In 2011 I was working as an Economic Development Officer with Community Futures, and I had a client looking to retire and sell their plumbing business.

One problem in this industry is when you put up a for sale sign, your suppliers and your customers get nervous. Your suppliers start asking for cash on delivery, which screws up your cash flow, and your customers do not want to buy a water heater from someone who won’t be around to service the warranty in five years.

I looked into options for my client to list their business: online posting boards, brokers, and classified ads. None of these options gave them the privacy they needed to sell their business in a cost effective manner. That is when I started my company called SuccessionMatching.com.

SuccessionMatching.com has evolved a lot over the past five years, from my speaking tours, feedback from our members, and 1on1s with our clients, I have documented trends and pain points experienced by thousands of business owners who are going through the transition process and rolled out different programs to address these pain points.

One of the initiatives that we rolled out this year is the VC Program. Last week I was meeting with an investment firm in Calgary that is interested in investing in employee share ownership plans (ESOPs).

Given the markets that this firm is currently invested in, I was surprised at the first question they asked me “What do you have available in Manitoba?”. They later went on to explain that they have found that Manitoba is one of the best places to invest in for the following reasons.

1. The economy is stable

2. Cost of doing business is low

3. The lifestyle is one of the best kept secrets in Canada

After five years, someone who starts a business has a 10% success rate and someone who buys a business has a 70% success rate.

If you are interested in buying a business in Manitoba, please check out this Step-By-Step Guide on the Futurpreneur Canada website. For more info on Manitoba communities, checkout Manitoba’s Townfolios.

This guest post was written by Alison Anderson, Founder & CEO of SuccessionMatching.com, an online platform that connects business buyers and sellers using an innovative matching algorithm.

For more Townfolio blog posts, click here or show some love on Twitter, Facebook, & Linkedin.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more upcoming guest blog posts!

SuccessionMatching.com on 3 Reasons to Invest in Manitoba was originally published in Townfolio Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the majority of site selection now being done online, it’s clear that EcDevs need to maintain a proper digital presence. Traditionally, websites have been the foundation for online investment attraction (IA).

Most communities reduce their online IA presence to an economic development (ED) section on their municipal website and the content in this section always varies. Overall, very few communities have a dedicated IA or ED website. Why is that?

After interviewing EcDevs around the country, I quickly learned that most communities want a website dedicated to ED or IA but don’t have the budget.

So what can be done? If you can’t afford a web design agency then you can build your own website. Modern technology is making it quick & simple.

Here are the 3 DIY steps to building a beautiful economic development website for under $250.

1. Use An Online Platform to Build a Website

The cost of DIY websites are going down and platforms like Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix make it extremely easy to build them.

In just 1 hour using Wix, I made this basic EcDev website for Gotham City, the home of DC Comic’s Batman. (Yeah. I’m a nerd.)

Their templates keep the site modern & fresh. And if you upgrade, you can use your own domain name and remove the ads for approximately $200/year.

2. Build Key Content for your Website

Once you have you have created your account on a platform, look to add some basic content to your website. At the very least, focus on the content mentioned in Development Counsellors International’s (DCI) 10 Best Practices for an Economic Development Website blog post:

Highlight Key Industries: Clearly identify the sector’s strategic advantages and list or provide success stories for the top employers in the region to demonstrate a robust industry network.

Comprehensive Contact Information: When location advisors and corporate executives are ready to make that call, a decision maker wants to be able to get on the phone with the right contact.

Keep Demographic Data Up-to-Date: Site selectors, executives and other decision makers want to know if your community has the workforce needed to support their business.

From my interviews, I learned that most EcDevs struggle with keeping data up-to-date on their website, which brings me to Step 3.

3. Power Your Website With Townfolio

If you visit the Gotham City Economic Development demo website, and click “Data Centre”, you would have noticed the data for Gotham City was visualized in an easy to read format. This is powered by Townfolio.

Townfolio is a community profile system that aggregates and automates community data, while following International standards.

Data updates are taken care of, saving EcDevs the time, money and pain of sourcing and updating their own data.

Townfolio also offers a chart embed feature to make your website data interactive and intriguing.

Basic chart embeds are now free and simple as adding a line of code.

Tip: Follow the rule of thumb I used for Gotham City’s Economic Development website and make everything “1–2 clicks” away.

And there you have it! You now have a beautiful website with basic content, and interactive data to help jump start your online marketing efforts!

Disclaimer

By no means do I think this is a final solution, I wrote this article to help EcDevs with little to no budget, and are limited to what they can do. I think this is an excellent option to consider if you can’t afford to hire a professional agency.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly at davie@townfolio.co

Help us improve Townfolio! Fill out our 5-minute survey. We’ll return the favour with profile promos! LITE User Survey or PRO User Survey

For more blog posts, click here or show some love on Twitter, Facebook, & Linkedin.

