Marion recognized by author MARION -- The City of Marion has long held the title of "Hub of the Universe" but now there's a new title to tack on to the city's resume - boomtown. The city is featured in a new book, "Boomtown USA: The 7 1/2 Keys To Big Success in Small Towns," written by Jack Schultz, CEO of Agracel, Inc., in Effingham. "We're involved in industrial development and have gone out and specialized in small towns where we do our business," said Schultz. "And in my travels and our team's travels, we see a lot of those communities that were doing very well and then some that were not doing very well." Schultz began to see common themes in successful towns across the nation and decided to write an "uplifting book about their experiences." So for the last three years, he's been researching the best and the brightest so to speak, those towns that fit his seven keys to success. According to Schultz, adopting a can-do attitude, shaping your vision, leveraging your resources, raising strong leaders, encouraging an entrepreneurial approach, maintaining local control and building a brand for your community are sure ways to become successful. "From what I've seen of Marion is that they really exemplify a number of those characteristics," said Schultz. Marion survived round after round of cuts as Schultz and his team narrowed the initial field of 15,800 to 12,000 then to 800 and then finally to a field of 397 towns that Schultz termed "agurbs"ª from 45 states around the country. An agurbª, says Schultz in the book's introduction, is a prospering rural town with a tie to agriculture that's located outside a metropolitan area and meets certain standards of growth. Marion definitely fits the bill. In fact, Schultz further divided the results and picked a top 100 out of the 392. Out of 13 Illinois towns among the 392 only one made the top 100 -- Marion. "My experience is that it's very much of a 'can-do' type of community," said Schultz. "They've established themselves from a vision standpoint as a regional center for medical, retail and manufacturing and done a good job of projecting that out. I've seen a number of entrepreneurs come out of Marion and I think that there's a little hotbed there of entrepreneurship." Schultz took the top 100 and compared them to three very high tech communities, Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle. Schultz's agurbsª grew their jobs almost three times more than those communities did during the 1990s, he says. "Furthermore since the year 2000, the three high tech communities have lost 102,000 jobs and our top 100 have added 225,000 jobs," said Schultz. This isn't the first time that Marion has been featured among the premier small towns of the nation, says city Director of Economic Development Dorain Fletcher. Marion was also included in the 1993 publication "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" as well as several economic magazines. "Anytime we can get national publicity, that helps us a lot," said Fletcher. "I'm happy because this helps give us some selling points. This will get distributed nationwide, and I've gotten calls as a result of that other book about people interested in bringing their business here." Schultz unveiled the book last weekend in Washington D.C. and will be touring the country presenting seminars on the 7 1/2 keys. Schultz will be speaking in Mt. Vernon on Feb. 12 at 5:30 p.m. By Eric Chaney
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