OK, here we go again, another new business in Jamestown - in fact, right on Second Street with the other new businesses.
Dennis Phillips reported in The Sunday Post-Journal on this full service business opening in a very newly renovated location across from Chautauqua Music - Precision Web Tech Inc. The owners, Tim and Valerie Hays, will host a ribbon cutting at noon today at 113 E. Second St. If you have any extra spare time we would encourage you to stop in this new location and welcome them to downtown Jamestown.
We also have another grand opening and ribbon cutting this Thursday at 5 p.m. While not located in the downtown, they are a great community partner and business. Shults Chevrolet and Cadillac will host the opening in its newly renovated facilities on Fluvanna Avenue. The Shults family invites residents and businesses alike to attend and view this great new facility. Let's all join the Shults family and help them celebrate this great new addition to Jamestown.
As I promised I will give you more information on Fireball Run and what it has done and will do for the community. This last week I got a note from Jay Sanchez, who is the executive producer of Fireball Run. He asked me to share some of the detail with everyone in the community.
Mr. Sanchez reported preliminary metrics are as follows, with regard to our communities:
$44 million in associated news and public relations.
Roughly 45,000 live in spectator audience.
Followers spent more than 1 million hours and more than 20 minutes "at a time" watching it and tracking it online.
9 million people watched it live on the news.
These figures are astronomical, and Sanchez said they are all tracked, recorded, accounted and measured. This is no short term program and it has long term results. They brought media, entertainment and economics to Jamestown. As Mr. Sanchez states, "Very clearly, Fireball Run has a valuable, personable, self-built group of entrepreneurs and high net worth investors." The ability for a community to become friends with a group like this is very rare. Jamestown has personally touched these people's lives allowing them to become personally invested in our community. We need to build on this investment without the distractions of hosting the event.
Continuing along these lines indicates we could send 1,000 economic development directors to knock on 1,000 doors, while spending a huge amount of money and still never get to some of these same people. He encourages us to continue to use the friends we made during this event to assist in our economic development activities. If we do this correctly we can increase the value of promotion of our community and increase the marketing of our under-discovered destination to a new audience while making new lifelong friends.
It will allow us to keep our brand new, exciting and in the spotlight.
What do you think?