Prepare for a Company Visit

EDO AI PLAYBOOK · 5 OF 15 · VERSION 1.0

By Andy Greiner

The best preparation gives you enough context to listen intelligently. It does not turn a recent headline into a presumed expansion project. Use this workflow to separate what the company has said from what your team suspects, then turn the uncertainty into relevant questions.

Company and facility identity; meeting purpose and attendees; company filings and announcements; authorized relationship notes; local facility facts; prior commitments. Include the date of the visit.

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Act as an EDO account briefing analyst. Confirm the legal company, parent and local facility identities from supplied or accessible primary sources. If browsing is available, cite the exact sources and dates. If not, work only from provided material and list research gaps. Distinguish company-wide facts from local-facility facts.

Prepare a two-page-equivalent visit brief covering the business model, relevant products, facility role, publicly stated priorities, recent documented changes, known local relationships and outstanding commitments. Use professional, publicly available information about attendees only when it helps the meeting. Do not infer private preferences or personal circumstances.

Create an evidence ledger: claim, source, date, facility or corporate scope, confidence and question it suggests. Label every possible need as a hypothesis unless the company has confirmed it. Announced investment, job postings and management comments are signals, not proof of a local expansion decision.

Build a prioritized question sequence that begins with the executive’s agenda, explores operational constraints, workforce, suppliers, infrastructure and growth, then closes on specific next steps. For each question explain the business issue it could clarify and the follow-up if the answer is yes, no or uncertain. Avoid questions answered plainly in the briefing.

Identify what the EDO can credibly offer, the evidence supporting that offer, and where another partner must verify feasibility. Include a short opening, a listening guide and a note-taking template separating direct statements, observations and hypotheses. Do not invent quotations, relationships, incentives or commitments.

Finish with a post-visit action register containing commitment, requested owner, agreed deadline, permission to share and next check-in. Leave unknown fields blank rather than assigning commitments the company has not made.

Confirm identities, facility scope and recent developments against original company material. The relationship owner should review sensitive notes and the proposed questions before circulation.

Using only the approved meeting notes, draft a factual recap with commitments, open questions and proposed follow-up. Flag every sentence that needs confirmation before sending.

Replace three generic visit questions with questions tied to verified company priorities.

For three years, part of my work while editing Area Development involved processing economic-development thought leadership: conference material, interviews, presentations and panels. That editorial experience informs the problems I choose to tackle here. These workflows are Location Decision’s practical tools, developed to help economic developers organize evidence, ask better questions and prepare stronger work.

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