Welcome home | Maine cities and towns are learning a focused approach and a little ingenuity are key to luring outside companies

Belfast City Manager Joe Slocum threw everything he had at Athenahealth to convince the Massachusetts-based company to open a customer service and account management center in his city. You want space? He had 135,000 sq. ft. in an empty, state-of-the-art former MBNA facility right off Route 3. You want bodies? MBNA and Bank of America found plenty to run their call centers here. You want scenery? Check out the rare ocean views from the ski summit at the Camden Snow Bowl just 20 miles away.

Slocum was so set on distinguishing his midcoast city from its final-round competition in Vermont, during the last weeks of the site selection process he told Athenahealth chairman and CEO Jonathan Bush, the President of the United States' cousin, to "ask [Vermont officials] if you can see the ocean from the ski trail." Bush got the hint, telling Slocum as he headed to Burlington for a site-scouting mission and skiing excursion that his point was "much more important to me than you'll ever know."

This year, Slocum's efforts to distinguish Belfast — in "whatever way I can," he says — helped clinch a deal that had been in the works for three and a half years and that had involved state officials, site locators, a business recruitment agency and a strategy to turn an empty office space into an instrument for business attraction.

On Nov. 29, Athenahealth, a provider of Internet business services for physicians, announced it would locate a new operations center in Belfast that would employ 100 people by the end of 2008 and as many as 600 by 2013. At the press conference announcing the expansion, Gov. John Baldacci said, "The presence of a leading company like Athenahealth confirms that Maine is open for business."

Problem is, Belfast's "open-for-business" enthusiasm is still relatively rare in Maine, according to Matt Jacobson, president of the Portland nonprofit Maine & Co. Jacobson says that when he took the job as head of the state's leading business recruitment and retention agency in January 2006, he thought he'd spend most of his time matching Maine towns and cities with national and multinational companies looking for a new place to set up shop. Instead, Jacobson spends half of his time just helping Maine municipalities figure out what they have to offer. And there are still plenty of places in Maine that don't want anything to do with him.

"In terms of where I can bring opportunities, I don't have many choices," Jacobson says. "I think a lot of towns aren't ready to have the discussion yet. I'm not sure there is a consensus in Maine that we want to do a lot of business attraction and that we want to grow a lot of business. People have very strong views; go to a Plum Creek hearing and you'll see it."

A plan of attack
Of the half-dozen major successes Maine & Co. has helped shepherd since it began in 1995, including NotifyMD's call center in Farmington and T-Mobile's call center at the FirstPark business center in Oakland, Jacobson says all involved concerted planning on the part of municipal or county officials to identify the location's unique assets and promote them to the company or through intermediaries like Maine & Co., the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, or regional economic development councils.

According to Jacobson, a concerted approach to business attraction like Belfast's is still new to Maine. Most Maine towns and cities, he says, are reactive rather than proactive about an out-of-town business coming to call, scrambling to approve or deny proposals as they arise rather than tracking down the companies they want to attract. Jacobson compares this frenzied method to a disorganized fire drill: Wait until a business declares interest in your town and then rush to decide whether you want it or not.

A better way, says Jacobson, is to target the types of businesses your municipality wants, have a plan for attracting them, and make that attraction part of an overall economic development strategy. "If you don't know what you want, then you can't catch the attention of the type of companies you want," Jacobson says.

Though Maine's municipal officials may not have warmed to business solicitation as much as their peers in other states, national site selectors say Maine is competitive with other states, thanks in large part to business incentives like Pine Tree Development Zones, which were enacted in 2004 to provide tax credits to businesses.

"We can compete favorably for certain industries," says Tony McDonald, a partner at CB Richard Ellis/The Boulos Co. in Portland who brokered the $6.1 million Athenahealth sale. "The best thing that's ever happened to make Maine competitive — and I've been doing this for 20 years — is the Pine Tree Zone program."

Keith Scott, senior vice president of the Staubach Co., a Texas-based site selection agency owned by former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, helped T-Mobile identify Oakland for a new call center. In 2004, T-Mobile selected the small town after a nationwide search, and the call center now employs more than 775 people. Scott agrees the Pine Tree Zone program made T-Mobile notice Oakland — he says the related tax incentives are better than those in many other states — but the welcome T-Mobile received from officials from the Central Maine Growth Council and the 24 towns invested in the Oakland business park sweetened the deal.

Scott says big businesses are interested in municipalities that are willing to help them navigate local regulations and evaluate the area workforce, as the Central Maine Growth Council did when it organized meetings with local business owners and T-Mobile and presented the corporation with area workforce data. "It helps that community get that company pulled in and really deep into the community," he explains.

