There are no lack of companies whose business strategy involves preying on small town naivete and local government dysfunction. Without incentive or basic research skills to do the most minimal due diligence, our city council has, over the past 8 years, hired a succession of retail recruiters, faux marketing consultants, and east coast media firms with the most dubious of reputations. Safely ensconced behind executive sessions, council members remain blissfully oblivious of their actions while local business and residents are left to pay for the grift.

Buxton - 2016-17 $100,000

In 2016-17, the city of Sunnyide hired Buxton to lure new businesses to Sunnyside. Buxton is a legitimate location analysis firm that helps big corporation find the most favorable business environments and most lucrative consumer markets in which to expand.

They also provide a service branded as ‘retail recruitment’ that they sell to cities for $100,000 for a 2 year contract ($50k for a first year teaser analysis and $50k for the second year’s ‘lead’ generation). As dramatic as this price tag may feel to a struggling small city, it pales compared to the revenue Buxton earns from the corporate side of their business. Buxton likely uses its city service to fill its databases with data, analysis, and relevant observations about a city and its leaders. So this service might be of value if your city is truly a hidden gem with its political house in order and realistic development strategies in place for moving forward. On the other hand, you may be paying Buxton $100,000 to blackball yourself if you are a city pockmarked with economic red flags:

• retail fragmented across geographically diverse strip malls
• business ownership patterns that do not reflect local demographics
• social media posts documenting toxic social divisions
• a constant churn of grand openings and store closings,
• accelerating crime rates

The Sunnyside Sun reported that Buxton was responsible for bringing the “Ross Dress for Less” store to Sunnyside, but according to a mall manager, they had been in negotiations with Ross years before the Buxton contract. Even the city manager at the time was careful to state only that Buxton assisted in ‘closing’ the deal.

The main complaints leveled at Buxton’s retail recruitment service is that their results could be acquired with an internet connection and a couple of hours on the phone. In Sunnyside’s case, the majority of ‘leads’ Buxton provided were actually a list of franchising opportunities available to any local investor willing to google a franchising company’s website (e.g. popeyes, chick-fil-a, pollo loco). Moreover, many websites exist that collect and compare this franchising information, some even analyzing the values of each opportunity or estimating their respective ROI (e.g. franchise direct, top franchise, franchise com, franchise grade). The value of locally owned franchises should not be dismissed, but this is not the kind of “retail recruitment” that results in a major inflow of corporate investments.

Roger Brooks International - 2018 $25,000 + travel and lodging expenses

After a career as a roadie for Concerts West and project manager for Ocean Shores and Whistler Mountain, Roger Brooks started a marketing consulting company targeting small towns. Roger Brooks International’s evolving menu of revenue schemes currently consists of

• $20/month subscription that gives the user access to Roger Brooks blogs, videos, and RBI approved webinars.
• Motivational speaking engagements.
• $30,000 Destination Assessment - Roger Brooks and his wife visit your city for two days then give a powerpoint presentation explaining problems they found with the community.
• Fast-track Marketing Action Plan - a proprietary branding and marketing template with actionable steps to turn your city into a tourism destination. Though deliverables may include graphic design work and some customization specific to your city, it does not include any real marketing analysis that true marketing firms like DCI, Accord, or MMGY provide.
• $10,000 - $50,000 Partnership Programs - provides advice, SEM schemes, and cross-promotional vehicles to help aspiring business consultants tap into the “destination marketing” demand.

Roger Brooks can be very good at marketing himself, each uploaded powerpoint presentation from his Destination Assessments significantly increases his Internet presence. Other attempts at self-promotion can seem somewhat juvenile and perhaps even beyond acceptable marketing hyperbole:

1. Roger Brooks was never connected to Leavenworth or Ashland OR - though he no longer explictly claims this, his presentations still strongly imply such.
2. He has a bachelors in business from Central Washington University, but not a law degree as his linkedin profile implies. Though he may have entered the UW law program, there is no indication that he exited it with a degree.
3. His only retail experience was as a shoe-sales clerk at JC Penny’s when he was in High School.
4. He never worked in marketing before starting a marketing consulting company. As project manager at Whistler Resort and Ocean Shores, his primary role was to help these companies circumvent local ordinaces and ram their expansion projects past environmental opposition.
5. Roger Brooks did give a TED Talk (actually TEDx) in 2013, but the expert on Judaic Studies who spoke about “Higher Education for the 21st Century” was not the same Roger Brooks that Sunnyside hired.
6. The book he self-published in 2019 has just one reviewer on Amazon who lived in the same residence as Roger Brooks.
7. The “Roger Brooks” Wikipedia page he attempted to establish was deleted in 2016 with the comment “This is advertising. I tried to reduce it to a reasonable article, but found that there was too little of substance…”

