The fact that you’re even receiving this magazine indicates that your business must be doing well.
And one of the byproducts of success in business is the need to grow, to physically expand, to open up new facilities, new production plants, new warehouse facilities, new distribution hubs, new service or sales offices.
Sometimes these new operations are right next door to your existing facility. Sometimes they’re on the other side of the country, or even the other side of the world.
Whatever — and wherever — it is you’re expanding, the reality is that, as a successful and growing business, your strategic goals require you to occasionally physically expand from your current environment.
It’s a fact most folks don’t spend much time thinking about, though.
After all, it was your knowledge of your market and your product that made your company successful, not your familiarity with worldwide labor costs and availability, or your background in real estate markets throughout the country, or your contacts with local and state economic development executives around the globe.
Some companies are large enough, and expand often enough, to maintain a fulltime staff of experts to guide them through the site selection process.
Most companies don’t. And that’s why magazines like this one exist.
It’s our business to know about labor markets, about real estate, about taxes, about business climates, about incentives. And it’s our business to be experts on the expansion and relocation process itself. We live it and breathe it … and we have for more than 15 years.
This year’s Atlas & Guide is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of business and demographic data, as well as economic development contacts that we have at our fingertips.
Our goal is to share that knowledge and information with you, to help get you started and oriented in the right direction.
That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Getting started.
The worst part of it is, though, that you don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on the learning curve. Most growing companies need their new facility — plant, warehouse, distribution, back office, whatever — up and operating immediately.
Life is like that, and so is business. That’s why things like “Cliff’s Notes” and “(fill in the blank) for Dummies” are so successful. They give you what you need quickly, and in manageable portions.
In fact, after considerable prompting from our readers, our renowned research department has come out with an easy-to-use CD called “Site Search 101: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know to Find the Best Location for Your Company,” that’s like an executive summary for companies like yours in the expansion/site selection mode.
Just pop it in your computer, spend a couple of hours going through our digital self-paced text, review the data behind EM’s current research projects — like the Education Quotient, Legislative Quotient, Quality of Life Quotient, Employment Cost Index, Work Force Training, and more — and you’ll be in a much better position to organize and direct your company’s next facility search.
After all, our job is to help you learn to help yourself … no more, no less.
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