Rockville Minds Its Own Business

When Atlantech Online expanded from Silver Spring to open a new data center in Rockville on Feb. 20, company president Ed Fineran wanted to get to know the neighbors.

But without a storefront, making new friends can be a challenge.

Enter

REDI, the economic development arm of the City of Rockville, held its annual on March 12-16.

Thirty-eight Business Week “ambassadors,” including Mayor Phyllis Marcuccio, Rockville City Council members, city staff, REDI staff and members of the boards of REDI and the Rockville Chamber of Commerce, visited 55 businesses, including Atlantech Online.

Fineran said he saw the opportunity “to meet people in the business environment and hear what they had to say about Rockville.”

Atlantech Online, which provides telephone, Internet and data center service to businesses and government agencies, serves companies in and around Rockville.

“I’m always looking to meet new people and expand my reach in the community,” Fineran said. “And here people are showing up at my doorstep.”

Atlantech Online’s visitors were Albert Lampert, president of Pi Research and chairman of REDI’s board of directors, and Carlos Vargas, chief of human resources for the City of Rockville.

Fineran led a tour showing guests the security and reliability features of the new data center, which hosts customers’ computer network servers “so that the world can reliability get to them 24-7,” he said.

‘A force to be reckoned with’

Business Appreciation Week included visits to nonprofit organizations, companies focused on biotechnology and information technology, financial institutions, insurance and real estate agencies, retail establishments, construction and architectural firms, businesses offering legal and professional services and the hospitality industry.

The businesses featured this year employ a total of 4,350 employees, occupy 2.94 million square feet of commercial office space and generate $13.6 billion in revenue, Lynne Benzion, acting executive director of REDI, told the City Council on March 19.

“Rockville companies are really quite a force to be reckoned with,” she said.

Click here to see video of Benzion’s presentation.

By the numbers

The week includes a survey to collect business’s opinions about Rockville’s economic climate.

This year, retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers told REDI that they valued their Rockville address for putting them near their customers and other businesses, Benzion said.

The survey yielded some surprises.

“A big surprise to us was that transportation was a strength,” Benzion said.

Despite the perception of traffic-clogged Rockville roads, 84 percent of the 50 businesses responding to the survey said they “were very or extremely satisfied with the transportation network here." None of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with the city’s transportation infrastructure, she said.

The survey also found that:

• 91 percent of respondents said they were “very to extremely satisfied” with Rockville’s image. “That is a huge thing for us," Benzion said. “I certainly will be trumpeting it on my website.”
• 91 percent said they were very or extremely satisfied with the city’s amenities and cultural offerings, which businesses use to attract employees.
• 80 percent said a Rockville location enhanced their business.
• 74 percent of businesses said their revenues had increased in past year.
• 73 percent said the workforce availability was “very important” to them.
• 56 percent said they were “very or extremely satisfied” with the quality of the available workforce. “They’re telling us that they’re getting a lot of resumes, but it is hard to pick out the gems,” Benzion said.

Another important number: 86 percent said they had hired at least one employee within the last year. Contrast that with last year, when just 51 percent of the companies surveyed said they had hired someone within the past year and 43 percent said their number of employees would remain stable.

“So we’re seeing just a little bit of light at the end of that recessionary tunnel,” Benzion said.

Room for improvement

Still, business owners told REDI that Rockville has room for improvement.

“They were particularly concerned about new or young employees” who have a hard time with the high cost of living in the county, Benzion said.

“I think that was not a big surprise to us,” she said.

Business owners also said that being based in Rockville or Montgomery County was not necessarily an advantage when competing for local government contracts.

While competitors based outside the county seem to have such a “home field advantage” when competing for government contracts with governments in Northern Virginia, for example, such an advantage is lacking in Rockville, business owners said.

Owners also said “they wanted a consistent, predictable transparent process” when it comes to city permitting and signage laws, Benzion said. “Predictable in time. Predictable in money.”

Navigating the permitting process is an area where REDI stepped in for Atlantech Online, Fineran said.

“They held our hand in many steps through the permitting process,” he said. “They’re very knowledgeable in how the city works. They’re a business ambassador for the City of Rockville and they do a tremendous job of that.”

Fineran said that he’d recommend that other companies participate in Business Appreciation Week for the chance to network with people like Lampert and Vargas.

“It’s a great opportunity to meet business representatives that you might not always come across in REDI,” he said.