Columbia Mayor Bob Coble's 2007 State of the City Address

Business Retention Plan

Our first challenge is to keep our existing businesses thriving in Columbia. We need to create a perpetual and self-sustaining business retention program as part of our overall economic development strategy. We have seen great success with many of our homegrown businesses like Deepal Eliatamby’s company, Alliance Consulting Engineering. Deepal’s staff has grown to twenty five since the company was started less than two years ago. In the coming weeks, we will be calling together the economic development professionals of our community to form a core group. The core group will help us develop a list of our most valuable companies and our most growable companies. This group will be asking the business community to volunteer time for this very important endeavor.