S3,E3 - Nora Spillane

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This is Talk CNY, a semi-monthly podcast by CenterState CEO. We're an independent nonprofit committed to creating inclusive, equitable, and sustainable economic growth in Central New York. Join us as we meet the people and explore the projects driving the regional economy forward. This is Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Zilcosky, director of communications for CenterState CEO and your host for Talk CNY. CenterState CEO's vision of economic development is not narrow. It aims to enable sustainable and inclusive growth, bringing together different partners to find creative solutions that will make for a more vibrant, Central New York community. So that means the projects are wide-ranging from the multi-billion dollar investment from Micron to a new restaurant opening in a city neighborhood. That's all economic development. So in this episode of Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank, we are joined by CenterState CEO's Vice President of Economic Development, Nora Spillane, to talk all about the projects currently going on in the region and how they'll impact the community. Nora, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Katie. I'm excited. New Year, new backdrop. I know. It's all very exciting. So let's jump right in. Something that's keeping all of us very busy here at CenterState CEO these days is the new innovation hub on Harrison Street.

It's kind of like a physical manifestation of how Center State CEO does economic development, bringing in a lot of different strategies and priorities from across our teams. So can you break that down a little bit? Sure. How are we putting it all together? Yeah. I think the thing that's really important to remember is 20 years ago when the Tech Garden was first a little kernel of an idea in a failed parking garage, failed, collapsed. It was about starting businesses and that Tech Garden isn't an unintentional name. We were starting to grow things, but we've seen a lot of success, but we've also seen new demand, and I think that's what I'm excited. I think that's what the whole team is excited about with the new Innovation Hub is the ability not to serve tech or the perception of tech.

But really the entire small business, whether you're starting something up or you have a business and you need support, we want to make sure you feel like there's a place for you there. We want our partners in the ecosystem who support all of the work that we do and our local community does to feel like they have a home there. So we've been talking about who has office space, who is going to be part of regular office hours. So that's the really cool part. And I think we wanted to make sure a lot of the feedback we did, we did a lot of customer discovery as our entrepreneurship friends would say, and a lot of what we heard was Tech Garden was a mental barrier for people. They didn't see themselves there. And I think with the new innovation hub, we want to be intentional about that. We know that it's really important for people to see themselves there. The first idea that you have, we want to go and who can help me? Folks at the Innovation Hub at CenterState.

Now, this innovation hub is really spearheaded by our Inclusive Growth team, which you're a member of, and you lead the economic development sector of it as our Vice President of Economic Development. But the other kind of arms of it are Workforce Innovation and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. But all three of these branches are really working together along with our Member and Business Experience team and our Strategy, Policy and Planning team to put this together. So what's it been kind of working even across those different arms of CenterState CEO?

It's been awesome. We have such a good crew here and so many fun and smart and talented people that you just sort of get to watch them excel at the thing that they're passionate about. It's amazing. We have used a lot of data to inform the programming that we're starting to consider in the space. Our business advisors have been thinking about what are the industry sectors? What are the supports folks need? We had a really great kind of conversation around workforce training and entrepreneurship and small businesses and what are the commonalities there. And there was a lot of similarities in terms of feeling like you're part of something, feeling like you have the support you need. Even just talking about mental health services. It was funny. Someone was like, entrepreneurs get lonely too, and some of these things can feel very solitary, but that's the idea behind the whole place. We've got the resource pool, and it's just really exciting to think about those really intentional connections between a member who's like, I want to be doing more for the community. I just don't know how, what provide 10 hours of free accounting services for a small business in one of our programs. Go talk to Mike Macaluso. It'll be great. That's a unique thing between the teams. I think the looking at where we see ourselves going and positioning the small business community, well, the whole business community is just really helpful from the policy team. They're looking ahead, they're looking at trends that helps us make decisions. Just the broad spectrum of that and to have it all really come together in one place and do it in person and where the exciting things happen that you can't plan.

