The Project: Inside Corporate Location Decisions

So what does 2017 look like in terms of site location decisions? How will the Trump Presidency impact corporate decision-making? And will new minimum wage increases in states like New York, California and Colorado change the landscape at all?

"The Project" sits down with Kathy Mussio, Managing Partner with Atlas Insight and Brett Bayduss, Executive Vice President of the Site Selection Group for their perspective on the year ahead. They share interesting answers to some difficult questions in the first podcast of the new year.

Charles Schwab recently announced plans to build a $100 million campus that would initially house 1,200 staffers in Westlake, Texas, a growing suburb of Dallas. Understanding where the right financial services talent "is going to be" in the next 20 years was the key to selecting a location in the Dallas region.

To get the inside story we decided to "Talk to Chuck" – or in this case Chuck's Senior Vice President of Corporate Real Estate Glenn Cooper. We also interview Larry Gigerich, Managing Director of Ginovus (a site selection firm engaged by the company) and the Honorable Laura Wheat, Mayor of Westlake, Texas.

It started with a Thanksgiving Day Tweet from Donald Trump: "I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier to stay in the U.S. MAKING PROGRESS - Will know soon!"

On December 1st, just a week later, President-Elect Trump, Vice-President-Elect Pence and Greg Hayes, President of Carrier Corp's parent company, stood on-stage together and announced that 1,000 jobs would stay in the United States and not relocate to Mexico. It was an extraordinary reversal and Carrier's local workforce couldn't have been happier.  

So on the day of the announcement, we set-up a conference call with two highly-respected site selection consultants to get their take on this decision. You'll hear from Larry Gigerich, Managing Director of Ginovus and Michelle Comerford, Industrial & Supply Chain Manager with Biggins Lacy Shapiro, another highly respected site consulting firm. Both firms are members of the Site Selectors Guild. 

Vonco Products, a manufacturer of flexible packaging products with 80+ employees, recently announced plans to move its operations across state lines from Lake Villa, Illinois to Salem, Wisconsin. If you're up on your Midwestern geography, you know that move was just 20 miles to the North. But the deal at the center of this episode was nearly two years in the making.

We talk to Keith Smith, President at Vonco Products, and Todd Battle, President of the Kenosha Area Business Alliance, to get the full story.

Hotwire Communications is a fast-growing, privately held company that was rapidly outgrowing its headquarters in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. When they began exploring a new location, they did so quietly without the help of consultants or economic development organizations. Their search led them to purchase a 180,000 square foot building in Fort Lauderdale that was a perfect match with their needs. And they called upon both the city and the state for a $1.9 million incentive package that would seal the deal.

We interview Dan O'Connell, Vice President of Sales for Hotwire Communications and Bob Swindell, President/CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance in this episode.

Alorica is a $2 billion company with 92,000 employees. And you've probably never heard of them. They are the largest customer engagement company in the United States and they run 162 centers in America. We're going to mix things up a bit and tell the story of Alorica's search as a three-act drama with three central characters telling the story. 

The name of the company is CAEK – which stands for Catherine, Anna, Elizabeth, and Katie – four entrepreneurial women who started a software development company in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Their growth plans will take them from 9 employees today to a staff of 150 people in five years. So the need for talent and venture capital took them to the West. They looked at tech hotspots of Silicon Valley, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Austin but ultimately they decided to relocate their growing company to Reno, Nevada. We talked to CAEK Founder Katie Lay and Stan Thomas, Executive Vice President of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (or EDAWN for short). 

When Dana Incorporated was selected to supply axles for the next-generation Jeep Wrangler, the company chose the Overland Industrial Park in Toledo, Ohio – the exact site where the first Jeeps were built in the 1940's – as the site of its new manufacturing facility. For the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, which purchased the site in 2010 and invested heavily to attract tenants, the decision represented a big risk that ultimately paid off. We talked to Ken Andres, Global Director of Real Estate and Construction at Dana, and Paul Toth, President and CEO of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, to get the full story.

iCIMS, a technology firm that had been on the Inc. 500 list for ten years in a row, had outgrown its existing space. Based in Central New Jersey, they needed a new home that would be appeal to the company's millennial talent. Their search took them to Bell Works, a former research laboratory constructed in 1962 with a long history of innovation. They hit some bumps along the way but with the help of a pioneering real estate developer, our story has a happy ending.