The most frequent complaint against Roger Brooks International is that they do not actually visit local businesses or do any reputation research on social media as they claim. Most of Mr. Brooks energy appears to be devoted to uncovering and exploiting divisions within the community so he can deliver results that confirm the biases of those who have hired his company. In Sunnyside’s case, Mr. Brooks admitted in an email not having visited any downtown businesses despite claiming in his presentation otherwise. Although, his presentation contained many valid points (eg. more garbage cans, encouraging the development of foodtruck pods downtown, ending the capricious regulations that disincentivizes business investments) these were all points that businesses have advocated for or complained about for years, and have been doing so without charging the city consultation fees.

CGI Communications - 2019-21

CGI Communications is a New York company that targets small towns to sell 1) promotional video services, 2) website development, and 3) advertising on municipal street banners. The company leverages its knowledge of small town dynamics to exploit the naivette and dysfunction inherent in many city councils and municipal bureaucracies. Businesses, towns, and law firms throughout the country have expressed displeasure with CGI Communications business practices (cgi sales tactics, cgi ceo).

Two years ago CGI Communications produced a free video for the city of Sunnyside in exchange for a list of local business contacts and the signature of the city manager on a form letter endorsing the company’s products. With this official endorsement and Glengarry list, CGI Communication urged local businesses to show their civic pride by hiring them to create promotional videos at severely inflated prices. Of course the video CGI Communications did for the city was not free since the exorbitantly priced products they sell to local stores are siphoning resources from viable businesses and sending the profits to New York.

At the beginning of 2021, CGI Communications was given the rights to sell street banner advertisements on Sunnyside utility poles. The initial proposal was for banners only on S 6th Street between Franklin and Decauter. Any business or organization can “sponsor” a banner for an initial price of $495 per banner per year for which the sponsor’s logo would be placed on the bottom third of the banner. 26 banner spaces in these two blocks were put up for sale, available for anyone (including businesses located outside of Sunnyside) to buy by going to the CGI website and claiming the spaces. Of the 26 utility poles in these 2 blocks, only 6 have brackets for banners, so CGI Communications was also given the rights to install additional banner hardware and uninstall mounting structures for holding planters, including plumbing and facilities for automatically watering the plants.

$495 for street pole banners is a huge markup. In 2016, several Sunnyside small businesses produced a proposal for funding street banners for the downtown core. At that time, appropriately sized banners could be purchased for as low as $100-150 per banner. Today, that price has dropped even lower to $40-100 per banner bannerbuzz, wholesale bannerz, uprinting, postupstand, esigns.

The 2021 contract with CGI Communications gives the company complete control over pricing and sales of the banners. CGI Communications has a similar banner program with Cornelius Oregon where banner prices rose to $795 after the first year. In other cities, CGI sells the banners for $995. When asked if the terms of the contract the Sunnyside signed with CGI Communication caps the annual banner advertisement fees at $495 per year, the CGI banner program manager replied, “The sponsorship rates are determined by CGI, are not permanent and may changes due to any number of factors, including but not limited to the demand for the recognition within the community.” In other words, pricing is determined by what the market will bear.

Very few downtown stores were among the organizations initially notified of this banner program. A Cornelius business suggested this was an intentional sales strategy: CGI drives up demand among businesses located outside the downtown area in order to pressure downtown shops to buy banner space in front of their own storefronts. The CGI Communications banner program manager seemed to confirm such, stating “we do our best to determine those who are well established and those who have engaged civcly in the past or have a history of supporting community initiatives, to give them the first pick of the usually limited number of street lamp locations available for city banner sponsorship.”

Although the city of Sunnyside is not explicitly compensated for the banner advertising, CGI Communications provides a kickback by outsourcing banner installations back to the city. In other cities this has run from $50-$100 per banner. This makes the banner advertising program a means for transforming downtown from a retail district to an advertising platform with profits being yet another backdoor tax on local business.