Episode 18 | LIVE from the SEDC Annual Conference in Williamsburg | Brandon Wilcox & Matt Francis

Hello SCDC members and welcome to the 2023 annual SCDC conference held here in beautiful Williamsburg, Virginia. Hi, I'm Ray Methven with Insightful and the truth is while Matt Matthew weren't looking, I hijacked the podcast again. So you have the next few days with me and with a lineup of guests I'm really excited about. We'll have conversations with community leaders, state leaders, really good vendors we love. So stay tuned and join us. Good questions coming up. And hi SCDC members. I am lucky to be joined by Brandon Wilcox with the Greater Witt and Wichita partnership. Brandon, welcome to the SCDC podcast. Thank you, good to see you. Brandon, I see that you're the economic development project manager for the Greater Wichita partnership. Tell me a little bit about your organization. Yes, so I am one of our project managers on our team. Got a team of about 17, including the communications and the downtown organization. But what we are is a regional EDO. So we are the local economic development association for Wichita, but then we go beyond our traditional MSA. And we really just took a look and said, you know, if you drove an hour in any direction, we think that's our labor shed. We think that's our market and those are who we serve. And so it's about nine counties plus the 10th county being Stegwick, where Wichita is. And that's the area we serve. So we come alongside the local development offices and some of them are more refined and have more robust full-time economic development staff, sure. And sometimes it's the local smaller town and it's a city administrator who's wearing 13 hats. And they just don't necessarily have the resources. And so we come alongside them and kind of help their community have wins, our communities have wins. Absolutely. Make sure no one's stealing from each other, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but you step in and be the helping hand when you need to be. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we split our time. I mean, between attraction and business development retention, the one thing we won't do is when it's outside of Wichita, you know, I'll give an example, like Hutchinson is another city that's in our region. You're not going to find me calling on businesses in Hutchinson and trying to do business retention expansion conversations with them unless asked. Attraction is what we'll do outside of our region. But we'll leave the local business development retention to those communities. And then we just come alongside win appropriate. Sure, sure, we're talking to Brandon Wilcox with the Greater Wichita partnership. Brandon, tell me about some success stories. I think you guys have hit a lick lately. Yep, so one of the major ones that probably comes to mind would be integrative technologies. This was the biggest, this is a mega project as you're seeing around the country. So this is semiconductor manufacturing facility that's in town. It's actually been in Wichita for over 40 years. And they just recently announced an expansion. And it's quite an expansion. It's about a $2 billion expansion, 2,000 job creation. Wow. It does, like many, in an on-shoring effort, semiconductor expanded efforts in the US. It is going to require the federal chips funding. So we're looking forward to that announcement. And we're very, very positively hopeful on how that's going to turn out for us. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's my employer, actually, who spent probably the most time on that. I think he worked with them for maybe two years putting this deal together. And it's not done yet, but we're getting there. We're getting there. But you've gotten beyond the secret password and the secret code word. We have. We have. And it's, they've integrated, you know, they'd be someone who has 500 customers, you know, so they wouldn't be like a competitor to like an Intel or something. No, they would actually serve an Intel. OK, a lot of what they do is on the latter end, so the testing and the packaging. OK. And so there, if we see other semiconductor manufacturing happening in the US, that just makes us smile, because we know that that's probably a client of Integra. Good. Good. What else is out? Another one is, so we are just some back on, we are the partnership, the Greater Wichita Partnership is between the Economic Development Association and the Downtown Association for Wichita. So a little unique in that we're not part of our regional chamber. We have a wonderful chamber, but they are a separate entity. And so we have a Downtown component with us. And so this is a really exciting win because it incorporates the Downtown. It is our Downtown Biomedical Facilite Campus that's going to be coming in. This is a partnership, it's very unique. It's between Wichita State University, the University of Kansas Health Systems, and WSE Tech. It's a $300 million project, which would be the largest, I believe I'm right, it's the largest single project in Wichita Downtown history. Congratulations. And this would be a center for healthcare innovation, medical research, training. It would be about 2,000 students, or I'm sorry, no, 3,000 students, and about 200 faculty and staff. So it just breeds a huge breadth of life into our Downtown