Ponca City Development Authority WEEKLY UPDATE     

June 27, 2014

GOING TO BIO......with about 25,000 other really smart folks from around the world.  PCDA Staff helped man the Oklahoma Bio Booth at this International show focusing on all things biological: medical, agriculture, mechanical, vaccines, molecular, etc....  If it has to do with science, there was a booth, country or service represented.  The Oklahoma Bio Booth boasted over 70 companies and partnering organizations who attended the conference, worked to generate new leads, re-connected with colleagues and met with companies to create new partnerships and projects.  Over 144 meetings took place in the Oklahoma booth meeting rooms (officially) and several more impromptu meetings happened in the table and chairs areas outside the officia l rooms.  Whew.  Many connections were made and now the real work begins to promote that new product, idea or partnership over the next year until Bio is upon us once more.  And PCDA will be there to wave the Ponca City flag of manufacturing, science & technology, new business assistance and our "Center of the Universe" locality to loud music and cheers because that's the way we roll.

TWO LEADS....PCDA talks about projects and every now and then we tell you just what we mean by the word "project." This week we were and are working two "leads." A lead is when we hear from a reputable source that a company is looking for an expansion, either an existing company or a company elsewhere wanting to grow, or a company wanting to find a new home. The former is more typical than the latter. Sometimes that reputable source offers to introduce, sometimes they heard from a friend of a friend and they tip us off. Truth is, there are not magic words to utter when we call a cold lead but we do it all the time. It can be fun because sometimes the person answering the phone at company X does not know that the company is looking elsewhere and that person may not want to either a) move; or b) lose their job. So a little diplomacy comes into play and that often makes getting through to the big cheese a little tough. This week, we had two extremes, kind of like Tuesday's election. One was easy to get to the company, one was hard. Both want very specific buildings. For the easy one, we have a building that kinda sorta might work if they don't find anything else. For the hard one have we got a deal for you, that is if we can get through to the decision maker, (which we are trying to do). So if easy lead says the building is in the ballpark, we may get to turn this lead into a project. If the hard one gets to see what we have on the table, we're confident it will be a project. That's when the real work begins. Either way, the November 2014 Mid Term elections will be a memory by the time either turn into job producing companies. Fortunately, we have several in the pipeline from before the 2012 election.