Business Development - Economic Gardening

GXA 

Since 2014, our Economic Gardening program has assisted 15 small business enterprises grow their revenues by utilizing a network of prominent business strategists, researchers and marketers.

Economic Gardening® is the gold standard for an entrepreneurial approach to economic development. The program focuses on supporting local stage 2 growth companies with strategic information and frameworks to grow jobs locally. To learn more, visit the National Center for Economic Gardening.

The assistance is provided on a confidential basis and without cost to the company, other than its investment of time. The approach is customized to the company’s needs and only requires about 12 hours of the CEO’s time over a two- to three-month period.

As testament to its success, three of the participating companies have been acquired by much larger corporations and another received an equity capital infusion of $8 million.

Some of the companies that have participated and found great value in program are:

From GXA CEO Alicia Makaye, Ph.D. (shown in photo above with her team):

“GXA, is a Managed Service IT provider headquartered in Richardson, Texas. Right before the pandemic we relocated and into a new space due to the demand to add more team members. Within the first 6 months of a new office our nation was hit with a pandemic sending 90% of our staff home. During the pandemic, most businesses were getting hit hard and we were on the front lines trying to keep ourselves and our client’s businesses up and running and technology was the primary tool being used to keep ourselves and our businesses up and running. During that time, GXA had opportunity to participate in the National Center for Economic Gardening.

By participating in the program, we were able to understand what were the key issues that businesses were experiencing with technology as it is related to employees working from home. We were able to understand what the unique problems to certain industries. As a result, we refined our website and begin to implement search engine optimization and we re-strategize our efforts we needed to put in place to keep our client’s users safe. We were able to use geographic information systems to understand spot densities of our customers, and potential markets and our competitors. We found an untapped market and begin to put our efforts to expanding beyond the Dallas Fort Worth area and begin to market those areas and have successfully acquired in client in the region we noticed that needed IT support. Overall, the program was successful and gave us access to do our own market research and help understand how to use social media to help us refine our market search efforts and increase our sales.”

Qualifications

To qualify, a business must have the following characteristics:

  • Located in Richardson for at least 2 years
  • Have annual revenue of between $1 million and $50 million
  • Employ between 10 and 100 full-time employees
  • Have revenue and/or employment growth in 2 of the past 5 years
  • Have a product or service that could be sold beyond the DFW region to national or global markets
  • Possess a sincere desire to grow the company
  • Be a member of the Richardson Chamber of Commerce

The REDP is currently taking applications for its limited number of 2022 assignments.

For more information, contact us.