The person: Jim Glove r is a father. He is also the founding partner of the company The Idea Group of Santa Fe, is involved in a program with the state of New Mexico called Live Work New Mexico, and has recently launched a marketing advice video blog called Once a Day Marketing. “I’ve been in New Mexico 20 years, and for 10 years while I was here, I commuted every week to LA because I had an entertainment company in Santa Monica,” Glover says. “When my girls got old enough to know who Dad was, I decided to form The Idea Group and stay here all of the time.” The Idea Group works with leading companies and nonprofits to develop strategic marketing and branding plans. Glover created Once a Day because he feels that, when businesses fail, it’s often because they are not marketing enough. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I try to pat them on the back with inspiration and give them a video blog every day to look at to try to get them thinking about marketing?’” he says.
The plan: Encourage a local, home-based economy based on the strategies pioneered by Live Work New Mexico.
How it works: Glover feels that, by incorporating more of the Live Work’s strategy in Santa Fe, the local economy would be stimulated. “It bucks the traditional system; Live Work says, ‘Throw everything away that you used to do.’” Live Work is about supporting and expanding home-based jobs and businesses; recruiting high-income, home-based workers from out of state; and helping some local unemployed and under-employed people to have jobs in the home-based community.
Some examples of action the city's Economic Development Department and Live Work should take, according to Glover, are:
• Attract high-income people working out of their homes in other cities and states to move to Santa Fe. For example, offer them assistance with their home-based jobs or businesses by offering to pick up any moving costs and lower tax rates and interest rates on their homes for a period of time.
• Offer project work to those working out of their homes who have little experience finding work in their field. "It's like a placement agency, but you're placing projects and hourly work," Glover says. He cites Los Alamos National Laboratory's recent decision to cut its workforce by several hundred employees, many of whom live in Santa Fe. "What if we were able to say to those people, 'Oh, by the way, we've got an economic development program where we're going to find you project work that you can do out of your home'?"
• Ask home-based businesses where they need help. Going to these businesses and offering assistance would make them stronger and give them the support they need to expand and excel.
• Create a place where home-based workers can network. “We have something called the success center, where all the home-based workers go to network, shoot the shit, find new project work or maybe there’s business support services there for them to use,” Glover says.
Bottom line: If the city encourages home-based jobs and businesses, people with demanding schedules will have an easier time contributing to the local economy; carbon footprints will be lower; and new networks will arise. The Live Work strategy can help boost Santa Fe’s economy overall, Glover says, by encouraging people to move here and generating jobs.
