What do college football and corporate site selection have in common? More than you might think.
This time of year the focus of millions of Americans — particularly those of the male persuasion — turns to football, specifically to college football and, even more specifically, to which school has the best team.
Every week the sports writers vote, the coaches vote, even computers vote, each based upon some complicated formula that compares wins and losses, strength of schedule, perhaps even the phase of the moon.
The object of these polls is to slim down the list of contending universities from some hundred or more teams down to just two. Those two teams then go head-to-head in the Fiesta Bowl (this year, at least) to determine the national champion.
The site selection process is much the same.
Your company starts out looking for the best place to expand or relocate its operations. You will probably begin with a hundred or more possibilities, much like in college football just before the first weekend of competition.
In football the majority of the schools will be knocked out of the competition after the first week or two. The same will be true for your site location search. After starting out with a hundred or more possible locations, you’ll quickly eliminate all but about 15 or so.
In college football, the rest of the season is spent trying to work the list down to the final two teams. Likewise, the bulk of your time will be spend reducing the list of 15 or so possibilities down to a short list of two or three final contenders.
And how does college football get down to its final two schools? Simple. A number of independent polls rank the various contending teams according to a set of commonly accepted criteria. Polls are conducted every week to measure how each of the remaining contenders is doing, but it’s the final poll conducted at season’s end that will determine the final two contestants.
The same is true for you in your search.
You’ll evaluate the various different locations according to a number of factors — many of which are rated and ranked in this issue of Expansion Management — and then rank them according to whatever criteria you have established to enable you to select the best location for your particular company.
Hopefully, this process will enable you to eliminate all but the two or three best locations, at which point you will actually visit the final sites in order to determine, first-hand, which is best. Look at this phase as your very own site search Fiesta Bowl.
But it’s deciding which communities among the 15 or so legitimate contenders actually make it into your Fiesta Bowl that takes all the time and hard work. That’s when you need to start collecting specific data on things like work force quality and availability, labor costs, tax rates, tax incentives, training incentives and infrastructure. Then it’s time to rank the communities according to how well they meet your company’s needs, and to see how they shake out.
When you’ve whittled it down to your short list of a couple of communities that meet all of your needs, it’s time to let ‘em go head-to-head.
That’s when you can break out the chips and dip … and don’t forget your helmet.
Means the article is accessible only to our magazine subscribers.