A step in the right direction
Houlton Town Manager Doug Hazlett is betting a mix of down-home friendliness and shrewd strategy will make his northern Maine town the next success story. Hazlett became the Houlton town manager in March 2005 after a career in corporate strategic planning for a division of the Hartford Insurance Group. Prior to his arrival, Hazlett says Houlton officials were grabbing at any business attraction opportunity that came along, without any strategy to boost the town's chances of being selected.

"We were trying to do an awful lot of cold-calling," explains Hazlett. "You have to have your ducks in order. You have to give people a reason to locate in Houlton."

Hazlett contacted Maine & Co. shortly after taking the town manager position and asked Jacobson to come up to Houlton to help brainstorm how the town could leverage its assets to lure big business. The men identified several promising angles — the town's airport, which is visited frequently by executives needing to clear customs; its proven work ethic, demonstrated by gun maker Smith & Wesson's longtime presence; and its proximity to the Canadian border and Interstate 95.

In 2006, Houlton answered a request-for-proposals from an unidentified nutriceuticals company for a site to grow acres of alfalfa. (Companies looking to expand often keep their identities and those of other considered sites a secret to protect their competitive edge and public image.) The town had identified farming as one of its strengths, and the match, Hazlett says, would have been perfect.

Would have been.

In December 2006, the nutriceuticals company informed Maine & Co. that Houlton was the runner-up in a national search that included 68 sites. The company, whose name has never been revealed, opted for a site in the Midwest. Hazlett says there wasn't much he could have done to change the outcome — the company preferred a site with a history of growing alfalfa, rather than an area that would have to introduce it as a rotation crop. But though Houlton lost the deal, Jacobson and Hazlett consider the result something of a win.

Catching the eye of a site location company — which probably represents several different companies looking to expand — is a step in the right direction, says Jacobson. "Even though Houlton didn't win, we're already getting looks that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise," he says.

Different strokes
Houlton isn't relying on niceness alone to lure a big player. In fall 2005, the town created a tax increment finance zone on the roughly 30 acres near its airport that overlap its Pine Tree Development Zone, and then placed an Aroostook County Empowerment Zone over some parts of the area. Together, the zones offer qualified businesses municipal, state and federal tax credits. Houlton is also touting its biomass electricity generator to businesses worried about Maine's relatively high energy costs. The generator is owned by the town and provides power at a rate cheaper than most of the state.

To tie up the package, Hazlett says he just wants to "get the word out that we're open for business. I like to say, 'Come and talk to us.'"
While Houlton is just diving into strategic business attraction, Lewiston and Auburn have been swimming in that pool for more than 20 years. Years ago, the city identified its proximity to rail, road and river as one of its strengths and began appealing to businesses with transportation and logistics needs like Wal-Mart, which opened a Lewiston distribution center in 2006 after the state and city offered the mega-retailer a combined $17 million in subsidies and incentives. The Wal-Mart get, says Paul Badeau, marketing director of the Lewiston Auburn Economic Growth Council, put L/A on the radar of other big companies with transportation needs, and now LAEGC is fielding calls from companies interested in moving to the area. It's the result of two decades of work that included creating the region's only Foreign Trade Zone and U.S. Customs Port of Entry, both in Auburn, and New England's only double-stack freight container service, in Lewiston.

"Distribution and logistics is a huge, huge opportunity for us," says Badeau. "And it is starting to work in a big way."

As Houlton, Belfast and Lewiston demonstrate, local and county officials can use several strategies to make their piece of the world attractive to big businesses — everything from laying on the folksy friendliness to leveraging the Pine Tree Development Zone program. (North Carolina-based Global Contact Services, which as this issue went to press announced Pittsfield is a finalist for a new call center, is considering Maine because of its available workforce.)

Athenahealth CFO Carl Byers, who along with all of the company's executive staff was part of the recent site search, says Athenahealth chose Belfast because of its high-tech MBNA facility, area workforce, local and state incentives, and the city's willingness to help. And Belfast City Manager Joe Slocum's creative attention-grabbers also helped keep the city on the Athenahealth brain in the critical final months of the selection process: In late October, Slocum sent Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush a framed aerial photograph of the MBNA facility with a Post-it-note reading, "Wish you were here."

"It's important to have a general mindset and an attitude of offering to cooperate with the company," Byers says. "If I compare [Belfast] to other locations, apart from the finalists, there's just a feeling in town of energy and enthusiasm."