Craig Richard President & CEO Tampa Bay Economic Development Council
What were the reasons behind the Tampa Bay EDC’s rebranding? We have been holding strategic planning sessions to develop our next three-year strategic plan. Part of that included discussions about how we market ourselves as a region and as an organization. We found there was confusion about our name outside of the market. For example, when we worked with people from Nashville or companies in Boston, they had no idea what TampaHillsborough meant. There are several local marketing agencies, such as Visit Tampa Bay, Film Tampa Bay, the Tampa Bay Sports Commission and so forth, promoting the area nationally and we were the only ones without Tampa Bay in our name. Our mandate is to attract new businesses and to help local businesses grow and expand. Business development is still what we do first and foremost. But we have developed two additional priorities as strategic areas: talent attraction and placemaking. What do investors want you to do regarding talent attraction and retention? If you take immigration out of the equation, we will actually have stagnant population growth. Fortunately, 27,000 people relocated to Hillsborough County last year. Without that immigration we wouldn’t be experiencing growth. Our Investors say that one of the most important things that we can do is to help attract the type of talent that we need. How do you work to help and promote small businesses in the area? Our Business Retention and Expansion program focuses on our existing small and medium-sized businesses and offering resources that assist them in going to that next level. We identify and visit more than 200 small and medium-sized businesses every year to spread the word about the resources available to them to grow and expand, such as training and opportunities in international markets through trade missions. 12 | Invest: Tampa Bay 2020 | ECONOMY
The population of the region was 3,142,663 in 2018.
( ) series of lavish hotels he built along the rail line to coax visitors into the region. The shipping industry also entered a boom that ran from the 1880s into the 1890s, and today Tampa’s port is the seventh-largest in the entire country. Vicente Martinez Ybor’s cigar factory, established in 1886 in the area that still bears his name, the Ybor City district of the city of Tampa, was also instrumental in the economic development of the region. In 1914, the world’s first scheduled commercial airline service was also launched in Tampa Bay in the form of Percival Ellicott Fansler’s St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. Between 1923 and 1926, the mass production (and mass commercialization) of the automobile brought a new wave of settlers into the region. Today, the Tampa Bay region consists of three cities: Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, and by some definitions covers the counties of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Hernando, Pasco, Citrus, Manatee, Sarasota, and Polk. The population of the region was 3,142,663 in 2018, making the region one of the Top 25 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States. Demographic shifts The demographic makeup of the state’s population has been changing over the last few years. For