Yeah, and like you said, this is a place, it's a physical structure in our downtown. So as the Vice President of Economic Development, what does this mean as an economic development project for the region?

It's awesome. It's just really, the intentionality behind this location 20 years ago remains right now. It's right across the street from the Hotel Syracuse, the Marriott downtown, which was a labor of love for a lot of people, and it's thriving. It's right by our convention district, which is where we show off our community to people from out of town. This is an opportunity to say, Hey, this isn't your same old rust belt city. We're vibrant. We're happening. This is a space where creative things are going on. The opening, the visibility literally into the space from Harrison Street as people are walking from the hotel to the convention center around for food. It's a visible recognition of what we've done sort of behind the scenes, and that's exciting. But it also is an investment and it's right by transit. So it's right by the Central Bus hub. It's right by the STEAM school. As I said, it's a really important part of the downtown sort of quad. That southern end of downtown has always kind of lacked a real consistent anchor, and it's an important bridge into the south side of the city, which as we know is an area where there's a lot of opportunity right now, 81. Folks coming in. It couldn't be more perfectly positioned. It's like we planned it 20 years ago.

It's almost as if. So, as you mentioned, this is not just the beginning stages of a business anymore. We're not just focusing on that. We're focusing on really the entire lifecycle of both a business and of entrepreneurs. So can you explain a little bit more about that approach and all the services that could be needed and the thought that goes into that?

One of the things that's super exciting is the idea of crossing the team within Inclusive Growth and within the community. So we might be running a workforce training program for one of our major manufacturers, and there's 20 people in that class. It might not end up being for them, but they will be exposed to some of the entrepreneurial programming and some of the other training. They'll know those people, they'll know where to go. So there's a vice versa kind of, oh, that's not for me. But that's interesting that we just hope will naturally occur. We're going to cultivate it not just out of nowhere, but we want to make sure people see the options that people have that view into the possibilities.

We also, we have really amazing creative folks in our large employers, and we want to make sure that they get to do really interesting and creative work and provide a space for a major manufacturer to have what they call like a skunk works, where they get to go and kind of tinker and play and do that with either a small company that might be in their industry through a mentorship program, or just go to the manufacturing hardware center in the new space and say, I want to build a new thing. We're working on this. Sometimes the best thing to do is get out of your head, get out of your comfort zone, and we want to facilitate that for our larger employers too. So we see it as not only small businesses and the entrepreneurial training and the supports, but exposure, exposure to larger companies to new ideas to, I never thought of myself as a C and C machiner. And that's where I'm excited about the nexus of the Innovation Hub where all those things can come together.

Now I want to move on to another project you and your team are working on in inclusive procurement initiative. So these words all put together. You are talking to some of the region's biggest employers, analyzing how they are purchasing the goods and services that they use for their business. What are you hoping to learn from this process?

There's 29,000 small businesses in the five-county region and they employ over 400,000 people. Wow. And you just the multiplier effect of small business growth in this region. Every dollar a small business spends gets returned into the economy one and a half times. Every 10 employees at a small business is another seven in supporting businesses. Wow. The impact of small businesses on our economy cannot be overstated. Over the past few years, people have seen a lot of ups and downs, but we knew with the anticipation of growth that we needed to do two things. What's going on in the economy now? Where do we have pockets of opportunity? Where do we have areas we need to improve to support businesses growth? And what do the anchors need? These are our tried and true folks. These are our eds and our hospitals and our large manufacturers who have been here and working, and we want to make sure that they are set up for success over the next few years as well. So this initiative, we've got a terrific consulting team who are just diving right in. They will analyze the spending power of these eight or so major institutions and employers where they're buying stuff, how they're buying things, what are the processes that they're using and dig into the barriers and the opportunities there as well. So it could be - Hey, we've been buying from the same person for 10 years, 15 years. We had no idea new business had popped up because we just purchasing managers know who they know. So helping give them insights into that is really exciting. The conversations we've already had, people are just sort of like, yeah, this is a no brainer.

