#7 - Preventative Maintenance: What is BR&E and Why Does It Matter?
If you’ve been following our Economic Development 101 series, you’ve learned about the ins and outs of the incentive process, as well as how a project comes together, why confidentiality matters, and what happens once a company is ready to go public. So, what about the other side of what we do? Outside of a company locating to Catawba County, what else does the EDC help with?
Enter the Business, Retention, & Expansion program, or BRE for short. Let’s start with the basics: What is it? Who is it for? What can it achieve? Why does it matter?
What is it? Who is it for?
BRE is the ongoing work of checking in with businesses already located in Catawba County to understand their needs and help them stay, grow and succeed. In other words, it’s about keeping the businesses we already have, not just recruiting new ones. That means a scheduled visit, phone call, email, or sometimes just a basic touch point. It could be as unplanned as the one time I ran into a plant manager in a grocery store and caught up on how things were going.
Think of BRE like you may think of vehicle maintenance. Nobody waits for the engine light to come on to think about vehicle maintenance. You routinely check fluids, change the oil, and perform standard maintenance to catch a problem before it becomes a bigger and more costly problem. Think of BRE the same way. If a business has a need, we don’t want to assume what the need is. Instead, we try to take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one by continuously staying connected.
Beyond the visits themselves, we stay connected through our quarterly Industry Pulse newsletter, staying current on issues that affect our local businesses, and through our membership in the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance. Through the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, we can offer businesses access to the Manufacturing Council, a group designed to educate companies and provide resources on topics that affect them directly. Recent examples include hosting the Regional Director for U.S. Senator Ted Budd's office on visits to several existing industries to discuss tariff impacts; a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) information session with the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance; and, through a partnership with the Catawba County Chamber of Commerce, a session on regional workforce trends and strategies for recruiting and retaining talent.
What can it achieve?
“How’s business, workforce?”, “Is your current facility still a good fit?”, “Is there something the city, county, or state could assist you with?” Sometimes, the visit is short, and the answer is “Everything is fine.” However, even those short visits and touch points are important. They’re important for if, and when, things aren’t fine and they remember us and the conversation begins.
Other times, a visit surfaces a real, solvable problem. During a recent visit with an existing furniture manufacturer, the conversation turned to something weighing on her: an aging workforce, and the wave of retirements she could already see coming. “Kimberly, I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told me. “Any suggestions?” I asked whether she’d recently connected with Catawba Valley Community College’s Furniture Academy. If not, I encouraged her to reach out and learn more about their new program for second-chance hiring. This may be a pool of potential employees she hadn’t fully considered.
Another time, a manufacturer called us directly, stuck in a permitting slowdown unsure of the next steps with the county. We reached out to the county on their behalf, got the answers quickly, and kept the company updated at every step until the issue was resolved. None of that happens unless the relationship already exists.
Why does it matter?
Because the businesses already here are the ones your neighbors work for. Or maybe you work for one of them. Keeping those jobs and investment here is as important as landing the new ones. Even if it doesn’t always make the front page. Catawba County is home to over 400+ manufacturers with thousands of employees. Making sure they stay and grow here is not just important, it’s essential to our local economy.
Even if an existing business doesn’t add more jobs or additional square footage, it still protects the jobs they already have. A company that’s happy, growing, and heard is a company far less likely to consolidate operations into another county or state. And every dollar spent helping an existing employer solve a problem is a dollar spent on jobs our community already depends on. It is also part of the tax base that funds schools and infrastructure and provides the stability that comes from not having to replace what was already working.
These visits and touch points matter because every business in Catawba County matters. The jobs they provide, the products they make, and the benefit they bring to the overall local economy. BRE is our way of making sure businesses have what they need to stay successful and stay in Catawba County.
Be sure not to miss the next piece in our Economic Development 101 series -what actually happens during and after a BRE visit, and how those conversations turn into action.
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