May 13, 2022 – 

For more than 350 years, Jeremy Rothwell’s family has owned land on the Delmarva Peninsula. As development accelerated throughout Rothwell’s lifetime, the Senior Planner for the Town of Smyrna, Delaware, took an interest in smart growth.

“I got into planning to preserve farmland,” he says.

Since entering the profession, his interest has only increased. While studying political science and history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, he worked for the Upper Shore Regional Council, made up of government councils and economic development agencies in the three counties of Maryland’s upper shore. In 2014, he earned a master’s degree in urban affairs and regional planning from the University of Delaware.

Today, he puts his considerable skills to use for the Town of Smyrna while also working part-time as a planner for the City of Harrington. The bulk of Smyrna is in Kent County, but the part that includes the new 206-acre Duck Creek Business Campus is on the town’s New Castle County side.

What led you to your role, and what do you like most about it?

I worked for the Planning Services Group at the Institute of Public Administration, an office out of the University of Delaware. They do a lot of planning work for municipalities and local governments in the state, writing comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, and that sort of thing. I wrote zoning districts for Smyrna’s corridor plan.

As part of my job now, I work — or I have worked — with numerous organizations, including the Kent Economic Partnership. I served on the Kent County Tourism Corporation, and I was a municipal representative for the Dover/Kent Metropolitan Planning Organization, which handles transportation funding and planning for Kent County. I wear a lot of hats. As a planner, I am in charge of all the development reviews. I handle them from start to finish.

I like that I don’t do the same thing every day. For instance, I might be doing a park plan one day, working with large employers, or dealing with infrastructure issues.

Which of Delaware’s attractive qualities helps spur economic development?

From the Smyrna lens, the location on the I-95 corridor is a huge benefit. You have access to the Northeast corridor. Such a large percentage of the population lives between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Smyrna also has Route 1 and Route 301, an alternative to I-95.

People who move to Smyrna are generally from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The cost of living here is significantly less.

What are some of the most compelling attributes of Smyrna that site selectors should know?

First, we are a one-stop shop. The Duck Creek Business Campus owner went through all the planning and approvals, so new employers don’t need a separate permit from DELDOT or the Kent Conservation District. All that planning work is done. Plus, Kent County players have a good working relationship with one another, and we all work together to help an applicant.

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May 12, 2022 – 

Seaford, Delaware, has made the news lately, and with good reason: the Sussex County city is home to a new 100,000-square-foot delivery station able to process 20,000 packages a day. Trisha Newcomer, Seaford’s Director of Economic Development and Community Relations, couldn’t be happier.

“I grew up right here in the City of Seaford,” says the Seaford High School graduate. “It’s my driving force.”

Until relatively recently, Seaford had been best known as the “Nylon Capital World” because the DuPont Co. had run a plant there from 1939 to 2004. Today, the city’s slogan is “The Perfect Place to Start,” whether residents are starting families or people are beginning businesses. “It’s all-encompassing,” Newcomer says. 

In the last decade, she’s witnessed a lot of change. “It’s exciting!” she says.

What led you to your role, and what do you like most about it?

I worked my way up. I started as a 9-1-1 dispatcher, and I ended up where I am today through several promotions. I like the community interaction and seeing what we can provide for the community — just really being an intermediary to help new and existing businesses navigate red tape. It’s an enjoyable job, and it isn’t the same routine every day.

Which of Delaware’s attractive qualities helps spur economic development?

Certainly, the lack of a sales tax. But one of our most significant advantages is our size. Because we’re small, we get more done. When a business wants to move to the area, we can get the stakeholders in the room without wasting any time. The company can put a face with a name.

What are some of the most compelling attributes of Seaford and Sussex County that site selectors should know?

Sussex County beaches are a draw, and we have agriculture. In Seaford, we’re moving the needle toward eco-tourism. The Nanticoke River runs right through our community. It’s a beautiful river, and we’ve created Oyster House Park with the Chesapeake Conservancy and a riverwalk with kayak launches. Getting out on the Nanticoke River is amazing. It’s so untouched, and there’s not a lot of development along the river.

We stay very connected with the state and county legislators to keep them apprised of everything going on in Seaford. We want to make sure that our business community is thriving, and we are a partner that’s always there to help, whether you’re interested in moving here or you’ve been here 25 years. We want to connect with one another and get things done. 

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May 11, 2022 – 

Regina Mitchell never thought she’d live anywhere else but in Pennsylvania. The Bucks County native went to La Salle University for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for a master’s degree in public administration. Even when she started dating her husband-to-be, she stood firm on staying in Philadelphia. 