corridor and vitality, just spurring the need for more development downtown, more office retail, and just getting the flow of people in that vibrancy downtown, which we're not immune to downtown woes of the rest of the country. Sure. Fortunately, we have not been hit as hard as some of the other larger metros in the US, but do we have empty offices? Yeah, we've got some. But then we also have some winds coming into our downtown, and headquarters being moved to our downtown. So we've seen over a billion dollars of investment into our downtown over the last seven, eight years. Excellent work. And so this is just the next evolution of that, and they're growing, the sizeable investments are growing. So that's a big, exciting thing that we're starting and endeavoring down, and that was just recently announced. And then the last thing that I really wanted to touch on as far as what's new in Wichita is, if you're familiar, Wichita is known. Our moniker is the air capital of the world. 70% of airplanes that are in flight today were built in Wichita, or a part of them was built in Wichita. My uncle was an engineer. Oh, there you go. In Wichita. So we spend a lot of our summers in Wichita. Yeah, so you've got spirit aerosystems, which works on commercial, does the fuselages for commercial airliners, and then you've got Textron Aviation, which is Cessna and BeachCraft together under Textron now. They do all the general aviation. And so those have 11,000 and 9,000 employees, respectively, with, and that's leading about a 30,000 aviation workforce right in Wichita, and about 450 aerospace companies right in Wichita. So I think we've earned that title. We'll go toe to toe with anybody on that. And that's relevant because we keep seeing investment. It's not done, it's not the past that says, oh, well, they've brought a bunch of aviation companies. Well, we're still doing it. And we're bringing them internationally. So quick step is a company that's Australia's largest independent aerospace composites manufacturer. After a pre-register eight-month process and over 20 US sites, they've said yes to Wichita. I've selected Wichita to move their first, their very first US engineering and manufacturing facility. Congratulations. So we just thank you. We just announced that just towards the end of last month in July. But that's a, that'll be, that was a connection that we had made at a trade show. And you always talk about ROI, what's your value? Are you getting, and so kind of, maybe a lesson learned there is kind of how to follow up. And so that one was actually at the Farmboro Air Show, which alternates with Paris every year. And so that's something that we've, and our board has said we want you to invest in this. That actually leads me into a great question because I think SEC members, and for me personally, water takeaways and tips that you would give to other SEC community leaders about success. How do you turn possibilities into success stories? Right. Well, maybe the easiest way is making sure that your leadership is all paddling in the same direction. You don't have a split room. Sure. Kind of have an embarrassment of riches there because we do have every leader that I could think of in our community is involved in our board, has been involved in our board, and gets it. I mean, they're mission oriented. We don't do a lot of events. And we kind of let other organizations do more than networking type stuff, are some more investor meetings. We hold quarterly investor meetings. And so we treat it like what it is. It's an investment. You are trying to see the community grow. You're trying to see return on the dollars invested for every dollar here. How much more is being created through economic development efforts. So the best way is to make sure that you're getting the right people in the table to help steer the organization. I mean, I just, I can't hate on that enough. Yeah, yeah. We're talking with Brandon Wilcox, the greater Wichita partnership. Brandon, you're here at SCDC. What do you look forward to at the conference? Yeah, so my, others, my organization have been here. This is my first time, both to Williamsburg and to the conference. I've got a little sticker. It's this new member. Did you do the breakfast? I think it's tomorrow. Oh, OK. So I will. Good. I'm about to do the YP con here a minute because I technically had a 35 stills. Ah. But I'm looking forward to meaning more in our industry because it's a pretty select industry. There's not a lot of people who do what we do full time just around the country. So anything that we can do from the sponsors to holding these types of events, professional development, it strengthens our industry, which, as you already know, strengthens our communities. So there really needs to be more focus put on it. And anything we can do to better ourselves in the profession, best practices, and also just widen that network of people who are aware of what it is that economic development is. I think it's just great things to be aspiring towards. Well, let me ask you a personal question. As a young professional, as technically still under 35, what led you to this industry and this profession? How did you become an economic developer? Fell into it, just like everyone is what I've learned. So my background is in chambers of commerce. So I came to Kansas at Ottawa