RKG Associates Inc., the consultant firm chosen by the Danville-Boyle County Economic Development Partnership to develop a strategic plan for the area, recently returned to Boyle County, but the strategic plan isn’t the first project they’ve undertaken in Danville.

In 2003, RKG conducted a downtown retail study in Danville for the Heart of Danville.

RKG’s previous experience played to their advantage when the Danville was choosing a consulting firm, EDP Vice Chairman Ben Nelson said. 

“We felt like their breadth and depth of services were strong,” Nelson said. 

RKG is a 35-year-old economic development and real estate planning consultant firm, founded in 1981. 

RKG Vice President and Principal Kyle Talente said he’s created dozens of economic development strategic plans around the United States. This is his “wheelhouse and frankly where my passion is,” he said. 

“The firm is focused on providing our clients with fact-based implementation strategies for them to make decisions on what they want to do, how they want to do it and when they do it,” Talente said. “We are technical advisors … we are going to make sure they are well aware of the benefits and drawbacks of the decisions they make — that’s my job.” 

Talente described the strategic plan as a menu that will have different options available for officials to choose from.

“We are going to give you the full breadth of what the options out there are based on the goals and strategies that the community has established for economic development,” he said. 

Talente said RKG is often hired by communities that are struggling and are having to start over, but in Danville and Boyle County, that’s not the case. Instead, a strategic plan for the area could focus on improving on positives that already exist.

“We have to get everybody working together to do better at what they do,” he said.

Making that happen can be complicated, he added.

“You’re asking people to change what they’re doing when they are being successful,” he said. “That sometimes can be harder than (in) a community that’s not having any success at all.”

Nelson said so far, everybody has a lot of good ideas and “this is about how do you get those good ideas and get them moving in the same direction.”

“This is an exercise in unifying our community to share a vision,” he said. 

RKG consultants will return again in January.

“Our task between now and the next visit is to finalize our workforce assessment, finalize the industry analysis, identifying not just by office/industrial/retail (types) but specifically what types of businesses we think the community has the ability to attract,” Talente said. “We are going to come back and present that to the elected officials and we will have the in-depth conversation with the committee after that.”

After their next visit in late January, they will return in the spring to see where the strategic plan needs to go and start looking at the framework of implementing the plan, he said. 

“I think everybody is genuinely excited and open-minded about what that next step looks like,” Talente said. 

SO YOU KNOW 

A video of the RKG presentation given on Dec. 1 can be found in this link http://www.betterindanville.com/strategic-planning.