By Tom Ryan, Kansas City Star Reader Advisory Panel

We know Missouri is a great state. Let’s start telling people. Let’s market Missouri and bring business here to create jobs, invest, and get those tax breaks in the process. But we need some marketeers. Missouri should outsource their marketing campaign today.

Time ticks away quickly and we watch the numbers daily. We check our personal numbers and then watch the State unemployment keep dipping. We hear the personal stories around us. To build business, business needs attraction. We cannot squabble now about tax credits in these lean times. Businesses go elsewhere when the squabbling gets loud.

Competetion with other states is keen and Missouri is losing...

Across party lines there are the pragmatists in office, the ones getting work done, with business growth in mind. It’s an admitted tightrope but that’s why we elect these people.

Presently, the Missouri Department of Economic Development team is asleep at the wheel. Check out their website here http://www.ded.mo.gov/ and try to stay awake. We deserve better.

The solution may be to outsource this to a company who does this for a living, with a track record of success. Throw out the talent search internationally as well. For in many instances we would be attractive to foreign companies. Set goals for the contract and hold their feet to the fire. This is serious business but there are agencies used to working in a very hot kitchen.

Other states speak of themselves as economic development centers, and places of potential. We know we’re it. We just need to have someone championing our great state…keep the politicians at a distance on this and bring in some good “Ad People”, now.