offer, and especially rural Missouri. We’re proud to be able to do what we can to help bring new businesses to those parts of the state.