Rick Weddle: Welcome to Site Selection Matters, where we take a closer look at the art and science of site selection decision making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, President and CEO 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 with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners and corporate decision makers to provide you with deep insight into the next and best practices in our profession. In this episode, we have as our guest, Tom Stringer, managing director and service leader for site selection and incentives with BDO. Today, Tom will talk with us about the site location industry in the post-COVID 19 era. Join me as we welcome Tom Stringer to Site Selection Matters. Tom, before we get into how the pandemic has really changed your business, take a minute if you will, to give our listeners an overview of your portfolio or book of business and the site selection and location advisory world. Tell us a little bit about what you do.

Tom Stringer: Hey, Rick, and thanks for the time today, certainly appreciate it. Yep, our practice here at BDO really is multidisciplinary in the site collection and incentives world we work with various companies on things like corporate headquarters, where we represent companies like Northrop Grumman and other well known brands with their corporate headquarters site searches to major manufacturing facilities. We had the honor again of working with Northrop years ago for the long range strike bomber. Recently, another client of ours that’s attracted a lot of attention has been Nikola motors, we help them with their headquarters and their manufacturing facility in New Jersey, we just recently went public the other day, we also spent a lot of time working with major professional sports leagues helping them plan some of their major events. So, we have a lot of fun, we’re in a lot of different areas, and we certainly enjoy the work very much.

Rick: So, real quickly, just to kind of dig in on that just a bit major manufacturers, major headquarters, and sports leagues, that seems to take you across the full gamut of location work.

Tom: It does. One of the benefits of this profession, I think, is that you have to be multi-disciplined in order to really succeed through the ups and downs of economies and the swings and business cycles. And I’ll be honest, we’re at the point in our careers, our team here that we get to kind of choose our projects and choose the clients that we work with rather than having to chase a lot of business. And those clients have been with us for in some cases now decades, which is a lot of fun. And the economic impact of things like a major manufacturing facility, or a corporate headquarters, or a large event can be pretty tremendous for a community. Certainly you’ve seen that in film and TV Motion Picture production, where we have a rather large client that we help choose some of the site works for their production. And the economic impact from those events can be as large on a shorter term basis than it can be for permanent facility. So, we enjoy what economic development can do, we’re really happy to be a part of it. And it does keep it interesting when none of your clients are the same.

Rick: Sounds both interesting and fun. And then along came the future and the COVID-19 pandemic. Tell me how has that affected and also not just the pandemic, but also business and government’s response to that, how has that impacte