Retail consultant wants to bring shops, jobs
Rome officials are seeking assistance in their retail recruitment efforts.
Retail recruitment consultant Chuck Branch compares recruiting retailers to a community to dating. “You’ve got to keep calling and asking them out,” Branch told city staff and Commissioners Bill Collins and Evie McNiece last week. Perhaps an even larger question, philosophically at least, is whether or not the city should be in the business of recruiting retailers to Rome and Floyd County.
City Manager Sammy Rich said in the past year there has been a great deal of discussion about industrial recruitment activity but more recently he’s been hearing a lot of questions about what the community is doing beside industrial recruitment.
Branch’s firm, r360 LLC, made a proposal to serve as the city’s consultant in the retail recruitment sector and just two weeks ago signed an agreement to partner with Georgia Power to provide consulting services to cities that Georgia Power works with, and estimated that partnership would lower the company’s offer to work specifically on behalf of Rome by at least 25 percent.
The original proposal pitched to the Redevelopment committee in January of this year called for the city to pay $35,000 a year for three years to retain r360 LLC.
Since r360 signed its agreement with Georgia Power, a new company has been formed called NextSite 360.
“You’ve got a really cool community,” Branch said. “We’re going to create realistic lists, then be aggressive in recruitment. We’re going to provide all of the market analysis.”
Rome retail property developer Robert H. Ledbetter Jr., of R.H. Ledbetter Properties, said it’s certainly no secret that retailers are not in the market right now, and there is a lot of pressure from e-commerce on the big box retailers.
Ledbetter, whose company is responsible for the Riverbend, Etowah
II, RiverWalk and MidTown Crossing shopping centers in Rome, and has purchased property for a new CityCenter shopping center at Riverside Parkway and Turner McCall Boulevard, also said the retailers all do their own market studies and have a pretty good idea of what their competitors are doing in a given market. “Certainly whatever the city feels like it needs to do to improve the community, I encourage them to do what they feel like they need to do to make Rome a better place,” Ledbetter said.
“We don’t want empty buildings. We like to see them filled before new development,” Branch said. His plan is to specifically identify between
six and 12 properties for development or redevelopment. “We’re also going to identify retail leakage, which is going to Cartersville, who’s going to Chattanooga,” Branch said. He asked commissioners to think about the fact that when a Roman goes to Cartersville to Target or Academy Sports, what other shops do they visit.
Mobile-mapping technology — tracking of smartphones — is available to tell a retailer where their customers are coming from, and where they go next.
Amanda Carter, the new director of the Rome Downtown Development Authority, said that type of information would be great to have for existing retailers in Rome. “It would be very beneficial when we’re looking to grow,” Carter said. “I wish our office could take that information and try
to recruit. We could look at other downtowns and see if maybe there was a need for a certain type of store. We could take that information and maybe grow our downtown.”
Carter said the leakage information would also be tremendously beneficial. “If the community knows why people are going out of town to shop, if there was someone in this area that had a thought to open that kind of business they would know it could succeed here,” Carter said.
Brooke Nolan, owner of Snazzy Rags Boutique, 419 Broad St., said the city hiring a consultant to recruit retailers could be a double-edged sword. “We don’t need to oversaturate the market, but I think some other retail stores could be great,” Nolan said. “At the same time, discounted stores like a Ross (already in Rome at Riverbend) or Marshalls, they affect everybody.”
Branch told members of the Redevelopment committee that he thinks the type of person who shops at a Ross or Marshalls store is a completely different type of client from the mom and pop local women’s clothing boutique shoppers. At the same time, he said a density of boutiques or restaurants would ultimately
draw more shoppers to the market. “I believe a rising tide floats all boats,” Branch said.
On the flip side of that issue, Branch was asked about anecdotal reports that some of the larger stores such as Target and Academy in Cartersville were not as interested in Rome because the Rome customers were making the drive to Cartersville, he responded that the mobile-mapping technology could be used to prove or disprove where their shoppers are coming from.
Branch also said mobile-mapping would show a retailer that the Rome market is much larger than the number of residents in the city of Rome or Floyd County.
He said it would be able to show how many people from outlying communities are coming to Rome to shop.
“I’m trying to figure out why they would not want this in their tool box,” Collins said. “I think I kind of like this tool.”
“To me this seems like it is a good business decision,” said Rich.
Branch is expected to be asked to come back to Rome and make a presentation to the full City Commission during a caucus session before the commission makes any kind of a decision on hiring NextSite 360.