Rick Weddle: Welcome to ”Site Selection Matters” where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, president of the Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak to members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode, we have as our guest, Mark Williams, former Guild chairman and president of the Strategic Development Group, Incorporated, a firm that provides a variety of site selection and location and city of negotiation services designed to enhance the operational performance and produce cost savings to companies and their suppliers. Today, Mark will talk with us about the issue of reshoring as it relates to the current COVID-19 environment. Please join me as we welcome Mark Williams to ”Site Selection Matters.”

Mark, despite the lockdown and stay-at-home guidelines, this has to really be a busy time for location advisors. Take a minute, if you will, and give our listeners a brief overview of your role in the Strategic Development Group and what you do.

Mark Williams: Sure, Rick. Thanks for having me back on this great podcast. You know, we remain very busy. Strategic Development Group is a location advisory firm and we have a suite of existing clients and are always generating new clients to advise them on where to locate and why. So of course, there are factors related to logistics sites, technical aspects of sites, labor, etc. So no two projects are the same. We’ve been in business for a long time and have kind of seen the good and the bad and the ugly related to navigating this path of site location. So we help our clients do that. Generally, our clients are medium and very large firms, many of them global firms. So we help with those locations, but there are always things that come up where additional advice is required in that process. It could be related to the political nature of things, it could be related to how do we negotiate incentives in the COVID environment? What is the acceptance of that concept? So it’s dynamic. It’s very interesting. It’s been very interesting to me.

Rick: Well, thank you. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, which I think has changed nearly everything, we’re hearing more and more about the concept of facility reshoring or bringing facilities back to the US. For the benefit of our listeners, how do you define reshoring?

Mark: Rick, for I’m gonna say about the past 20 years, companies, many of them from the U.S. have been looking to focus on improving their economics of their production systems. And they have decided in many cases to move offshore for economic reasons. In 2019, for example, 18% of all the U.S. imports were from China. You know, my definition of a reshoring is, okay, these companies have moved production capacity offshore, reshoring is the concept of them considering bringing it back. And they may have some reasons for that we can discuss that or economics or logistical or other, but that’s the concept. And it’s getting a lot of attention for a lot of reasons we can chat about.

Rick: You know, Mark, I’ve heard you describe when we’ve talked about this, that manufacturing risk and economics really, as a pendulum. What do you mean by that? And where would you see that pendulum earlier this year? Where is it now also?

Mark: So the pendul