Before Aaron Brossoit learned to sell a place, he learned to build one on a screen. At St. Cloud State University in the late 1990s, the future communications executive began playing with web pages. The phrase has the innocence of a lost internet: pages, not platforms; play, not optimization. By his junior year the experiment had a name, Webkromatic, and Brossoit had a company before he had a degree.
This was a useful time to be curious. The web had plenty of empty lots. Nobody could hand an aspiring designer a settled rulebook because the rulebook was being typed, badly, in real time. Brossoit taught himself the craft and found that art, design and technology could occupy the same rectangle. Years later, giving advice to students from his old school district, he compared the technological frontier to the Wild West. “There aren’t rules on ‘how to’ or what you have to do or should do,” he said. “You’ve got to create it.”
He had rehearsed that lesson at Apollo High School in St. Cloud, where he made room for orchestra, jazz band, choir, theater, speech, and track and field. It is a comically broad extracurricular menu, as though one teenager had decided to become the entire liberal arts college. The through line was not specialization. It was comfort moving between forms.
The map inside the website
Webkromatic soon merged with a local cartography business. The resulting firm, Brain Magnet, combined web development, graphic design and mapmaking. By 2008, it employed 28 people, reported $1.6 million in annual revenue and served a market hiding in plain sight: community development agencies, many of them in rural areas. Brossoit was president and co-owner.
A map tells you where things are. Marketing tells you why you might care. Put the two together and a modest county can begin to explain its workforce, available buildings, roads, schools and daily life to a company scouting from somewhere else. Brossoit had found a particular kind of client whose ambitions were often larger than its communications department.
When Brain Magnet closed in 2009, he and his partners started Golden Shovel Agency. The new company kept the focus sharp: communications for cities, counties and states pursuing economic development. Consumer agencies could sell sneakers and soft drinks. Golden Shovel would sell the credible possibility of a factory, an office, a workforce, a home.
“You’ve got to create it.”Aaron Brossoit, on finding a path when the rules are unwritten
Place marketing is peculiar work. A town is not a product that can be redesigned before lunch. Its features include everything from industrial land and electrical capacity to commute times and the temperament of Main Street. The marketer must be specific without becoming provincial, optimistic without drifting into brochure fog. Brossoit’s answer was to join the creative possibilities of new media to the stubborn facts of a location.
A headset for the hard-to-picture
In September 2017, at the International Economic Development Council’s annual conference in Toronto, Golden Shovel unveiled PlaceVR. The team showed 360-degree familiarization tours and site tours built for economic developers. At the time, the hardware was awkward and expensive. The premise was simple: if a prospect could not yet visit a community, the community could visit the prospect.
Brossoit explained the feeling with less jargon. “It’s like being in an Omni theater,” he told his hometown school district. The technology fooled the senses just enough to make a distant place feel immediate. A site selector could look around an industrial property. A prospective worker could enter a factory. A tourism official could offer a first taste of a landscape before asking anyone to buy a ticket.
The launch was not futurism for its own sake. Distance is a genuine expense in site selection. Small communities cannot fly every prospect into town, and prospects cannot tour every candidate in person. Immersive video offered a better first look. By 2019, Brossoit’s communications tools supported more than 180 economic development organizations across North America. A 2022 conference program put the figure above 270, including international work. Golden Shovel now says it works with more than 300 communities globally.
The widening field
The translator’s advantage
Brossoit’s public work follows a reliable rhythm. A technology arrives wrapped in claims. He tests what it could do for an economic developer with a finite budget and a board meeting next Tuesday. His talks moved from social media and virtual reality to the metaverse, then to practical uses of artificial intelligence. At a 2024 Mid-America EDC conference, his AI session promised applications that could save time and increase effectiveness, not a robot oracle wearing a civic seal.
That instinct makes him less an evangelist than a translator. He likes the frontier, but he speaks to people accountable for roads, jobs and tax bases. “As a communications firm, our goal is to stay ahead of the trends,” he has said, “to identify what economic developers need to be competitive, and to deliver on that promise.” The operative word is deliver.
His firm eventually became fully remote, which made the distance-closing argument personal. The team once met weekly over coffee. Later, with colleagues scattered across the United States and Mexico, they might meet face to face only once a year. Conferences became what Brossoit calls the company’s “de facto meeting places.” The agency was using the same digital premise it sold: geography should shape collaboration, not end it.
There is another revealing episode far from any conference ballroom. In Dos Cruces, Guatemala, Brossoit joined a volunteer electrification project in a village of roughly 60 houses. He noticed the ingenuity of families building stoves and homes from the materials available. He also saw what electricity could alter: a light for reading, refrigeration for food, a hotplate that replaced smoke inside the house. Technology, in this telling, was not a spectacle. It was a practical widening of possibility.
New technology gets his attention. What it lets a community do keeps it.The enduring pattern in Brossoit’s work
A louder voice for rural places
In December 2025, Golden Shovel announced that Brossoit had been unanimously elected to the board of the National Rural Economic Developers Association. The relationship was already 15 years old. Golden Shovel had supported the group’s marketing committee and donated communications work, including an updated brand that Brossoit unveiled at its Nashville conference.
His stated concerns were concrete: talent attraction, electric-power availability, reshoring, and the need to keep rural communities in the national conversation. The board seat, which began in January 2026, gives his career a neat turn. He began by helping communities present themselves to decision-makers. Now he also helps represent their shared interests inside the profession.
The appointment also brings his work back to the sort of places that first made the business legible. Rural economic developers operate where one employer can change the trajectory of a county and one missed opportunity can echo for years. Their marketing must carry an unusual load: workforce evidence, site data, infrastructure, local character and political confidence, all without the budget of a large metro. Brossoit has spent enough time with that constraint to treat it as a design problem rather than a reason for resignation.
That outlook explains why his portfolio crosses categories so easily. Business attraction sits beside talent recruitment. A website sits beside a board workshop. A 360-degree tour sits beside a conversation about power supply. The medium matters, but only after the audience and the decision are clear.
His recent speaking calendar suggests no retreat from the practical. He has addressed succession planning, data centers, energy resources, AI and the details site selectors expect to see. The subjects change because economic development changes. The task remains recognizably the same: take a complicated system and show local leaders where they can act.
Creative at heart, operator by necessity
Brossoit describes himself as a creative at heart. His off-hours offer supporting evidence: poetry, bass guitar, board games, hiking and biking. He lives in Stillwater with his wife and son. These are ordinary pleasures, which is perhaps fitting for someone whose work depends on noticing the appeal of ordinary places.
The entrepreneur in him treats business as a platform for bringing ideas into the world. The designer asks how those ideas should look and feel. The operator has to make them useful for hundreds of clients. None of those identities works especially well alone. Creativity without delivery becomes a mood board. Delivery without imagination becomes another municipal PDF.
His career has stretched from home-built web pages to virtual worlds, with podcasts, remote teams and AI in between. Each wave arrived carrying a prediction that everything would change. Much did. Yet Golden Shovel’s durable proposition is almost quaint: every community contains a story, and the right combination of craft and technology can help the right people see themselves in it.
Brossoit did not leave small-town ambition behind when the internet got bigger. He gave it a larger screen.