New leader, new focus to lure business to city

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2016 (3608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s been a long history of Economic Development Winnipeg having to come up with creative metrics to justify its funding from the province and the city.

Since the exercise — facilitating investment promotion and attraction, capacity building, marketing and the management of market information — is done to support business undertakings, the agency will never get the credit it deserves.

How much credit it does deserve is also not definitive.

Take, for example, getting flagged by Vogue magazine as a “must-visit” place. The agency can use that, regardless of the role it played in getting that piece produced.  

Its $5.3-million annual budget ($2.4 million from the city, $1.4 million from the province and $1.5 million from partnerships and investor contributions in 2015) is no longer controversial. But like any other organization acting in the midst of a changing commercial landscape, it needs to adapt.

Those are some of the challenges in running such an agency, and Dayna Spiring, who took over earlier this year, is aware of that.

It’s not surprising a new leader will want to put her stamp on things. It makes even more sense when her partners at the legislature and at city hall are also relatively new.

So the agency has rebranded, refreshed and reorganized for its next run at putting Winnipeg on the map.

“We are going to be coming out with a very clear statement of what our metrics are going to be,” Spiring said after an annual community breakfast Thursday.

Jobs and capital investment will still be included in those metrics, and how the city is perceived will also be part of it.

The Yes! Winnipeg initiative — the agency’s private-sector-funded sales organization to help attract, retain and expand business in the city — will function the same way. It has got its first tranche of investment from local businesses under its belt for its next five years of funding with the goal of reaching $5 million.

Using its own inimitable way of tabulating these things, Yes! Winnipeg says it has helped about 80 companies generate about 4,620 jobs and $615 million in investment in its six years of operation.

There’s no doubt there’s a new approach. For starters, it just moved its offices from the same building the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce is located in to the Richardson Building. 

It has reorganized into a more formal top-down approach eliminating confusion that emerged with the creation of Yes! Winnipeg six years ago. Tourism Winnipeg is also one of its divisions.

The idea is that they will function in concert with each other and to a greater extent with the community at large. 

A casual “fireside chat” between Spiring, Cliff Cullen, the provincial trade minister and Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman — facilitated by Yes! Winnipeg leader Vince Barletta — Thursday was the symbolic representation of the close collaboration that will exist between the agency and the two levels of government.

“To do anything else would be ridiculous,” Spiring said. “We need to do it collaboratively. If I look at the time before, there was not that alignment between city hall, the province and (the agency).”

Marching orders include becoming more data-driven and strategic in its approach.

“The city has been doing well, and the province has been doing well,” said Greg Dandewich, in charge of the economic development piece of the agency. “We want to be able to be a little more sophisticated and targeted in terms of how we allocate our resources.” 

Part of that will include more conversations with businesses about where they fit in to their market and their supply chain.

The province has identified five strategic sectors in the city and the agency will focus on them — advanced manufacturing, agri-food, information technology, digital media and new media as well as aerospace.

When it comes to aerospace, for instance, it’s recognized Winnipeg can’t compete with Montreal for avionics work. But it is a hotbed for composite parts, engine testing and maintenance, repair and overhaul — that’s where the focus will be. 

Spiring said if it is a choice between supporting a business with 10 PhDs or one with 20 servers or retail jobs, the agency will back the PhDs. “We need to get the jobs that are growing the economy,” she said. “If we grow those, the servers will come. They don’t need my help to come. It’s a question of where we spend our resources.”

You could say Winnipeg’s image has entered a new phase with Vogue and National Geographic pointing out the city’s distinctive charms. It will be a measure of its success if the agency capitalizes on that stepped-up image. 

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca