Benchmarking Business

GCP’s second “all in” annual report offers a great starting point.

BY TERRY TROY

“What gets measured gets managed.”

That truncated quote, often attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, has been elusive in Northeast Ohio’s economic development efforts for decades. But with its Annual Report for 2022 on its “All In Plan,” the Greater Cleveland

Partnership (GCP) and its partners are taking a huge step forward in benchmarking where we are and where we are headed in terms of our competitive economic regions in the Great Lakes area.

“We just started this last year, so we are really just getting started on a path to be among the top tier of our peers in the Great Lakes area,” says Baiju

Shah, president and CEO of the GCP. “It’s important to have this scorecard, so we can monitor year-over-year and see how Greater Cleveland stacks up with its peer set, so we can track it. It’s easy to get lost in economic data. That’s why we crystalized this with the three metrics at the top level that reflect growth and prosperity.”

HERE ARE THE NUMBERS: Business Growth

2010 to 2019 we ranked 8th

2019 to 2021 we moved up to 6th

Jobs Growth

2010 to 2019 we ranked 8th

2019 to 2021 we moved up to 5th

Income Growth

2010 to 2019 we ranked 5th 2019 to 2021 we ranked 8th

Productivity

2010 to 2019 we ranked 5th 2019 to 2021 we ranked 4th

Post-Secondary Attainment

2019 we ranked 8th

2021 we ranked 9th

Inclusive Opportunity

2019 we ranked 9th

Population Growth

2010 to 2019 we ranked 11th

2019 to 2022 we ranked 8th

The latter refers to the rate of growthandnotactualsize.

While we have made great strides with business expansions, investments of millions of dollars in capital for small and emerging businesses, scaling of workforce initiatives and increases in minority business growth, we are still very much in the middle of the pack when it comes to our competitive economic regions across the Great Lakes, even by Shah’s own admission. We’re competing against 10 other economic regions, including: Columbus, Louisville, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indiana, Buffalo, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Rochester and Pittsburgh. With Cleveland, that makes 11.

While the All In Plan Annual Report does give us a benchmark against our competitive economic regions, it still doesn’t publish hard numbers that can show whether we are actually growing — especially when it comes to jobs, business growth and population. But the data used to achieve those rankings are supported by hard numbers from empirical sources, including: Federal Reserve Economic Data, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau.

The All In Plan Report also redefines our region, and that is a very important step in the right direction. While it’s simply contained in a footnote on page 3 of the report, it’s a statistic that we all need to

Risk and Insurance Leadership

embrace — especially if we want to grow.

Currently, the federal metro area definition for Cleveland includes only five counties (Cuyahoga, Lorain, Medina, Geauga and Lake) from which data are easily available. That’s not really a level playing field, when you consider that other major metropolitan areas in Ohio include 10 and 16 counties.

The Greater Cleveland region needs to be defined as the Cleveland-Akron

Combined Statistical Area (CSA) (which is 13 counties) or Cleveland and Northeast Ohio (which is 18 counties) both of which better describe the region and its true scale. By those latter two definitions, we are the largest region in Ohio, the third-largest region in the Great Lakes (behind Chicago and Detroit) and one of the top 20 economic markets in the United States.

“When I talk to Greater Clevelanders, they don’t realize the size of our region,” says Shah. “In the Cleveland Akron CSA, we have 3.6 million people. The City of Cleveland is just one component of our CSA. That’s why we are a Top 20 market. It’s why we have three major sports teams. It’s why we have a major airport. These things come with population.”

And we are growing, contrary to what you might read in the national and business press.

“We grew from 2010 to 2019, and we continued to grow from 2019 to 2022,” adds Shah. “We are not where we want to be [in terms of our growth rate being in the top four], but we are a growing region.”

Defining ourselves as a larger economic region does present some challenges, but there are also significant opportunities.

“Certainly, the number of companies and higher education institutions as well as the breadth of our workforce are assets,” says Shah. “When companies are thinking about where they can expand, they look for those kinds of resources.

“Because of our region’s size, we have the largest number of tech workers compared to the 11 different geographies in the report,” adds Shah. “We have 58,000 technical workers. If you are looking to scale up a tech-related business, or if your business requires a significant tech component, that matters.”

Other competitors in the report can’t deliver those numbers.

“Another one of my ‘fun facts’ that Greater Clevelanders don’t appreciate is that we have more college students in Northeast Ohio than they have in Central Ohio. No one perceives that because people usually just think about our flagship school in Columbus. But if you add up Case Western Reserve, Cleveland State, Kent State and Akron, not to mention all the smaller, private universities like John Carroll, Baldwin Wallace and Oberlin, we have more students,” Shah notes.

“Those are some of the advantages we have because we are such a large region. We need to start acting like we are a singular large region rather than remaining vulcanized against the idea.”