How to Make an Economic Development Website for $250 was originally published in Townfolio Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(Part 3/3 articles explaining Townfolio, you can also view Part 1 or Part 2)

The Power of the Network

I’ve done enough cold calling to know that it sucks. It sucks for the caller and the recipient. I believe, slowly but surely, digital marketplaces and networks are eliminating cold calling. The beauty of a marketplace is that sellers get to be in front of an audience that potentially want their product, and buyers spend less time searching for what they’re not looking for.

Think how targeted digital marketing can be and how un-targeted billboard ads are. How about searching for new talent? LinkedIn covered that. How about searching for a new partner? Online dating has disrupted that.

We’ve spoken with communities who have paid over $10,000 for a “ contact list” of companies in a particular industry. No guarantees that the companies are expanding, or interested, or that the phone number even works.

Likewise, in the digital age, why should an expanding business or entrepreneur have to go through a painful search for data to help shortlist communities for their next location? There’s probably dozens of communities that fit the criteria. Shouldn’t you be able to find that one piece of info for site selection with a quick search?

These are the questions we’ve been asking ourselves ever since Townfolio was just an idea. As our network grows, Townfolio will eliminate the need for useless qualifying phone calls back and forth.

A Touch of New

If you need another excuse for a network of communities, consider that when most international investors think Canada, they only think of a couple major centers.

With the traditional system of searching, website by website, if your community is not on their mind, you will probably be missed.

That means a solid opportunity could be missed on both sides.

We’re building Townfolio according to most industry standards while throwing in what we like to call a “touch of new”. In other words, we like to dream big on upcoming features to shake things up. We’re keeping most of it a surprise :) .

Something we have already we’ve included on Townfolios is the “Business Wanted” section. It’s open to both LITE and PRO customers and has been a huge hit for our communities and the users.

Target industries are also great identifiers, and we’ve included them, but why not include the talk of the town or coffee row. Every EcDev and citizen knows what businesses they really want opening up in their community. It’s not to say that your community isn’t open to others (all communities dream of a major employer creating hundreds of jobs) but if you’re proactively wanting or needing a dry cleaner or a dentist or even a wind turbine refurbisher, for example, why not let profile visitors know?

As we launch across Canada and Internationally, with a searchable database of “Businesses Wanted” it will better connect communities and companies and that’s just the starting point.

As mentioned in the prior post, we will soon be building our network to include companies (expanding companies, RFPs, entrepreneurs looking to launch franchises, site selectors, etc).

The thought is, both sides are already looking for each other, why not make it easier for them and connect them through a network? Giving communities leads that may be an actual fit, while reducing the search time for companies.

This is how we plan to achieve our goal of helping communities and companies find new business opportunities in a globalized economy.

Communities, if you want to help us help the industry, join our network today and claim a Free Townfolio for your community! Then we don’t have to cold call you ;)

Companies, are you interested in being part of our network? Contact us for more info!

If you want to attract new investment, save time, and save money by automating your community profile, claim your FREE Townfolio today!

To stay tuned by giving us a follow on Medium, Twitter, Facebook.

Attention EcDevs, we’d love your feedback! Help us make Townfolio better in 5-minutes by filling out our form.

Cold Calling Sucks, Let’s Build a Network was originally published in Townfolio Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(Part 2/3 articles explaining Townfolio, you can also view Part 1 or Part 3)

Finding Opportunities in a Globalized Economy

So now that you know the problem we see in the EcDev industry, we want to share our solution.

To get a bit more technical, Townfolio, at heart, is a data company with multiple upcoming software solutions, not just one.

Townfolio helps the public + private sector make sense of complex economic & government data through the creation of useful and visually appealing software. Our software assists with investment attraction efforts, site selection among many other uses, like making a decision on where to move.

Our main goal is to help the public and private sectors find new business opportunities in a globalized economy.

Business in the digital world has no geographical boundaries but finding localized data that’s specific, accurate and up-to-date is still very time-consuming and/or very expensive and that’s something we want to change.

More Than Just a Community Profile

Our flagship software solution (named after our company — Townfolio) attempts to solve this problem by creating a network of digitzed community profiles (we call them Townfolios).

The Townfolios are all connected through an always evolving search engine to help users find the right community according to what specific requirements they have, saving a ton of search time.