However, things change, and the couple now lives in the Middletown area of Delaware. And her new state, she notes, has won her over.

“Delaware really impresses me, and I see a lot of people from New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey moving here,” says Mitchell, currently serving as interim director of the Delaware Division of Small Business. In the Middletown area, “it’s easy to get to the beach, and there are a lot of state parks to explore. There’s a lot of growth.”

What led you to your role, and what do you like most about it?

I was the senior fiscal and policy analyst for the Delaware Office of Management and Budget beginning in 2016 – I like to work with numbers. In the fall of 2018, I started as the business finance director at the Division of Small Business, which basically oversees all the money that goes out of our office. The unit reviews applications, handles the financial analysis, and runs the economic models to develop incentive options to make a grant. I was promoted to deputy director in March 2021.

It’s a shift for me to be providing services directly to the community that we serve. I really enjoy working with businesses and providing them with what they need to succeed. In many ways, our division is very impactful. Our team works every day to help large and small businesses create jobs for Delawareans and to improve the overall quality of life in our state.

Which of Delaware’s attractive qualities helps spur economic development?

It helps that it is a place where employees want to go. If you don’t have the workforce, companies aren’t going to come here. We have a diverse, skilled workforce.

Our location also helps. It’s easy to get to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., or New York. But Delaware is quieter. You can have space, a nice house, and good schools. 

What are some of the most compelling attributes of Delaware that site selectors should know?

I come from Pennsylvania, which has 67 counties. It was a real shift for me to come to Delaware, which has three.

But there’s a real value to being small. It’s easy to make connections and figure out who is working on what. We like to say here that there’s no wrong door to walk through. We all work together to help our small businesses succeed. In larger states, you likely wouldn’t find that kind of environment at the state level.

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May 10, 2022 – 

Sara M. Bluhm knows Milford. The Milford High School graduate has served on the city’s planning commission and was president of Downtown Milford Inc. (DMI), part of the Main Street America program. Not only has she lived in the area for 20-plus years, but she also has the skills to promote it. Her undergraduate degree is in communications, and she earned a master’s degree in marketing.

So, when the city created an economic development position in 2021, Bluhm was the right person for the job.

What led you to your role, and what do you like most about it?

I was a volunteer on the city’s planning commission for four-and-a-half years, and it was eye-opening to see how the planning process works. I came to the table with that experience and with the skills I acquired working with DMI, a Main Street program with a four-point approach, including economic development. 

With a degree in communications, I am comfortable with the community engagement side: I can tell the city’s story, and I feel privileged to do that. I also minored in graphic design. 

And I love Milford. I’m super connected — I’ve lived in the area 23 years. I enjoy being a spokesperson, but I also enjoy working with people who share the same ultimate goal.

Which of Delaware’s attractive qualities helps spur economic development?

They say there are six degrees of separation between everyone, but in Delaware, I think it’s two — maybe one. There is a strong network of people and resources that you can tap to get your business started or to grow your business. That can go a long way in the business community. At a recent Delaware Prosperity Partnership meeting, Jamie Burke from Millsboro said he told someone in Ohio that Delaware had 57 municipalities in the state. The person replied that there were that many in his county. There’s a benefit to being a small state. We all work well together, and we all want to see growth. 

What are some of the most compelling attributes of Milford and Central Delaware that site selectors should know? 

Milford is right at the cross-section of state Route 1 and state Route 113, and Route 14 goes west to Baltimore and over the Bay Bridge. We are a hub on the Delmarva Peninsula. If a company is looking for a warehouse that is centrally located to stores on the Eastern Shore or in Delaware, Milford is a nice pocket for them to be in. 

Then there is the quality of life. When my mom and I moved to Delaware, we picked Milford because we’re a half-hour from the beach and a half-hour from the capital in Dover. It’s convenient.

And Milford is growing. We have a new economic development website, GrowInMilford.com. We want to bring businesses here, and we want to keep businesses here. I can’t wait until we can sell off light industrial lots in our new Milford Corporate Center, and we have a lot of commercially zoned space in our comprehensive plan. There’s vacant land here that is available — we welcome the opportunity to show it all off to site selectors.

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Dr. Von and Nicole Homer, husband-and-wife co-founders behind Hx Innovations Inc., are a couple on the move whose success stems from helping people learn more about the ways they move.

Like so many businesses, Hx Innovations takes a premise that might seem obvious – that the way we move can affect our balance, sports performance and potential for injury – and turns predicting and preventing injury and improving performance into a quantifiable science.

