workforce-development
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Patti Betts Learned to Sell the Experience Before She Sold the System
Before healthcare partnerships and enterprise software, Patti Betts spent nearly a decade selling weddings at the San Diego Zoo. The scenery changed. Her working idea did not: people commit when an ambitious system begins to feel personal.
The Solar Lobby That Learned to Sell Sunlight as Infrastructure
SEIA does not make panels or sell electricity. It makes a scattered industry act like one - with lobbying, data, standards, and a very Washington belief that the right spreadsheet can become a constituency.
The State That Learned to Sell Itself
Michigan built an organization that can sell a factory site, coach a founder, finance a main-street storefront and advertise a lighthouse. The interesting part is not its range. It is the fine print that turns public money into a bet with a receipt.
The City That Learned to Sell the Whole Map
World Business Chicago’s cleverest product is not a program or a pitch deck. It is a front door - one entrance to a region that spent years behaving like eight separate sales teams.
Jacob Slayton Turns Secondhand Goods Into First Chances
The Bakersfield native went from commercial banking to the hidden logistics of Goodwill. Now he is opening stores, building steadier jobs and making a practical case for giving both people and products more time.
The Company That Sells Detroit Without Selling a Thing
Its service is free, its product is an 11-county region, and its best sales tool may be a soil report. Detroit Regional Partnership turned economic development into a concierge business.
The Company That Sold a Direction
Eighteen counties, more than 175 private investors and one stubborn idea: Northeast Wisconsin becomes easier to choose when it learns to act like a single place.
The Company That Sells the Space Between a Handshake and a Headline
For nearly half a century, Strategic Partnerships has worked the overlooked territory between institutions - where a university needs an employer, a nonprofit needs a governor, and a good idea needs someone powerful to notice.
The Hard Hat Is the Easy Part
RBCA discovered that a credential alone does not make a career. Its Dallas model bundles training, equipment, case management and contractor relationships into one five-week bridge to the job site.
The Business of Making Strangers Useful to One Another
For 128 years, the Virginia Peninsula Chamber has sold a simple regional advantage: put the shipyard executive, the banker, the professor and the small-business owner in the same room - then give them a reason to talk.
The Consulting Company That Built a Stage - Then Turned the Lobby Into a Job Market
Corp4ness began with a language problem: companies had good intentions and forgettable ways of expressing them. Its answer now stretches from strategy decks to television studios, conference stages and a free arena built around real job vacancies.
The People Who Make a Company Move
A corporate relocation is really a pile of small uncertainties. Broward County's economic development partnership has spent six decades learning which phone call makes each one disappear.
The Business of Making Renton Feel Smaller
For more than a century, the Renton Chamber has sold one deceptively useful thing: a shorter distance between the people who need one another. Its latest move is to price that access by ambition, not headcount.
The Public Relations Firm That Learned to Read the Fine Print
HillDay found a valuable place between the public meeting and the project ledger - translating infrastructure for communities, then documenting whether the promises survived the paperwork.
The People Who Count Who Gets to Build the City
Prism Technical found a peculiar job hiding inside every civic megaproject: turning the promise of inclusion into names, hours, contracts and receipts.
The Little Agency That Learned to Think Like a College
AccessU found its niche by treating colleges less like products and more like complicated communities. Thirty years later, its best work begins with a deceptively unfashionable move: listening before advertising.
The Small Firm Translating Big Government
Kaptivate built a business around an unglamorous but valuable trick: making sprawling public programs legible enough to act on. Its best work begins where the memo, the dataset and the community meeting stop agreeing.
The Switchboard Inside a $7 Billion Boom
Clarksville's economic-development office does not behave like a lone recruiter. It works as a switchboard - aligning industry, tourism, business, schools, and private money until a site, a workforce, and a story point in the same direction.
The Trucking Company That Owns No Trucks
Alabama Trucking Association does not haul freight. It hauls the problems that individual carriers are too small, too busy, or too divided to move alone.
The $135 Switchboard That Keeps a County Talking
For the price of a modest newspaper ad, a Blakely business can buy into something harder to print: a referral network, a public voice, a welcome desk, and a place in the county's working conversation.
The Chamber That Put Networking Under One Roof
After a post-pandemic listening tour, Beavercreek's business association made an unusually literal bet: if local companies need connection, media tools, advice, and room to grow, put them in the same building.
The Agency That Started With a Moving Target
Heartland began by explaining what a military realignment would mean for one Kentucky region. Two decades later, the same habit - making complicated change legible - is still the product.
The 105 Knocks on Greenville's Door
A county-created nonprofit turns confidential inquiries into factories, tax agreements and paychecks. Its real product is not land or money, but a shorter distance between a corporate maybe and a public yes.
The Chamber That Sells a County - Then Teaches It How to Grow
In Lawrenceburg, the same organization courts factories, trains civic leaders, markets Amish Country and still finds time to organize the Christmas parade. The interesting part is not the variety - it is how the pieces reinforce one another.
The People Who Build the Bridge Before the Concrete Arrives
Modern Times, Inc. works in the part of public infrastructure most people never see: turning promises about local jobs, small-business participation and public input into programs that can survive contact with a megaproject.
The Oakland Firm That Makes a Public Promise Survive the Job Site
Lowe Consulting Group works in the narrow, consequential gap between a public project’s promises and the paperwork, people and persistence required to keep them.
California Capital Airshow’s most interesting work happens after the jets land
At Mather Airport, a weekend of flying helps fund a year of career exploration. Inside the Sacramento nonprofit turning aviation’s biggest attention-getter into an invitation to participate.
Capitol Impact and the business of getting people unstuck
A hospital needs builders. A student needs work boots. Capitol Impact makes a business of connecting the institutions that can help them both.
At this Goodwill, the first thing worth keeping is a job
In South Central California, donated goods pay for paid work. Behind the thrift-store racks is a hiring model whose most revealing measure is what happens after someone gets the job.
JKH Consulting and the question the room keeps asking
A new development can promise gardens, shops and jobs. JKH Consulting works where those promises meet a harder question: who gets to benefit?