Yeah, it's better for us. It's better for the economy. We may have goals from certain suppliers who say, we want to see more local purchasing. We want to see spending with historically disadvantaged businesses. And that's always a primary thought, but it is about the entire Central New York economy as well. So we're at the very beginning. Probably the next few months in the fall, we'll have some really interesting insights. So maybe I'll come back, but what are you buying? How are you buying it? How do we support you to buy it? And how do we support the companies that are going to be supplying you? There was one example of a major employer who once you get a contract with them, you're in, you're good, but you also become a target. So what is the cybersecurity needs you have? Are we providing those kinds of resources? Are we providing the right trainings for folks? Are we making that accessible? So that's the kind of insights and outcomes we're hoping to see. So this is going to all be a little wonky for people who maybe aren't in it, but it is still important. I mean, some of the things that you just laid out are really important to understand in order to make sure that our economy is working the best way it can. So for people who aren't living and breathing this, why is this important to making a more vibrant community?

It's really two things. We don't know what we don't know sometimes, and this, it's such a varied ecosystem that having really aggregate level data across industries helps us do a better job, and ultimately that's what we want to do. The second part is we want our businesses large and small to be successful, it's easy to keep doing things the way you've been doing it, to buy from the same person, but helping people take that tricky next step, making it really simple and straightforward is really part of the initiative. And what's exciting about it? It's numbers, yes or no?

We'll be back with Nora in just a moment. But first a word from our presenting sponsor, NBT Bank.

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Welcome back to Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Kilcosky, CenterState CEO's, director of communications and your host for Talk CNY. I'm joined today by CenterState CEO's Vice President of Economic Development, Nora Spillane. Nora, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So we've talked a lot on this podcast generally about the growth in this region, but I think it can be hard sometimes to really conceptualize what this growth could look like. What a 10% population increase could look like. Of course we'll need more doctors, we'll need more teachers, but businesses are also going to have to scale in this moment. What does that mean for the business community?

None of us know us has a crystal ball, but I think it's fair to say the things that we love about this place we want to preserve. So there's a thoughtfulness and an intentionality about what's coming that we really need to be mindful about. We love our local employers, we love the folks who live here and go to school here. They are going to see new stuff. There's going to be maybe more traffic, so maybe you have to leave your house a little earlier. But on a broader level, there's more work. It's more people coming through your local restaurant. It's more buildings needing to be designed and retrofitted. So there's more engineering work, there's more doctors and teachers and dentists and all of that that we've talked about before on this show. It's that level up. But the one thing that we've talked about as a team across Inclusive Growth is not only is it more, but it's a higher level.

We'll be doing business in this community at a higher level of sophistication. That is where I find the work we do at CenterState so exciting because we get to help people figure that out. We get to help people be better and find resources they didn't know existed. And a class that's going to help them take their point of sale system from a paper and a cash register to a toast. It's just we get to find those cool things and share them with everybody. But truly the sophistication is the thing that I'm trying to still wrap my head around. We'll have big employers doing really interesting stuff. The people who will be employed there, the restaurants still want to go to, just the quality of life is going to expand. Yeah, I'm excited for different foods and better small cinemas and just what comes with population growth. Exciting, exciting stuff.

So I think that's one thing. It's hard to put numbers on it. I wish I had a crystal ball.

Yeah. An algorithm that made it all come together. But the thing that I am a hundred percent on is we're going to have real opportunity for the things that are here that are fantastic to level up. You mentioned it a little bit about being thoughtful and intentional, and we talk a lot about planning for the future on this show. Can you kind of really dig into why it's so vital that our entire community plans for what the community will be and not just how we're operating right now?

When you're in the moment, sometimes you don't pick your head up and you miss things. I think we have an opportunity to get this right and do it right for a lot of people. That to me is the forward-looking importance. If you plan, you plan well, everybody gets a piece and everybody can be excited about it.

