Doing business without understanding the latest in technology and practices in today’s marketplace puts any company behind the eight ball these days, and the USU Eastern Business Conference last Thursday certainly tried to cure some of that.
The conference, held in the Jennifer Leavitt Student Center, featured speakers on everything that ranged from cyber security to trying to make rural communities better places to attract businesses.
The day began with keynote speaker Joe McManus, a cyber security expert, who warned about all that can go wrong when people don’t protect their networks, devices and systems. He began by talking about the importance of security for networks, computers and other systems.
He spent the next hour talking to the audience about security breaches that big retailers have faced, how it affects everyone, what can be done to protect people and ultimately how to keep hackers out of business and personal systems.
The audience broke into breakout sessions that included instruction on high tech ideas and supervision/training topics. Those classes included:
•A session on digital marketing presented by Kyle Ashby, who works with the Sun Advocate. He spoke about traditional marketing and how it is tied to social media, websites and email. He described how SEO’s work and other topics.
•Tom Chamberlain, who works with the Small Business Development Center in Blanding, did a presentation on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of people.
•Jarad Nielsen focused on teamwork using the example and the practical applications of changing tires on a race car during races in the pit crew challenge. Nielsen actually had participants work on a car in the university’s McDonald Career Center and timed them as they worked on teaming up to improve their time each time they completed the task.
•Tony Benjamin presented a session on modern Human Resource departments dos and don’ts when dealing with employees.
•Delynn Fielding, a former Zions Bank branch president, former Carbon County Economic Development director who also worked for the Governor’s Department of Economic Development (GOED), taught about access to financing for business. He was aided in this by a panel made up of Tim Frame from Cache Valley Bank, Dawna Houskeeper, who works for the Southeastern Utah Association of Local Governments and Jordan Leonard, the Economic Development director in Emery County.
•Attendees could also go to a TECH room where experts in various systems such as designing websites, participating in social media and marketing were working with individuals and groups. There was a good deal of time devoted to letting those attending network with each other to learn about their businesses and other possibilities in southeastern Utah for teaming up for economic growth.
For lunch, there was a food expo where various food vendors provided samples of things they prepare for the attendees, followed by a light lunch where Bim Moore gave the luncheon/afternoon keynote address.
Moore’s message was about rural Utah towns and how they can survive, thrive and still keep their identities. Moore directed the state’s Main Street program for a number of years.
“The Main Street Program was essentially about revitalizing downtown areas in rural communities around Utah,” he said at the beginning. “Two towns in Carbon County took advantage of the program, Helper and Price. With that said, there has been some interest in talking with various agencies at the state of resurrecting the program.”
The Utah program was based on a national program developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and was started in the 1980s when a lot of historic buildings in downtowns were lost. Many factors were causing downtown atrophy, and the trust developed a plan to help bring a it to a halt. Some of that included establishing organizations at the local level to undertake revitalization, looking at design which looked at a towns physical attributes, working on promotion to establish strong brands downtown and restructuring a downtown’s economy.
“I believe growing from within and revitalization is all about a grassroots initiative. Economic development does not belong to those professionals that work in that area or to those people who deal with it every day, but it belongs to the community. The broader the set of interests that a community can bring in to work on economic development, the stronger it will be. That is what will represent what the community wants it to be,” he concluded.
Based on comments from attendees and the way the workshops were attended by110 participants, the future appears bright.
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