Just as the search is always evolving, so are the features. Here’s what we’re brewing up:

• PDF/XLS Exports — Export up-to-date profile data on demand
• Widget Embedding — Power your website with Townfolio Charts
• Analytics (BETA) — PRO customers can track visitor location & pageviews
• Compare (BETA) — Compare communities to one-another
• Dashboard for Communities (in development)
• Real Estate Listings Integration (coming soon)

In case you’re wondering about data, Townfolios feature common data such as population to the more complex such as utility and real estate data, with new datasets being added on a continuous basis. We have dozens of different data sources, but we’re most proud of working directly with communities to get as much proprietary data as possible.

Townfolios are currently live in the Canadian Prairies and soon to launch across Canada with other countries to be considered down the road.

The next step soon to follow is to diversify our network to include expanding companies, site selectors and entrepreneurs, making Townfolio the network where Investment Attraction meets Site Selection to create new opportunities. You can read more about our goal of building a network here.

If you want to attract new investment, save time, and save money by automating your community profile, claim your FREE Townfolio today!

To stay tuned by giving us a follow on Medium, Twitter, Facebook.

Attention EcDevs, we’d love your feedback! Help us make Townfolio better in 5-minutes by filling out our form.

(Site Selection + Investment Attraction) + Digital Network = Global Opportunities was originally published in Townfolio Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(Part 1/3 articles explaining Townfolio, you can also view Part 2 or Part 3)

A few years ago while working in site selection for an Irish government agency I noticed a major data problem. Part of my job description was to help internationally expanding Irish companies with research on the Canadian market. For example, if an Irish manufacturer was interested in opening up a facility in Canada, I would be the point of contact to help them with the research required to build a shortlist of communities.

It sounded fairly easy when I was first tasked with this, but it quickly turned into a nightmare for me. I would need to search which communities in Canada were manufacturing friendly, had the right incentives, the right labour force or even data specific as local water lagoon capacity. It was during this process where I would painfully spend countless hours trying to find relevant data on Canadian communities for my client.

If I was able to find relevant data, it was either out of date or came in the format of a 50 page PDF community profile. Now, imagine trying to go through 20+ of these community profiles all to try and find that one little piece of key information? Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

If I couldn’t find the data I needed online, I would need to call the communities, taking up even more precious time. When it comes to data, I learned that most communities are reactive vs. proactive meaning when a site selector or expanding company calls needing a particular piece of data, the economic developer must scramble to find this data.

The scary truth is most site selection is now done anonymously and online (source). What this means for communities is that if their data isn’t online and readily available, there’s a very good chance they’re being overlooked.

As a result, I realized finding all this data was a very time-consuming process, and wondered why this was? It was a problem that lingered with me for the longest time and I wanted to solve it.

The Idea for Townfolio was Born.

A few years passed with this problem buried somewhere in the back of my mind and then the idea to create a unified profile system of communities for purposes of investment attraction and site selection popped into my head.

Long story short, after some preliminary feedback and assembling a team with two other co-founders, before “taking the plunge” and creating any software or a business, we did our research, a year and a half of it to be precise. By interviewing dozens of economic developers and municipal governments across Canada we wanted to learn about their challenges with online marketing and common pain points that everyone shared.

We quickly found out that many economic developers are quite overwhelmed with diverse job duties. Across the board, from the smallest towns to big cities, we found pain points in three common areas all economic developers face.

First off, we learned that economic developers wear multiple hats. It could be switching between economic development marketing to urban planning or literally being the only person in the town office doing everything from administrative duties and collecting taxes to economic development. The point is, most EcDevs we talk to feel under-resourced.

Second, we discovered that many economic developers lack the budget to afford the traditional and digital marketing solutions currently available for investment attraction. Towns and villages, in particular, have a hard time finding the budget to afford existing solutions, if any.

Third, many economic developers lack the technical skills to try and manage their own digital marketing efforts, let alone keep up with the evolving trends of technology. From building and updating websites to finding, understanding and updating data, EcDevs have told us they do not have the skills to manage this properly.

We learned that because of these constraints, most communities spend so much of their time on defence (doing different duties, trying to find data, etc), and we wanted to create a solution to allow them to spend more time on offence (promoting their community and having data ready when needed).

Built By EcDevs For EcDevs.

With this research in hand, we proudly created Townfolio based on feedback from potential clients, not assumptions we had about the industry from working as a site selector.

From this research, we’ve created our first software solution to assist economic developers and communities with their investment attraction efforts and make the site selection process easier for expanding companies, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors.

Click here to read Part 2.

If you want to attract new investment, save time, and save money by automating your community profile, claim your FREE Townfolio today!

To stay tuned by giving us a follow on Medium, Twitter, Facebook.

Attention EcDevs, we’d love your feedback! Help us make Townfolio better in 5-minutes by filling out our form.

The Problem with Investment Attraction was originally published in Townfolio Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.