Latest News & Blogs

195 small businesses in West Michigan negatively impacted by Executive Orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be receiving grant support from the Michigan Small Business Relief Program.

The COVID-19 crisis poses a severe threat to both our local economy and business community. West Michigan is built on the backbone of entrepreneurship and small business, and the Rapid Response Economic Relief Fund is aimed at delivering short-term financial support to small businesses in need.

As essential businesses continue to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic, they need to fill critical, immediate vacancies. There are high volumes of both temporary and full-time open positions as a result.

Today The Right Place, Inc., in collaboration with Calder Capital, announced the new ownership and subsequent expansion of Laser Access, LLC. The company will be expanding at their Walker, Mich. facility and investing $1.6M into the location.

Talent is a topic that's never far from the minds of employers. Currently, millennials make up the largest portion of the U.S. labor force, making this generation a critical component in building up a region's talent pool.

AdvisorSmith, a business insurance resource that provides research and advanced tools to businesses, recently published a deep-dive report on U.S. cities where the manufacturing industry is booming. The company evaluated 318 cities based on four key economic factors: manufacturing output growth rate, manufacturing output per capita, manufacturing location quotient and manufacturing employment growth rate.

Leaders at Bank of America, the Consumers Energy Foundation, and The Right Place, Inc. will be developing the New Community Transformation Fund. This will be an investment fund based in Grand Rapids, Michigan to support diverse business owners. The fund aims to increase ethnic and racial diversity in business ownership in West Michigan.

Commuting patterns, or commuting flows, are a critical piece of intelligence that The Right Place often uses often to inform our economic development work. Commuting flows help us better understand the interconnectedness between communities in the region.

The Right Place, Inc. has appointed five new board members to the 2020 Right Place board of directors and accepted the retirement of six others.

In early December, more than 450 business and community leaders joined The Right Place for its 23^rd Annual Economic Outlook for West Michigan. The 2020 Economic Outlook provided insights on regional, state, and national economic trends and projections, as well as current economic development conditions and activities.