University. I'm originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, so not too far away, but Ottawa University in Kansas got me, and then while I was there, I had an internship. And they said, well, I've been thought about interning at the Chamber of Commerce. And I said, what's that? And it led to a full-time position following graduation. They're at the Chamber, and I was with them for several years. And they worked closely with the County Economic Development at the time. And in the midst of that, I had an opportunity to go up to the Kansas City Region and work in Shawnee for their Chamber and Economic Development Association. And then just was there for four years. So I've been economic development adjacent for about eight years. Okay. And then towards the latter part of that eight years, I found myself leaning over the shoulder of some people on that side of our office, and realized I was more interested in that than in my day of job. Oh, good. And so one of my wife and I moved to Wichita, where she's from, reached out to someone who's actually also from the same office I was in Kansas City area in Shawnee. And they said, well, you know Andrews down there now. And enough people told him when they found out I was moving, they said, well, you know Brandon's down there now. You guys should get together and see if there was an opportunity there. Oh, good. As fate would have it, there was an opportunity. And so I left at it. Which toss lucky for it. We're talking with Brandon Wilcox, of the Greater Wichita partnership. Now Brandon, I have some very important closing questions for you. All right, far away. Let's play favorites. Brandon, what's your favorite holiday? Favorite holiday. Probably Christmas. Okay. What's your favorite dessert? Cheesecake, my father and my father-in-law are both known for their specialty cheesecakes. What's now? What's your favorite specialty cheesecake? White chocolate raspberry Oreo cookie crumb crust. You brought some for everyone? Maybe next year. Okay. It doesn't make the six hour or the three hour flight. Yeah, and the four delays. And the four delays, which turns into, yeah. Here's an important one. What is your favorite karaoke song? Oh, man. I don't have a favorite karaoke song. Okay. It'd be something that would probably, something my wife would sing. She's a much better singer than I am. If I ain't got you by Alicia Keys, not because I can sing it, but because she can sing it. I got it. And the first time I heard her sing it, she was looking right at me and it was just like, oh. Well done. Yeah. Well done. Okay. And final question. What's the worst haircut you ever had? Seventh grade. I was playing flag football. My mom cut my hair. So you couldn't be mad. She used to cut my hair when I was a kid. And I just remember there was just one time, I was trying to have a skater haircut. This is back, you know, in early 2000s. And I was trying to have the skateboarder haircut. And she didn't quite get it right. And it just kind of looked a little off and the whole team just totally ragged on me, all practice. And it was just, yeah. I think we corrected it within two days. And that's probably the worst haircut I ever had. There you go. Folks, we've been talking to Brandon Wilcox with the Greater Witch Talk Partnership. Brandon, thank you for joining us. Welcome to SCDC and jump on that young professional meeting. Thank you, Ray. Good to see you. Thank you, sir. Hi, folks. We're talking to Matt Francis with Resimplify. Matt is the head of sales for Resimplify. Matt, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ray. Excited to be here. Yeah, this is cool. Tell all of our listeners about Resimplify. Sure. Yeah, so Resimplify, essentially, the best way to put it is I would say think of us as your internal research team when it comes to tracking availability within real estate. So naturally, if you're trying to recruit businesses, you need to know what real estate is available in your area. So that's what Resimplify does. We go out and we find all the available properties in your community, whether it be a city, a county, multi-county trade region, or a state. You can hire us to essentially be that research team. We go find all the available properties, maintain them for accuracy, and ensure that what you have on your website is up-to-date, accurate, and really a great representation of what you have. Now, does this require a lot of work from the local economic developer? How automated is this? Absolutely, yeah. Our goal is to have no work for the economic developer. Now, no work is all relative. I would say we really want to keep any effort on their end to a minimal. The great thing about us, though, is we do have monthly meetings. We have a dedicated project manager, Justin, who will meet with you. So we do always allow collaborative efforts with us in our communities. We don't want to solely take over this job from them. We want to do all the heavy lifting in 99% of the work, but we still want to work with them to ensure that they know what's going on in that area. Because if we take every bit of it away and don't allow them to kind of stay in touch with us and stay in touch with the process, they get, they're a little bit more left out and not as well-knowledgeed on what's going on in their market. So we want to keep them involved, but