There’s a bad time to discover you don’t have the information a prospect needs.
It’s when the prospect asks for it.
I've spent years interviewing EDOs and corporate real estate executives, talking with site consultants and working through educational content designed to help communities compete for projects.
One lesson has stuck with me:
You don't really know how ready you are until somebody starts asking uncomfortable questions.
So don't wait for a live project.
Make one up.
Give yourself a fictional manufacturer that needs 100 acres, 20 MW of power and 400 workers. Give it an aggressive construction schedule.
Then send the RFI around the office on Monday morning.
And start the clock.
Can you identify the sites?
Great. Now: Who owns them? Are they actually available? What's the zoning? What's been done environmentally?
You've got power?
Great. How much? Delivered when? At what level of certainty?
You've got the workforce?
Of course you do. Everybody has a great workforce.
Show me.
How many workers with the right skills live within a realistic commute? What do they earn? Who else is competing for them? How many more can your training system produce?
Then try permitting. Water. Wastewater. Transportation. Incentives.
You'll learn something pretty quickly.
The point isn't to see whether your economic development team knows the answers.
It's to find out how hard it is to get them.
Maybe your sites team is terrific, but the workforce data is stale.
Maybe everyone says permitting is fast, but nobody can tell you what “fast” means.
Maybe the utility answer requires four phone calls.
Maybe three organizations have to collaborate on the response — and they've never actually practiced collaborating under deadline.
That's useful information.
Because when a real RFI arrives, you're not just selling a community. You're demonstrating that the people on the other end of a nine-figure investment can trust you to execute.
I've heard corporate executives and consultants describe great economic developers in a hundred different ways.
Responsive. Prepared. Connected. Knowledgeable. Honest.
Most of those qualities show up in the same place:
They get the answer.
So run the drill.
Find the holes.
Make the uncomfortable phone calls now.
Because Friday afternoon, with a real project on the line, is a lousy time to discover where your organization keeps the fire extinguisher.