An excerpt from our interview with Barbara:
Chas Rich: Chas Rich. I do Neo babble on Cleveland.com’s network. Ms. Ferris, to follow up on that, it sounds to me like you are describing a hub and spoke approach with the businesses, the major business in the center and protruding interests, the related interests going out. How do you expect to encourage that? I mean you talk about people wanting to do it. How do you encourage that, and are you talking physical location as well right around there and, if so, how do you work with what is already there, housing the businesses that have existed?
Barbara Ferris: I think Tower Press is a great example of enormous potential. We have empty warehouses. We have empty school buildings. There are a lot of empty buildings that I believe for entrepreneurs and artists and creative people to, say you come in and you fix their bathrooms and you give them a great bathroom, a great kitchen, and you give them 2,000 square feet of space, and you market us. We are a great location. Our greatest assets is our citizens in this town. We have airports. We have great access to roadways. The cost of living here is extremely reasonable. A 1,200 square foot house in Silicon Valley is worth $1.1 million. Figure that out. I mean unless you are in a high-tech industry making 6+ digits, you can’t afford to live out in Silicon Valley and be a tech entrepreneur, unless you are really well funded.
So the assets that we have as a region, what it takes is leadership with someone to go out and market the region. We’ve got sports teams. We’ve got Arts. We’ve got a tremendous amount to offer in this town, and we haven’t had anybody sing our praises or market it…
Read the entire transcript here.