
Kimley Blanks
Kimley is a Project Coordinator in Evergreen's Location Strategies (ELS) practice, where she is focused on sales, marketing, and branding efforts. She has been involved in all aspects of the site selection process through targeted detailed market research, labor market analysis, supply chain, and related analytics. Additionally, Kimley assists corporate clients with optimizing their location decisions as well as their ability to realize valuable economic incentives such as cash grants, tax abatements, sales tax agreements, workforce training incentives and grants, payroll rebates, sales and use tax refunds, utility benefits, and other valuable economic incentives.
Prior to Evergreen, Kimley managed private and public sector projects such as broadband deployment, state-wide marketing initiatives in the agriculture industry, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Virginia Department of agriculture and Consumer Services, resulting in new opportunities for ag-based businesses, and community branding campaigns to increase customer awareness of value-added products. Additionally, she developed marketing campaigns for food-based companies and a Xfinity NASCAR driver.
Location Strategies
At Evergreen, Kimley managed a project on behalf of a near start-up food manufacturer that is in the process of rebuilding their brand that resulted in a $12 million incentive package for a $25 million investment. In addition, through this client’s engagement with Evergreen, they are realizing their greatest potential of becoming a nationally recognized brand with future growth across the nation by expanding operations. With her extensive experience in project management and marketing, she developed a comprehensive plan to lead sales and marketing efforts for the practice and through these efforts Evergreen will focus on increasing foreign direct investment and exploring potential U.S. based expansion projects on top of expanding opportunities for clients.
Education
Kimley holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Old Dominion University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Christopher Newport University.
Organizations
Kimley is an active member of the Virginia Economic Developers Association and a 2018 Fellow of the Virginia Agriculture Leaders Obtaining Results (VALOR) Leadership Program.
Interests
In her free time, Kimley can be found volunteering as she has a passion for building up her community through applying her skills in problem solving, strategic thinking, project management that translates into her work for clients. She focuses on the entire process from identifying opportunity, engaging with community partners, developing a plan of action, and persistence to thinking creatively to find solutions. Her collaborative style has helped her to excel.