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COVER STORY: Never fear BizBam is here!

By Troy Clark

The Caped Crusader of Commerce wants to save your day. Quiet and reserved Chad Carson is a business retention specialist toiling away by day, but when businesses cry out for help, he sheds his mild-mannered demeanor, dons his red spandex and takes to the sky as ... BizBAM Man.

Okay, he doesn’t actually wear tights, but he is serious about helping your business.

“Chad won’t be flying through the air, but he certainly will be out at a lot of businesses discussing what it is they need,” said Marty Vanags, executive director of the Economic Development Council of the Bloomington-Normal Area.

Carson is a client manager and business retention specialist for the council. He works to connect businesses, small and large, with resources that can help them improve business and, hopefully, eventually expand. His alter ego, BizBAM Man, is just the latest hip and trendy promotional tool to spin out of the offices of the Council and marketing firm, Trace Designs, owned by Brad Barth.

The campaign

The BizBAM campaign developed as a way to effectively market the business retention program, but also make the potentially dry subject matter fun and memorable.

“How do you take something that is relatively boring and unexciting and make it interesting and do something different and have a little fun with it?” Barth said. “They’re not soon to forget this brochure unlike the typical tri-fold brochure that’s all full of copy. You’ve got to tell the story in pictures. We live in a culture that’s inundated with pictures.”

To get those pictures, Barth hired local illustrator and comic artist Steve Bryant. Bryant works on a few independent comic books, including Athena Voltaire, and was recently nominated for an Eisner Award, one of the industry’s top awards. Bryant took Barth’s and Vanags ideas and “pretty much nailed it.”

After Bryant finished his part, blending his work with Vanags and Carson’s dialogue, Barth took the artwork and added his marketing magic – animating the characters and panels for flash ads and developing promotional materials and print advertisements.

“It doesn’t look staid or buttoned down. We don’t want that, we want it to be memorable,” Barth said.

The program

When Carson calls on businesses “people are like ‘who?’ ‘What?’ And I think now this really gives it a face, gives it a brand. BizBAM will have a real meaning other than Chad Carson calling about business retention.”

BizBAM Man “evolved from business retention expansion to a business superhero,” Vanags said. Business retention and expansion was “Priority One” when the EDC unveiled its massive and successful capital campaign “1 Community, 1 Voice.”

The “backbone” of BizBAM is a Web 2.0 referral and database system called Executive Pulse, a highly developed database specifically designed to help economic development councils and used by councils and states around the country. The program was developed by the preferred trainers of economic development councils in retention and expansions through the International Economic and Development Council.

The program operates on two levels. One, it helps Carson connect businesses with resources. The other benefit of the program is it allows the EDC to collect, collate and eventually analyze data about local businesses, developing a better, more accurate economic picture of McLean County.

“A lot of smaller businesses don’t feel they get their opinions asked. Or if they are asked questions or they are being approached by somebody it is usually to be sold something. This is a service that is absolutely free. All we want to know is what’s going on with your business and how can we help you,” Carson said.

The information gathered is confidential and is only shared on the aggregate level. As more businesses participate in the program and more information is entered into the database, Vanags and Carson are confident that a true and clearer economic picture will develop. But before any of that happens, the main priority is getting businesses the help and assistance they need.

“When I go out it is two fold the meetings. One, it is to shore up any short term issues. And if there are no immediate problems I’m not just walking away into the wind. We’re gathering opinion and data for the long-term policy change of Bloomington-Normal.” Carson said.

The first step is the interview. The Executive Pulse program has an initial 120 questions that help develop a business profile, “but we don’t go out as a survey, we go out as a conversation. … if those attributes start to get filled great, if not, we’re really trying to whittle down to the issue, not gathering data.” He talks with owners about their business, trends in their industry, specific problems and issues. He gets their opinions on the business climate, current issues, etc.

After the interview, Carson comes back and enters the information into Executive Pulse. “So if I come back and they said they wanted some help with their business plan, under the heading entrepeneurship/management I do a little drop down. There’s Autumn Laube’s name. I put the info in and the email shoots outs.”

The system tracks the progress through emails. After a referral agent gets the email, they call up the Executive Pulse Web interface to gather information and then contact the business. After issues or referrals are resolved, the representative goes into the system and closes the referral and another email notifies Carson.

“It’s more succinct, quicker process of getting the right people involved at the right time and for the right issue.” Carson said.

One of the long term impacts of this Web 2.0 system is that over time if we sustain the program that we have a long term record of a company of its needs and issues in a quasi public file” that’s accessible to both the EDC and the referral agencies. The referral agencies have limited access, but they can look back at trends, issues and solutions over time.

Currently there are 12 referral agencies from city and county government and the universities to the Illinois Manufacturing Extension Center and utility companies. Carson trains people from these organizations to work within the referral system, but he’s also working with volunteers from some of these groups to be outreach specialists, that go out “not with the hat of their agency, but with the BizBAM hat.”

“I think that’s the third dynamic to kind of rope in all these players together that may never have been roped together before in this community,” Carson said. A lot of agencies spend resources and time marketing themselves, getting the word out. Now the BizBAM program helps connect the companies with the agencies, helping those companies focus on results instead of “beating the bushes.”

Adding perspective, Vanags noted that “Ultimately with all the structure and software and cool pictures, if we don’t actuall help somebody it doesn’t amount to anything. And that’s our ultimate goal, to be able to help, in the smallest way to the biggest way we can, whatever they think is important to them and ultimately that’s our goal.”

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Chad Carson with the Economic Development Council of the Bloomington-Normal Area talks about the EDC’s business retention and expansion program dubbed BizBAM. (Troy Clark)

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