A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Philippines. I stopped over in Tokyo to promote Peterborough as “open for business” and to my surprise made many more inroads than anticipated.
Penetrating a Foreign Market
How does one show up in a foreign city where they do not speak much english, half way around the world and begin to do business with people you don’t know… you might ask? Good question. The fascinating thing about economic development is that it is a business of networking and networks and we plugged into several of them.
I say we because economic development is a team sport and several of our team members scoped out business development opportunities in Tokyo before we decided it would be a good idea to stop over. In particular Susan Quinlan, Renato Romanin, Brigid Ayotte and Kate Young were quite involved.
Two for One – Leveraging Other People’s Money
I was planning on conducting some non GPA EDC business in the Philippines in mid January and as a bonus I could stop over in Tokyo en route. The flight and some out of pocket expenses were already paid for as a result of my pre-exiting trip,which made for an economical Peterborough investment attraction mission to Tokyo. I asked our tourism team if they thought that it would be worthwhile to connect with the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership to see what kind of connections and interest there might be about promoting Peterborough in Tokyo. They uncovered two worthwhile connections.
Tokyo Tourism Promotion
One is the pubic relations group who is responsible for promoting Ontario to the independent tourist and the other is the editor of Ontario Style Magazine, who immediately wrote a story about my visit. They are interested in Peterborough and want to do more promotion of our area in Japan. As a result of the visit we will be hosting them this February to familiarize them with what’s unique and interesting to the Japanese about Peterborough.
Investment Attraction and Supply Chain Partnership Opportunities
As well we contacted the business development offices for Ontario and Canada and it turns out some of their sector focuses such as clean tech water, aviation, energy, creative and healthcare industries parallel some of our strengths and focus.
The provincial office offered to introduce us to all 10 investment attraction office contacts who are spread through out the globe. They convene twice year in Toronto and we may even be able to convince them to come to Peterborough to familiarize them about our economy. I am looking forward to this opportunity
Finally the federal folks team were quite responsive and in hearing about our aviation cluster and were quick to offer introductions to senior executives at companies such as Boeing, Airbus and others. This fits extremely well as part of our emerging strategy, to perform warm calls with introctions. this process may help us open doors for our local companies in aviation and other sectors as well. They have 150 offices around the globe, with the primary mandate of selling Canada to potential investors and for joint venture and supply chain opportunities for our companies to expand abroad. They are very well connected with senior decision making executives with major globalcomanies in many sectors of the economy.
Can we get Kawartha Country Wines into Tokyo?
Last but not least, I met with all the only Canadian Wine importer in Japan – Heavenly Vines, who is hungry to expand his list of premium Canadian wines for wholes sale and retail in his shop. I asked Kawartha Country Wines if they were interested in being introduced but they were not,due to current limited production purposes. But I’m not giving up, I know if we can help them solve their volume challenge the Japanese will soon be drinking Kawartha Country wines with their sushi!
Trip Exceeds Expectations
I can honestly say that while I have high expectations in general, these four tangible outcomes far exceeded my expectations. We now have several connections and networks to help us put Peterborough on the map and uncover investment attraction and job creation opportunities.
Now I am off the the Philippines for a personal project and working holiday. While I am away our team will be preparing some follow up some with very clear next steps and action items to follow up on.
Sayonara.
