What can a former mill town learn from Steel City? A group of Upstate businesspeople traveled to the Rust Belt to find out
Sometimes it’s okay to let somebody else learn your lessons for you, which is part of the goal behind inter-city visits among business communities worldwide. Hundreds of times each year, delegations from one city hop on buses and make plans to see what they can learn from another.
The Greenville Chamber recently wrapped up a trip to Pittsburgh, where attendees learned how cities that seem vastly different at first blush actually have a lot in common. Substitute steel mills for cotton mills and it starts to become clear what kind of lessons Upstate South Carolina can learn from southeast Pennsylvania.
A Real Trip
A committee of 28 people did lots of homework and presentations before choosing Pittsburgh over Boulder, Chicago/Naperville, Oklahoma City and Indianapolis.
Inter-city visits are serious enough productions that the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE) published an 82-page guide on the subject. According to ACCE, the visits have been happening for decades, but have gained significantly in popularity in the past decade. A 2008 study showed that more than half of members surveyed had an active inter-city travel program, and 34 percent of those were less than three years old.
Most charged participants between $1,500 and $2,500, though many try to keep under $500. They can even be profitable with the right combination of fees, grants, underwriting or sponsorships. The Greenville Chamber charged $1,250 for a trip that was heavily subsidized by sponsors.
ACCE said that size is less important than diversity when it comes to delegations. It’s most important that they represent a broad cross-section of the community.
Visiting Pittsburgh
Size doesn’t matter so much when it comes to deciding where to go because principles apply at any scale, said Hank Hyatt, vice president of economic development at the Chamber.
For instance, just as Pittsburgh saw its population quickly skew older as a generation of people left to find work after the steel industry implosion, the Upstate has had a notoriously hard time holding on to its young folks and shifting its economy since the textile bust.
Ralph Heredia, vice president of business development at Zipit Wireless, said he experienced that firsthand when the company that brought him to Greenville in 1993 closed its operations. His colleagues then looked around and, seeing no suitable replacements for their high-paying jobs, left. He attended the Pittsburgh trip looking for ways to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
The group learned the details of this history from people such as James Rohr, former CEO of PNC Bank, and Tom Murphy, former mayor of Pittsburgh.
“They were very open and honest about things that worked there, and also things they were not very proud of,” said Tim Reed, chair of the trip’s organizing committee. Those low points include a cumbersome 43 municipalities within Allegheny County, and a total lack of an African-American middle class.
“Steeling” Ideas
Today, technology clusters are located along the Ohio River where steel mills once stood. Hospitals are venturing into the insurance business, and universities are having a marked impact throughout the community.
Hyatt said the trip showed how the Upstate could make much more out of the health care sector of the economy, and Heredia was impressed by the support system for entrepreneurs. He said there were concrete lessons for Greenville, even if Pittsburgh is a decade or more ahead in its development.
“I was pleasantly surprised that we have all the right ingredients here in Greenville to do what Pittsburgh has done up there,” Heredia said.
The group left thinking differently about how organizations such as the Chamber’s NEXT high-impact business initiative, the hospitals and universities, and independent groups like Innoventure and GSA Technology Council could work more closely.
“There’s so much momentum in every one of these areas that really can help connect people,” Heredia said. “We know about all these, but we haven’t really been looking at how these can collectively work together, but we saw in Pittsburgh how that can happen.”
Deeper Connections
Although they tend to be brief, these trips take networking to another level. Zipit Wireless, which works on health care technologies, already had a connection with University of Pittsburgh Medical School (UPMC). Heredia happened to have been in Pittsburgh a month earlier, but he said visiting with the Chamber brought a much bigger payoff than the usual quick meetings he would have with the potential customer.
After an inter-city visit “you have more of a collective understanding of what their needs are rather than just a couple of people in a department,” he said. That’s valuable information for somebody working to get his product in an institution.
Relationships with people back home are also formed and strengthened, Heredia said, and Zipit is already collaborating with some of the other delegates he met or got to know better.
Smaller trips occur here and there. Just last week the Chamber organized a visit to Charleston. Hyatt said the group’s next major trip will be in 2015, destination yet unknown.
