Attention on retention - Regional collaboration aims to invigorate industry

When Medicine Hat Economic Development received Council approval for its strategy in the summer of 2023, a critical piece of the holistic approach was a focus on business retention and expansion. This activity involves engaging with the industry to identify challenges and opportunities and is often referred to as the heart of economic development. This can also be the best indicator of the health of the local business community. I think we can all agree that supporting existing business is important and has significant benefits like job creation and increased local investment.

When I joined the Economic Development team in January 2024, I was tasked with developing and implementing a program that looks at key industries in our region and how best to support them. Our goals were to build and strengthen relationships with the business community, understand the state of the industry by gathering and analyzing data, and develop projects that will help support the industry’s sustained growth and success over the long-term. We lovingly call this project the BREIS (pronounced ‘breeze’) which stands for Business Retention & Expansion – Industry Specific.

Our department believes that, to do right by business, we need to listen to their individual experiences to find ways we can make their lives a little bit easier. Also, we know that we’re better together, so we actively look for opportunities to collaborate with other municipalities and business support organizations in the region. BREIS does both, working with Cypress County, the Town of Redcliff, Medicine Hat College, the Southeast Alberta Chamber of Commerce, Palliser Economic Partnership, and CAREERS: The Next Generation to look at the industry patterns so that we can take actions that will be impactful.

So, with that in mind, we kicked off our BREIS studies with Industry Roundtables, where we had discussions with industry leaders about what opportunities, challenges, and priorities they were seeing – both within and beyond our regional borders. ?These conversations directly informed the creation of a survey which we then did with businesses one-on-one to get a better understanding of their individual experience with those industry factors. (Spoiler alert: we actually found that some things that came up at the Industry Roundtable weren’t significant issues for many local businesses – important information to have!)

I’m happy to share that, with our community partners in 2024, we connected with 41% of manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution businesses and 88% of aerospace, aviation, and defense companies in Southeast Alberta. Most of those interviews were done at their business location so we got a firsthand look at how businesses were operating in the region.

Through these interviews, we found that 70% of businesses surveyed are likely or definitely going to expand in the next three years. This is a wonderful indication of the future of our business community. We also asked businesses what they consider to be the biggest opportunities in Southeast Alberta and interestingly the answers seemed to follow very similar patterns. We found that most businesses noted that there is a significant opportunity to diversify the type of businesses we see in our community. Broadening our focus beyond oil and gas, energy transition and renewable energy was brought up as an opportunity to diversify. Additionally, increasing the presence of large industry and manufacturing in our region rounded out the top three opportunities identified.

We are now formulating recommendations and action plans which will be released in State of the Industry reports early in 2025.? We’re excited to partner with the community to help make it easy to do business in Southeast Alberta.

By Alex Wright (Zabel) Economic Development Officer