Economic Development Has a Translation Problem

Economic developers spend a remarkable amount of time assembling information.

They know the available acreage. They know the interstate distance, utility providers, labor shed and incentive programs. They can tell you which training programs operate at the local community college and how quickly the mayor can get on the phone.

That information matters.

But having the information and communicating what it means to a company making a location decision are two different skills.

Economic development has a translation problem.

The people responsible for promoting communities naturally tend to speak in the language of communities: assets, partnerships, quality of life, strategic location and economic momentum.

Companies and their site selection advisers tend to approach the same place differently.

They are trying to answer a series of increasingly specific questions.

Can we build here?

Can we power the facility?

Can we hire the people?

Can we get permitted on schedule?

What will it cost?

What could go wrong?

And, increasingly important: How confident are we in the answers we have been given?

That distinction matters because location decisions are usually processes of elimination long before they become competitions for a final investment.

A community may begin in a field of dozens of possible locations. At that stage, nobody is deciding whether the community is wonderful.

They are looking for a reason it won't work.

Consider a community promoting a 500-acre industrial site.

Five hundred acres sounds impressive. But acreage by itself tells a site selector relatively little.

How much is developable?

Who owns it?

Is the property under control?

What environmental work has been completed?

What is the topography?

Where is the nearest transmission infrastructure?

How much water and wastewater capacity is available today?

What road improvements would be required?

How long would permitting realistically take?

A strong economic development organization doesn't merely know that it has 500 acres.

It understands the site's constraints well enough to explain what can actually happen there.

The same principle applies to workforce.

Saying a region has a strong workforce is promotion.

Showing the number of workers within a realistic commute who already possess relevant occupations is information.

Explaining the training programs that could close the remaining gap is strategy.

The more competitive the project, the more important that progression becomes.

There is another part of readiness that receives considerably less attention: knowing where your community is weak.

Every location has constraints.

Maybe the industrial site needs a road extension. Maybe wastewater capacity becomes tight beyond a certain level of development. Maybe the labor market can support a 300-person operation but would struggle with a 1,500-person project. Maybe power is theoretically available but the interconnection schedule doesn't match the company's construction timeline.

Those aren't necessarily reasons to lose a project.

Discovering them late can be.

The best economic developers I have encountered don't try to make every answer sound good. They try to make every answer reliable.

That credibility becomes an asset of its own.

A consultant who believes you when you say "yes" is also more likely to believe you when you explain what must happen before the answer becomes yes.

There is enormous attention across economic development right now on speed to market.

Usually, that conversation focuses on permitting, site readiness, utilities and construction.

But information has a speed-to-market problem, too.

A request for information arrives Monday.

Can the community answer by Wednesday?

Not with marketing language. With numbers.

How much power?

By what date?

At what voltage?

How much wastewater?

What is the usable acreage?

What occupations are available within 30 and 45 minutes?

Which incentives apply to this particular investment?

Who has authority to approve them?

The time to assemble those answers is not when the project arrives.

It is before anyone knows the project exists.

That may be the most useful exercise an economic development team can perform.

Take your best site, building or workforce proposition and stop asking why a company should choose it.

Ask why a consultant would eliminate it.

Then work backward.

If the answer isn't known, find it.

If the infrastructure isn't ready, understand the path to fixing it.

If an important claim can't be demonstrated, stop making the claim until it can.

And if the answer is genuinely unfavorable, know that before the prospect does.

Economic development will always involve storytelling. Communities should be ambitious about telling theirs.

But the most effective story isn't simply that a place is growing, business-friendly or well-positioned.

It is the story of a community that understands what a company needs to make a difficult, expensive location decision — and has done the work before the phone rings.

That's the language Location Decision intends to spend a lot of time translating.