Now, one of the clearest indicators to us that businesses are looking to come here right now is our economic development pipeline. And it's really kind of incredible. It's eight times what it was just five years ago. So what is our economic development pipeline for maybe people who haven't heard past episodes or just need a refresher and what are we tracking in it right now? Sure.

So one of the things CenterState does is keep an eye on the region as a whole. We've got great local partners in our counties, but looking at who's doing what and how are they doing it. So the economic development pipeline tracks capital expenditures, new jobs, and retained jobs at the sort of very basic level by priority industries. As you said, it has plused itself up pretty dramatically, and that's due to a lot of external factors, but it's also work that we've done that this community has done to make itself, to position itself to be a place where people want to grow. One of the insights that I get from the data is the number of retained jobs is really high compared to maybe five or 10 years ago. And that tells me those are jobs that are here now from employers who are looking to invest here and grow here. So we're going to keep those jobs. And that is a really, it's a unique insight that I haven't always seen correlate to the size of the capital investment, but it is.

Can you explain that a little bit more?

Yeah. So you might spend a lot of money on a very fancy building, but you may only need 50 people when you see a lot of people spending money, but retaining a lot more people that they're here for the long term. So it's not a neat ratio, but it is I think, an indicator of investing in people. And that's why the workforce team is so important and their work is so valuable. But that's a really, it's a nice metric that I recently started to track a little bit.

Yeah. A lot of the industries and sectors that we are seeing in this economic development pipeline are relatively new to the region, semiconductors and other advanced manufacturing. And these sectors come with some new and sometimes confusing words and terminology. So it's really easy for people to be like, I don't know what that means. It doesn't have anything to do with me. But I know from the work of our team at CenterState CEO that that's not necessarily true. So what would you say to someone who is thinking that this is not something that I have to work with.

First of all, don't make that assumption. You can't possibly know that. I think everything from semiconductors or in every car that we drive to students who are going to need to be proficient in AP physics to work a machine in one of these new factories. It's such a broad spectrum. The supplier who, there was a story of a supplier in a neighboring community who the plant manager at a fab had a cool car collection. He had a guy who was making him a special, unique part that he needed that it wasn't available on the market anymore. Lo and behold, because of that very specific skillset, that business ended up making a very unique piece for the flooring system that the fabs use. And it was just a happenstance, just because they liked cars. So I think you just can't discount yourself out of a conversation. You've got to ask too, that's why we're here. That's why we've talked about tech hubs and the small business ecosystem and the hub. There's so many ways to get answers or at least more questions that we can help with. So that's exciting. I think we live in such a complex world, we can't all understand it, but I hope that we are creating a system and a community where people raise their hand and say, I need to know more. Not that's not for me.

So someone listening to this or really just anyone asking themselves this question of, okay, where do I start? Then you mentioned a few of the things that we have going on, but what direction should they take? Who can they email? Who can they call?

Starting the summer stop by the Innovation Hub. We're going to have our resource pool manager there. We're going to have small business advisors. We're going to have probably more information than everybody could want to know about microelectronics and semiconductors. We're going to have data that we can share about where demand is coming from, what industries do semiconductors need to buy from, and what's here. So come down, hang out, get a coffee. Now I've promised coffee, but that's where I think we want to be as opening and welcome and to come a little bit full circle from where we were at the beginning. That's what's so cool about a physical space in the heart of downtown that people can just come and say hi and ask questions and feel welcomed. And that's cool to me.

Well, Nora, thank you so much for your time today and telling us all about what's going on in the community. Thank you again for having me. CenterState CEOs podcast Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank, is available on all major podcast platforms or centerstateceo.com. Additional content and clips can be seen across CenterState CEO's social media channels for new episode reminders. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app and don't forget to leave a quick review or five-star rating. Thanks for listening to Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank.