Bethany Beach businessman Scott Spencer is receiving support from a variety of people as he works to start a new business/community partnership designed to promote the town and help its businesses keep doing business, year-round.
The owner of Of All Things on Pennsylvania Avenue told town council members on Monday, Jan. 14, that he had been working to promote his business in the off-season through a variety of methods, including e-mail messages designed to bring loyal customers back into his store when they might not otherwise be stopping in downtown Bethany.
“My goal is to tell more people about Bethany Beach and what we have here in the off-season,” he explained of his fledgling effort toward a business/community partnership that he hopes will bring the town, its businesses and others together to bring more life to the resort town’s late fall, winter and early spring.
The idea has been supported by members of the town’s Planning Commission, who recommended the council invite Spencer to pitch the idea of the partnership to them. Spencer has also garnered support from the Bethany-Fenwick Area Chamber of Commerce, which has pledged its resources to help get the new group started.
“There’s good weather and plenty of parking. The meters are gone and the restaurants are empty,” Spencer said of the town’s cool-weather slower period, suggesting that freedom from the hassles of parking and the packed downtown of summer could be key to drawing people to visit the town from October through March.
“All I know is I’m really busy for three months, and I pay rent for 12,” he told the council, explaining his desire to boost business in the off-season. He said he’s taken to working at a side business of rehabbing older homes to help make ends meet during those lean winter periods.
“My customers ask me, ‘Is there somewhere around here to eat lunch other than a hamburger place?” Spencer said, referring to Five Guys Burgers and Fries on Garfield Parkway, which has since it opened been the only downtown restaurant open for lunch in the town every day throughout the late fall, winter and early spring.
Other downtown restaurants might be open on a given weekend, but Spender said keeping track of such things was difficult for him as a store owner and he hoped improving communication between businesses might be of benefit to everyone.
Spencer said he’d like the partnership to help develop programs and other ideas for the off-season that would bring more people to the town, and to increase communication among potential visitors, businesses and the town government in a way that would encourage people to visit.
And he asked the town to help with both the communication aspect of that challenge and in potentially obtaining funded needed to accomplish the partnership’s goals.
Despite some nay-sayers who recalled failed past efforts to work through a downtown Bethany business association, Spencer said he had been hearing a lot of positive ideas and garnering a lot of interest from the people he’d talked to about the idea in recent months.
“Yeah! Let’s do it,” he reported as the general response from many of them. But concerned whether that apparent enthusiasm for the project would result in actual involvement, he said he wanted to get the town involved before taking the next step.
Council Member Jerry Dorfman said Monday that he believed the town council should create a committee to help facilitate Spencer’s efforts and provide a council member to head that committee. And Dorfman did one better on the suggestion: he volunteered to be that committee chairman.
Spencer now plans to call a meeting early this spring to get the business/community partnership going. And Town Manager Cliff Graviet said the town would not only provide information on all licensed businesses in the town for that purpose but would send out a letter of invitation to all of them on the town’s behalf.
Hopes are to get the movement going before the traditional rush for business owners starting in early summer makes for a time crunch on their parts. They could then make plans for promoting the town’s off-season through the summer and into the fall, in time to possibly see some results in the winter of 2008.
The proposed partnership may also be among the issues discussed by the town’s communication committee when it meets Feb. 4. Council Member and Communication Committee Chairman Tracy Mulligan said he hoped to involve the area’s Realtors in the effort, since boosting communications with such businesspeople and town government was an idea recently broached by some in the field.