By Callie Jones, Journal-Advocate staff writer

STERLING — Business was the theme at the Rotary Club meeting on Wednesday.

Dick Pickett, executive director of the Northeast-East Central Colorado Small Business Development Center, and Rich O’Connell, executive director of the Logan County Economic Development Corporation, spoke about small business and economic development.

“Out of all the communities that we service Sterling has been one of the warmest in receiving the Small Business Development Center,” Pickett said.

His center covers the area from the Wyoming border, down to I-70 and over to Kansas.

The SBDC has three focuses.

“All those areas of focus go to trying to maximize — we try to help the small businessman maximize their potential as a small business, doing everything they can possibly do to get as much revenue as they can coming into their business,” Pickett said.

One area of focus is to provide free business counseling to small businesses. Any small business can come in for counseling. Pickett said most of their clients right now have 20 or less employees.

During that process, they usually encourage small businesses to develop a business plan if they don’t have one. Pickett said about 90 percent of the people who come see them don’t have one when they come, but 90 percent of their clients that leave them do have one.

Heidi Zajic-Eckland is the local small business counselor for the Sterling area. When she first started, the plan was to have her provide counseling two days a month. After a couple of weeks, they had to increase that to one day a week.

“Depending on how that goes, we’ll just see how much more we do,” Pickett said.

Their second focus is education. They provide education through a number of seminars they put on. Also, this year they’re trying to use technology so they have one webinar that runs a couple times a month. They’re also going to try to do at least one broadcast this year, with a speaker in one location and that will be broadcast live to the locations in the area.

The third focus is to try to try to help small businesses get funding.

“We try to put the strategy together that will help them be successful with their financial request,” Pickett said. “It’s challenging today, we’re not always successful, but the small businesses that we’ve been able to help have been very appreciative and we have helped a number of them.”

O’Connell spoke about the newest study of the Sterling area’s retail site done by Buxton Corp. The study is effective December 2009, so it looks at the 12 months prior to December 2009.

“This was not the best economic climate for measuring your retail site assessment, however, it was down slightly, but nearly the same amount of dollars spent by households in our region during this time frame,” he said. “Overall, as far as compared with the state and the nation, we did fairly well.”

The process that Buxton uses is called community ID and it is a proprietary process that tries to measure the psychographics as defined as the propensity to consume of the households that are existing within the market area.

“Different households consume different products and services, they try to measure what our retail site, what types of households live there,” O’Connell said.

Sterling’s retail site is 10th Avenue and West Main Street, that is considered this area’s market center.

One of the study looks at is general demographics. For those demographics they don’t just look at the limits of the city of Sterling, but the 15 minute drive time around Sterling. O’Connell said that population estimate is 18,809.

Also, the study gives a measurement of the total buying power, the measurable dollars spent by households in the secondary market area.

The study also shows a leakage analysis, something Buxton introduced this year. They measure what type of leakage or anti-leakage the Sterling area is experiencing on major trade areas.

“We are attracting more people, more dollars in and the leakage surplus is a surplus of $8,872,000, so we are actually drawing dollars that would be expected to be sent elsewhere into our area,” O’Connell said. “Which tells us that our retailers are doing a credible job of drawing people in. When people come in, they buy things and that’s good news.”

Some of the things he said the study showed are that many people are buying clothing outside of the community. Expenditures of women’s clothing is higher, men’s clothing is practically nonexistent and not too many children’s clothing item are purchased here either.

However, the jewelry stores are doing pretty well; they’re above expectations.

O’Connell said the study also showed people in this area buy a lot diapers and a lot of Nascar products.

This study is important for retailers. Community leaders, including O’Connell, with be using this study when they go to the International Council of Shopping Centers, in Las Vegas, May 23-27.

“The retailers are looking at very closely what kind of households are here, what types of products do they buy, what kind of income do they have to spend on those products, all that goes into their calculation,” O’Connell said. “What we want to do is make this available to retailers to make decisions based on what kind of products they can carry.”

One of the goals of the LCEDC is to get this information out in a format that’s easy to access. They haven’t devised a plan to do that yet though.

However, anyone who is interested in learning more about this data can contact O’Connell at 521-7196. Also, if you’re a member of the Logan County Chamber of Commerce you can get a disk with information on it.

“What we’re trying to do here is make a successful match, our community and our retail site assessment, with a retailer or business that wants to be in that type of community,” O’Connell said.

Filed under: In The News by LCEDC