we want to do all the heavy lifting to make it easy on them. Now, you mentioned a dedicated project manager. Do you also have real-time 24-7 dashboards or opportunities for the economic developer to see on their own time? Yeah, absolutely. All of our data can be fed to your website. We also do provide our clients internal dashboards. So the great thing about the dashboards is it shows you all of the available listings, the total count of listings, each property mix. So let's say there's 25 retail properties, 80 industrial properties, land, office, all of that. So you can see a breakdown of your listings and what that really means. So instead of just 500 listings, you can see what each listing is. Is it for sale? Is it for lease? Who's representing that property? How long has it been on the market? A lot of very useful information in that dashboard, as well as the property view we're displaying all the properties online. Cool. Now, one of the things that I've liked about re-simplifying and watching over time is that you've been a real innovation leader. So tell me, Matt, give us a couple of secrets. What's on the horizon? What's coming up? Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're not building rocket chips over here, but we are doing some pretty cool things. We did release in January our new property viewer. This has been a great success. So we include our property viewer with our data subscription at no cost. We also do integrate our data, as you know, with platforms like yours at Insightful, as well as GIS planning, GIS WebTech, Lois, Atlas. Really, any site selection platform we can integrate our data with. But we're definitely doing some cool stuff on our end as more and more clients have asked for a simple solution to display properties, as well as something that keeps everything in cost. So by providing it on our end at no additional cost, I think clients have really enjoyed that, because for, I'd say, a fairly reasonable rate, they can get a really good property viewer on their website, as well as an incredible, maintained database. So that's really what I'd like to highlight about Re-Simplify. Nice, nice. Now, for the listeners out there, you and I have known each other for a few years now, and we met at a conference. And here we are at the SCDC Conference in Williamsburg. So I'm talking with Matt Francis of Re-Simplify, Matt, what's important to you about being here at SCDC? Why are you here? You know, I think conferences in general are the best way to connect with your peers and other thought leaders in this industry. SCDC specifically is one of the largest conferences that you could attend in economic development. So it's a must go to 17 states across the American South and DC, not much of a better place to go to a conference. We're really focused on the southeast as well. We've got a large client base in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and all over the US. But specifically, the South is a strong region for us. So when we saw this, and since Matt Tack has taken over, he's done an incredible job. We knew it was a no-brainer to come this year. I agree. I agree. I love our SCDC conferences. We're talking to Matt with Re-Simplify. Matt, anything else you'd like to talk about Re-Simplify because I have some tough questions coming up. Oh, no. I'd say let's hit him. All right, let's hit it. Are you ready? Sure. We're going to play favorites today. What's your favorite holiday? That's an ongoing St. Patrick's Day. And why? That's interesting. So when are you Irish? Yes, we are. Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of Irish in my blood. I just think it's a fun holiday. It gets everyone out and about. Everyone having a good time. And as you said, it's a little bit atypical. So it's not everyone might think about. True. What's your favorite dessert? Ooh. Favorite dessert? I'm going to go recently, Teramisu. Why? You know, it's something that I guess I didn't give enough respect when I was younger. And I've had a couple really good ones recently. So it's just, you know, first thing came my mind, but also a big cinnamon fan. So that takes the take. What's your favorite karaoke song? Ooh. Let's go dancing in the moonlight. Ooh, can you give us a bar? Oh, not here. You'd have to pay for that one. And I don't have a embarrassment. If I buy you a beer lighter on? You buy me two or three, we can make that happen. All right, final question. Here's the tough one. What's the worst haircut you've ever had? That is a great one. I've had a few bad supercut haircuts in my day. Growing up going to Catholic school, you know, we had to keep it off the ears above the eyebrows. And so during the summer, I'd always keep it as long as I could. You know, you don't want to cut your hair. So one year, I went to cut in right before school started. And they practically gave me a buzz cut. And if you've ever seen me, buzz cut just isn't necessarily the best looking thing on me. So that would probably be the worst right before freshman year of high school. Great way to start the school year. Perfect, perfect way. We've been talking to Matt Francis, head of sales with Resimplify, Matt, welcome to the SCDC conference. And thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Yeah, thank you so much, Ray. I sincerely appreciate it. Yeah, good to see you as well.