Tempe is officially joining an initiative led by the National League of Cities on Thursday.
It’s called Legacy Forward, and it aims to help small and mid-sized cities help so-called legacy businesses — that means those firms that’ve been in business for at least 20 years and have fewer than a 100 employees.
In addition to Tempe, the nine other communities chosen include Chino and south San Francisco, California; Tacoma, Washington; Fort Collins, Colorado; and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Lisa Hausz is the interim deputy director in Tempe’s Economic Development Office. The Show spoke with her to find out what she hopes the city will get out of being part of this program.
Full conversation
LISA HAUSZ: Well, it’s a, it’s a great addition to our business retention expansion program. So, we’ve recently launched the Tempe 360 program, which has two arms. One is direct outreach to existing businesses to find out their their needs, their wants, how how can we help them. The other arm of the Tempe 360 is inbound, so when businesses have questions, they know how they can reach us directly.
And the legacy program, which will help in our direct outreach piece particularly, is having another tool in our toolbox that we have another service or other resources to offer businesses when we provide that outreach.
MARK BRODIE: What does it allow you to do that maybe without it you wouldn’t be able to do?
LISA HAUSZ: What we are hoping to learn from our counterparts across the nation in the program is really some key questions, some key tools and things that we can ask and dig into with our companies that have been here for a long time in determining their next step. What’s their succession plan? How are they going to to transition? Either into retirement or transition to their employees, or if they’re going to get it ready to sell.
We want to keep the business here, and we just need to know some of those details and how we can help them navigate.
MARK BRODIE: And what specifically do you get from this? How does it work for Tempe that you’re a part of this program?
LISA HAUSZ: So, it is a hands-on learning program over six months. So, we’ll join teams across the nation from I think there’s 10 of us across the nation — from June, so we’ll start this week. We’re going to do a kickoff all the way through February.
And in that, we meet, we’ll meet monthly and regularly. We’ll have some activities that we need to do. And at the, we’re learning from each other and what’s working, what’s not working in different cities across across the U.S. as well as building new and unique approaches that we can use to help businesses.
MARK BRODIE: Is that something that you’re not able to do or not able to do as well without the this National League of Cities program?
LISA HAUSZ: One of the things that we are hoping to gain through this is best practices and what’s really working in different areas. While we can do that trial and error here, we have a small but mighty team, and ... the more that we can learn from others, the the better and more effective we’ll be in helping our our Tempe businesses.
MARK BRODIE: OK. How many businesses roughly do you have in Tempe that are sort of these these legacy businesses that fall into the category of this initiative, relative to, you know, newer businesses or just plain new business?
LISA HAUSZ: Mark, that is a million-dollar question, because right now we have a database that’s starting with our new business license. So we don’t have a real feel of what businesses are there that we can we can help. We also get data from Maricopa County through our our association with government, so we get a database there, and we also have our own CRM that we’re trying to build those connections.
So, the short answer is we’re hoping to reach out to those and find out where they are in in their life cycle of of their business. We just don’t have a real keen grasp of that right now. Our businesses that we do know that we have, we have roughly just about 13,000 to 15,000 brick-and-mortar businesses in Tempe, which is huge for for municipality of this size. Of those, those are five employees or more.
We’re really missing those that are from one to four employees. We don’t have a a real keen sense of how many of those we have in the city. So, this program will help us build a database that'll work, get the right questions to ask companies of how long they’ve been in and how we can help them, and really continue to build that database that we need.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so given that, do you even know at this point who to be reaching out to in terms of businesses that would fall into the category outlined in this initiative?
LISA HAUSZ: So, when we do our kickoff with the National League of Cities, we have some of those key questions. So, some of our homework has been what sources that we have currently, including what I’ve just mentioned with our database. And also, if there are businesses that we’ve already been in touch with that may qualify.
So, for instance, there’s there’s three to five that I know off the top that I would say, these are the ones we need to reach out to. They’ve been in business 30 years, 40 years, 50 years in Tempe. They would be great ones to start the conversation with and then use their answers to find more.
MARK BRODIE: From an economic development perspective, what is the importance of having sort of these long-standing businesses that have been in the community for a long time? I mean, I know you always want, you know, new businesses, you always want as many businesses as you can get. But specifically for for some of these longer-standing ones, what are the what’s the importance of those?
LISA HAUSZ: So, businesses that already exist in a community are more likely to further invest in the community, hire more people and grow within the community. And much like a regular business, it’s easier to sell more and keep more of existing businesses in than it is to acquire new customers in that respect.
Our businesses contribute probably 80% of our job growth and of our local economy with the existing business groups. You know, we do have some that’ll close, that’ll move in and out, but the ones that have stayed here for a long time are our key economic drivers for the city.
MARK BRODIE: And I would imagine also that it’s ... it’s cheaper for a business to keep its employees than to have to continue to on-board and hire and train new ones. I would imagine there’s something similar for cities, right? Like, it’s more efficient to keep the businesses you have than to have to keep cycling through new ones with closures and and openings.
LISA HAUSZ: Yes, yes. You’ve exactly nailed it. It’s really that retention piece, and just like for a business keeping employees, keeping businesses here is much more effective and, I guess, economical in respect of our staff time and how we’re helping those businesses.
MARK BRODIE: So, I guess for the city of Tempe, you’re one of 10 municipalities that are part of this program, how big of a deal is it for you and your department and your city that you are now part of this initiative?
LISA HAUSZ: We are extremely pleased to be selected for this. We’re going to be partnered with I think there’s 10 of us across the nation. It’s they’re from all over from the South, from the North, East, West Coast. So we’ll get a really wide range of of perspective and how they’re approaching their business retention expansion, how they’re approaching their their legacy businesses.
For us, it’s a huge feather in our cap to say, you know, Tempe is a part of this, and these are the reasons why we want to build it into our business retention expansion program.
MARK BRODIE: And at the end of this, like, what do you hope that you have learned? What do you hope that maybe you’re doing a little differently or or have, you know, practices that evolved a little bit? Do you are you even at a point where you can identify that yet?
LISA HAUSZ: One of the key things — and it’s a great question because, you know, the outcomes at the end, what do we want — is really to have another reason to reach out to our businesses, particularly with the long-established ones or our legacy businesses.
For many, many years, they’ve been operating in the city and really haven’t had to engage with the local government level. They do what they do, they do it well, and they don’t need us to help. This may be one of those reasons for us to reach out to them and see if there’s — what’s their next stage? Where where are they heading? And having the tools through this program will help us to have those conversations.
MARK BRODIE: All right. Lisa, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
LISA HAUSZ: Thank you very much.
MARK BRODIE: Lisa Hausz is the interim deputy director in the city of Tempe’s Economic Development Office.
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