Blog
Bourbon + Bagpipes = Economic Boom
By Teasha Cable
A company is deciding between three towns that look nearly identical on paper: similar tax rates, similar incentive packages, similar workforce numbers. The town that wins usually isn't the one that offered the most money. It's the one that gave the company the fewest reasons to walk away.
Every economic developer I've ever spoken with has a similar version of the same problem.
A company is deciding between three towns that look nearly identical on paper: similar tax rates, similar incentive packages, similar workforce numbers. The town that wins usually isn't the one that offered the most money. It's the one that gave the company the fewest reasons to walk away.
That's the framework Michael Clark, AICP, CNU-A, Director of Community and Economic Development for the town of Town of Collierville, Tennessee, has built his career around.
With nearly 25 years in local government and urban planning across high-growth communities in North Carolina and now in the Memphis metro area, Clark has a simple observation about how corporate site selection actually works:
Companies aren't looking for reasons to say yes. They're looking for reasons to say no. The job of a town isn't just to build a better pitch. It's to take those "no" reasons off the board. A Distillery, a Bagpipe Maker, and Five New Businesses Clark provided a clear example of how he applied his framework in Zebulon, North Carolina.
A prospective business owner walked into the Chamber of Commerce with an idea for a micro-distillery. At the time, the town was in the middle of overhauling its zoning code. But instead of routing the business through a painfully slow and generic industrial process, Clark's team dug in to ask real questions:
How the business actually operated? What its regional draw would look like? Whether it belonged in an industrial park at all?
The answer was no. It belonged downtown. The distillery soon became a destination business, drawing thousands of visitors from across the region—even through a pandemic opening. One of their traditions, is to host a bagpipe parade for every new batch release.
The event caught the attention of a man who was trying to buy one of four companies in North America that build and maintain bagpipes. He wanted to relocate his factory near the distillery.
Clark's team again asked the right questions instead of defaulting to standard zoning, and helped him settle two doors down in a building that had been one of the worst eyesores on the block. That single relationship, one conversation about easing entry for one business, eventually helped spawn five new businesses and reshape an entire downtown.
The lesson Clark draws from it isn't about distilleries or bagpipes specifically. It's that most economic development strategy focuses on what a town can offer, incentives, grants, tax abatements, while spending far less energy auditing what it's quietly asking businesses to overcome.
Regulations, timelines, and approval processes that made sense a decade ago often survive simply because nobody has gone back to question them.
Breaking Down the Fiefdoms Collierville has structured itself around that same instinct at an organizational level. Clark oversees planning, engineering, economic development, GIS, and building code services under one division, with tourism soon joining the mix.
In most municipalities, these functions sit in separate departments that rarely talk to each other, leaving a business to navigate five different sets of rules and five different points of possible rejection. This creates too much friction for many small businesses to navigate effectively.
Clark describes his role in that structure as a Sherpa, someone with direct visibility into every division who can guide a company through the entitlement process instead of leaving them to find their own way through it.
The town is now building five-year strategic plans across departments with deliberately overlapping goals, an attempt to replace "fiefdoms" with a shared sense of what the community is actually trying to become. That same integration shows up in how Collierville is approaching growth itself. As a Congress for the New Urbanism-accredited planner, Clark has pushed mixed-use, walkable development, not as an abstract planning ideal, but as a practical answer to the traffic concerns that dominate most growing towns.
His argument to the skeptical resident is pretty straightforward: a coffee shop on the ground floor of a building with housing above it changes where people go first. Neighbors who share that kind of proximity end up looking out for each other in ways that scattered, car-dependent development never does.
A Plan Built to Stay Alive Collierville's current effort to formalize all of this is its 2050 Comprehensive Plan, a 25-year vision Clark is deliberately designing to avoid becoming, in his words, a document that sits on a shelf.
Drawing on conversations with urban planner John Zeanah, FAICP and his recent book on adaptive comprehensive planning, Clark is building dedicated long-range planning staff whose success is measured not by pages produced, but by how many neighborhoods they stay in active conversation with as conditions change.
The same philosophy extends to historic preservation, an area Clark treats as compatible with growth rather than opposed to it.
Collierville recently approved a mixed-use building near its historic town square that pairs modern construction with architectural cues pulled directly from the historic district, and the town is now working with a developer on what will be its largest project inside that district, built around preserving a contributing historic structure—rather than replacing it.
Here's What I Learned For any town or business trying to accelerate growth, Clark's approach provides a good gut check.
Before adding another incentive to the stack, look at the process itself. What regulation, what approval step, what unnecessary delay is quietly telling good projects to go somewhere easier?
The towns that grow well aren't always the ones offering the most. Often, they're simply the ones that got out of their own way first.
Listen to our conversation: