How Your Location Benefits Your Business
On Wednesday 9 November, I shall lead the first of a series of 6 workshop in Sheffield, UK. The series title is ”Shop Local! How to Improve The Local Economy”. This link will take you to the Eventbrite page where you can register. In my workshop, “It’s where your feet are: why a sense of place is important for your business”, I shall show how your location benefits business.
I’ve often written about how business contributes to community, helping build sustainable regeneration in our neighbourhoods. In the workshop I’ll show how support for a locality can benefit your business! By locality I mean a neighbourhood, city or possibly even a region. What matters is being grounded somewhere.
Perhaps this is not important for all businesses. Clearly as businesses grow they naturally loosen their moorings in their community of origin.
The Making of a Ruling Class
Part of the River Tyne, close to the earliest shipbuilding industry. 1681551 / Pixabay
I’ve lost my copy of “The Making of a Ruling Class: Two Centuries of Capital Development on Tyneside”. Benwell (Newcastle upon Tyne) Community Development Project published it in 1978. I doubt it is possible to get a copy now, so the link is to a library citation. What follows is from memory.
The report, one of 12 final reports from Community Development Projects around the country, studies the ruling class. There are statistical methods for studying poverty and they work because there are many poor people. It isn’t possible to survey the ruling class statistically and so the report uses genealogies or family histories.
What the Report Says
The major trade in Benwell was ship-building and the housing in the area is at the top of the hill, overlooking the River Tyne. Most of the terrace housing runs up or down the hill, their windows look along the hill at other houses. However, a few large houses originally belonged to the families that founded the ship-building industry and they face the River and the shipyards. This enabled the owners to keep an eye on their shipyards and so make timely interventions. I see similar houses in Sheffield overlooking the Lower Don Valley, where the large steelworks used to be.
I’m going to write loosely of generations. It is possible at each stage several generations passed, the exact timescales may be in the report. The point is if you follow the genealogies, the same family names appear in the same industries and they inter-marry. However, their location moves first to market towns in Northumberland, eg Hexham, then to London and now they are distributed in financial centres all over the world.
Presumably, these moves reflect changes in communication. In the early years, they would walk down the hill, then travel in by car and now use telecommunications. The same family names persist from generation to generation and from place to place.
Business and Community
Many of us will recognise this happened in our towns and cities. There is some inevitability about it. The moves ever further away reflect changes to business contacts and the need to mix with other similar businesses. For many today, these families will be directors of multi-national corporations.
However, it is not inevitable, many businesses remain rooted in their place and I shall explore their experience in the workshop. It is not inevitable that a successful business should cease to play a part in its community of origin. You can trade with anyone in the world these days and it does not necessarily mean you lose your local presence.
But how and when does commitment to a particular place become a liability or irrelevant? More to the point, is there an advantage for businesses that stay in one place and become central to its economy, building sustainable business relationships?
This is the question my talk will cover, so please go over to Eventbrite Shop Local! page and book a ticket now. It’s on Wednesday 9 November, 12 noon to 2 at a Sheffield City Centre venue.