The Project: Inside Corporate Location Decisions

This week we bring you the story of Sweetwater Sound, a homegrown Fort Wayne, Indiana company that started as a one-man operation in a Volkswagen bus in 1979 and has since grown to become the No. 1 online retailer of music instruments and audio gear. The company announced plans in October 2018 to invest $76 million in two new facilities at its 163-acre campus in Fort Wayne, bringing its facilities to a total of 800,000 square feet. To get the full story behind this impressive growth, we spoke to Sweetwater's visionary Founder and CEO Chuck Surack and John Urbahns, CEO of Greater Fort Wayne Inc.

KPMG is one of the "big four" accounting firms and has over 200,000 employees across the globe. The firm's practice in the Greater Toronto Area was growing and needed to find a new regional headquarters. At the same time KPMG was looking for a new headquarters, the city of Vaughan had a new Mayor who was focused on building a new and vibrant central business district. To get the story, we spoke with Sebastian Distefano, regional managing partner of KPMG, and Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua, Vaughan's mayor since 2010. 

This week, we bring you the story of Nexient, a digital product services company that was born in Silicon Valley, but has expanded rapidly across the Midwest. In March 2019, the company announced its newest center will be in Columbus, Ohio, where the company will add more than 200 jobs over the next three years. To get the full story, we spoke with Colin Chapman, Chief Delivery Officer with Nexient and Matt McQuade, Director of Business Development for Columbus 2020.

Last month The Project Podcast traveled to the Site Selectors Guild Annual Conference in Salt Lake City. And we conducted a series of one-on-one interviews with some of the nation's top site selection consultants. For the second installment from the Salt Lake City meeting, we just picked out some of the most interesting takeaways from our discussions with four, different Guild consultants.

1. Data Not Words (Darin Buelow, Deloitte Consulting LLP)
2. Try Before You Buy Emerges in Site Selection (Larry Gigerich, Ginovus)
3. Keep Your Money…Show Me The Training (Mike Mullis, J.M. Mullis)
4. Talent Rules But Don't Ignore Business Climate (Jay Garner, Garner Economics)

We cover these topics in rapid-fire approach in this 13-minute episode.

In the world of corporate location decision making, The Site Selectors Guild Annual Conference is a "not to be missed" event. So we took "The Project" on the road to Salt Lake City, Utah to sit down with ten Guild members for a discussion about a single topic: Talent. Here are key insights from our interviews with Darin Buelow (Deloitte Consulting LLP), Dennis Donovan (Wadley Donovan Gutshaw Consulting), Deane Foote (Foote Consulting Group), Jay Garner (Garner Economics), Larry Gigerich (Ginovus), Jeanette Goldsmith (Strategic Development Group), Chris Lloyd (McGuire Woods Consulting), Seth Martindale (CBRE), Mike Mullis (J.M. Mullis) and Rajeev Thakur (Newmark Knight Frank) all distilled into an 18-minute episode. 

The news that Amazon had reversed its decision to create a technology campus in Long Island City with 25,000 jobs ripped through the national media and economic development world last week. And it the wake of this extraordinary announcement, The Project Podcast had the good fortune to land an exclusive interview with Mike Grella, Amazon's Director of Economic Development for the past seven years. Mike departed Amazon last week (completely unrelated to the HQ2 news) to launch his own consultancy. From his unique vantage point, he shared his thoughts on the future of mega-deals, incentives and site selection searches.

The Project co-host Andy Levine caught up with Mike by telephone while he was on a Caribbean cruise with his wife and family.

Yes, Amazon HQ2 was the big, economic development story of 2018. It was one of those rare moments when the topic of economic development actually snuck into national headlines. And on November 13th, 2018 the company finally announced its decision to locate 25,000 people in Northern Virginia and another 25,000 in New York City. 

"The Project" co-host Andy Levine  traveled to Richmond, Virginia to meet with a chief negotiator of this landmark project. He sat down with Stephen Moret, President and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership for a behind the scenes look at this deal.

Earlier this month we traveled to Nashville for the Economix Conference. It's run by a group called Consultant Connect and a gathering of 250 economic developers and site selection consultants -- terrific content and great networking opportunities. 

One of the sessions that stood out was a presentation made by Gray Swoope of Vision First Advisors. Gray previously headed up economic development in the states of Florida, Mississippi and Arkansas. His session was titled "The Ten Big Issues of 2018." For today's podcast, we asked Gray to trim this down to the "Top 5 Issues" of the past year. Here's the countdown from #5 to #1: 

5) Trade

4) Disappearing Workforce

3) Disruption

2) Incentives Under Attack 

1) Amazon HQ2

Special thanks to Gray for the chance to reflect back on the past year in economic development. 

The Michigan fight song and an interview with KLA-Tencor's Chief Strategy Officer Bobby Bell is featured in this podcast. Bobby describes how the company and consulting partner Deloitte navigated a search that went from 350 locations to 12 communities to 3 finalists. And in the end, Ann Arbor, Michigan was the last location standing. The new, $70 million research and development center will house an estimated 500 positions. Ann Arbor Spark SVP Phil Santer also describes how a "trip to the big house," the University's fabled football stadium, helped add some color to a three-day site visit with the company's selection team.

On this special episode, we interview a rare Millennial Site Consultant. John Longshore is a Senior Consultant with Global Location Strategies (GLS) out of Greenville, SC. He entered the job market during the 2008 recession with a special appreciation for what it means to create jobs and has been helping companies and communities ever since. We asked John for his take on Amazon's public location search, the process for evaluating a community's talent pool, his economic development marketing peeves and much more.