Huntsville Works On Recruiting Businesses

The state of Alabama knows football – and if you really know football, you know as many games are won on the recruiting trail as the gridiron.

Business works the same way.

Directions Magazine Editor-in-Chief Joe Francica explains, “With the economic climate the way it is now, what we’re doing is we’re trying to essentially ring the bell about Huntsville.  there are already jobs here.  And we want to attract more jobs.”

Major recruits on the football field put fans in the stands.

Major recruits in the business communities put cars in the parking lots of local employers.

And when you corner an industry, like geospatial technology, it helps the whole city.

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle says, “We provide a job here, that means $80,000 a year that comes into our economy.  You provide a hundred jobs, all of a sudden you’ve got an $8,000,000 impact day in and day out.”

In football big recruits win big, and big wins bring in big recruits.

The same holds true for businesses.

Battle explains, “We’ve seen that through the BRAC movement.  5,000 direct jobs come.  5,000 indirect jobs start coming in.  People come in and say, I want to set up my company here to be close to my client.  Spin off work comes off of those companies, and they start developing other little companies.”

Alabama has built a football empire through dominating recruiting.

Now Huntsville works to create an economic empire the same way.