Von, who serves as the firm’s chief scientific officer, knows firsthand the ways in which one’s ability to move can affect everything else. As a scholar-athlete at McDaniel College in Maryland, he played both football and basketball while studying sports science and kinesiology. During a freshman-year football scrimmage he suffered a leg injury so traumatic that doctors initially said they’d have to amputate. Through his mother’s advocacy, doctors managed to save the leg, but Von then faced the challenges of losing his shot at collegiate sports and having to relearn a normal walking gait.

“Through that, he developed this passion for movement and understanding: How does the body move? What are the different systems that take place from a simple walk, from a simple run, from a jump?” says Nicole, who serves as the company’s chief operations officer.

His interest in body movement led Von to a certification in pedorthics, the practice of making braces, orthotics and foot and ankle devices. He went on to earn his master’s degree in biomechanics and human movement, then finally a doctorate in computational neuroscience. The idea for the company itself emerged nearly a decade ago from the technology that Von developed based on the question of whether his algorithms could predict human movement to prevent injury.

“The technology can predict the accuracy of movement and predict when there’s something off, so we can help people move more efficiently,” Nicole says. “As years progressed and our data enlarged, the algorithm became more advanced.”

While the science advanced, so did the search for places they could apply it. After Nicole, who was in the midst of her studies for a master’s degree in business administration, suggested doing a study on how they could apply the technology to the marketplace, she discovered that there was a significant need in the sports industry to predict and prevent foot and ankle injuries. She realized that their technology could potentially be used to test footwear for movement and endurance characteristics.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Hx performed pilot studies with professional, college and high school athletics programs, perfecting the technology and reporting.

“We found a need there, and we started building a plan around it,” Nicole says.

Nicole made building that plan easier thanks to her experience in supply chain logistics during her eight years serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I like to build things and organize structures and foundations, so I think with our combined skill set, Hx was bound to come about,” she says. “If we create something and determine we can go with it, we’re going to press the limits, use our resources and do what we need to do to get it done.”

The moment when the pair realized they genuinely had a viable business model was in June 2019, when they officially established Hx Innovations. Six months later, though, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the pair wondered how a business built on in-person movement testing would be able to survive with lockdowns and social distancing in place.

They survived by pivoting back to the science that birthed the idea for the company – footwear endurance testing. Doing so allowed for a pilot program using small groups of people as the Homers waited for society to open back up. Eventually, they landed their first big footwear testing client, which gave them the extra boost they needed.

“We were excited that the science could solve a real problem in the footwear space, but decided to stay within sports science to meet a bigger need,” Nicole says. “Our resolve was to establish ourselves in the Delaware ecosystem and grow from there.”

Hx Innovations Succeeds in Delaware

That decision informed their next: to locate their practice at the Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington. The site serves not just as the Philadelphia 76ers’ practice facility, but also the home of the Wilmington Bluecoats basketball team and a venue for youth sports games.

While attending their son’s soccer game at the fieldhouse, they noted the number of athletes on site. They also noticed the businesses located there specifically to serve the sports-centric customer base, including Nemours Sports Medicine for physical therapy and Titus Sports Academy for athletic training.

“We said, ‘They have sports medicine, they have sports performance, they have sports, but where is their injury prevention?’” Nicole recalls. They contacted the facility’s managing group and pitched themselves as a company that could add additional value to the operation. “Von showed them Hx technology, testing and reporting, and they loved it. The relationship has been growing ever since.”

Hx held its grand opening at the Chase Fieldhouse in March 2022. The company is offering its Power Performance and Footwear Endurance assessments as a service to the more than 30 basketball, soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, field hockey and flag football clubs and leagues who train or compete at the facility, giving Hx the opportunity to impact the overall health and performance safety of over 350,00 athletes who practice or play there.

Along the way, the tightly knit Delaware business community has helped Hx Innovations – which was chosen Technical.ly Delaware’s 2021 Startup Business of the Year – grow. Winning the Startup 302 competition for best science-based startup resulted not just in helpful feedback from other businesses, but also a new crop of clients. The Pete du Pont Freedom Foundation provided a business viability assessment and a clear path to scaling up the business. The Blue Hen 17&43 Award for Most Promising Venture validated their business model and impact potential. The Delaware Sustainable Chemistry Alliance (DESCA) Tech2Market program provided market mapping assessment tools and strategies.

“Those types of programs have been integral in providing the necessary tools to help us go in the right direction and give thought to the things we need to do progress,” Nicole says. “The support of Delaware adds to our strength.”

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