You came back with contacts. Your competitor came back with a next step.
The conference went well. Your team had good conversations, collected thirty-some cards, and got a photo for the newsletter. Somebody will send follow-up emails next week.
Three months later, the board asks what came of it. The honest answer is hard to say — and it’s hard to say because nobody defined what would have counted before you booked the flights. Meanwhile the consultant you most wanted twenty minutes with had a calendar that filled two weeks before the event, booked by an EDO that knew to ask.
The people who get value out of these events aren’t more charming than you. They’re better prepared, they know who’s actually worth the meeting, and they follow up within 48 hours with something specific rather than something warm.
The scorecard is wrong, so the preparation is wrong
Most recruitment events are measured in volume — badges scanned, cards collected, conversations had. Those are activity metrics, and activity metrics quietly reshape everything upstream of them. If contacts are the goal, walking the floor is a reasonable strategy. If advancing projects is the goal, it isn’t. Three failures follow from that, and they’re the same three every time.
The right meetings weren't booked
Site selection consultants and corporate real estate directors arrive at these events with full calendars. The value isn't in the floor — it's in the thirty-minute meetings that were requested by email in advance, by someone who knew which four people on the attendee list were worth requesting. Hoping to be introduced is not a plan.
The room got away from you
On a FAM tour, the most common failure is that an elected official talks for forty minutes about civic history to a consultant who needed ninety minutes standing on the site with someone who has utility authority. Everyone is well-intentioned. The itinerary was built for pride rather than diligence, and nobody in the organization is positioned to tell the mayor to hold it to five minutes.
Follow-up died in the first ten days
The deal doesn't fail at the event. It fails afterward, when the follow-up is a pleasant note rather than an answer to the specific question that came up in the conversation, with the data attached, before the consultant's file goes cold. A generic follow-up is functionally the same as no follow-up, except it burns the impression you made.
The third one is where deals actually die
Every engagement is scoped to a single event or a season of them. The rule: we define what would make this event worth the money before you spend it, in terms specific enough that the answer three months later isn’t hard to say.
The part that determines the outcome
Target list construction: which consultants, corporate real estate executives, developers, and brokers on the attendee list are actually worth your team's limited hours — and, just as usefully, which ones aren't. Then outreach and pre-booking, with requests written the way the recipient prefers to receive them.
For each confirmed meeting, a briefing sheet: who they are, what they've worked on recently, what they're likely searching for, what they'll ask you, and your specific ask. Not "build a relationship" — a defined next step you're trying to secure. Plus a materials check, team role assignments, and the scorecard.
A vetted target list, a booked meeting calendar, briefing sheets per meeting, assigned roles, and an agreed definition of a successful event.
Senior presence, in the room
We travel with your team. Real-time coaching between meetings, reading how each conversation actually landed rather than how it felt, and fielding the technical questions your team can't answer on the spot — capacity, incentive structure, timeline — so the answer isn't "let me get back to you" on the one question that mattered.
Nightly debrief while it's fresh: what was committed to, by whom, what needs to go out first thing, and which of tomorrow's meetings should change as a result.
A second senior voice in the room, live coaching, and a captured commitment log that becomes the follow-up plan rather than a memory.
Inside 48 hours, and specific
Every contact tiered honestly: advance, nurture, or drop. For the advance tier, follow-up drafted to answer the actual question raised in the conversation with the data attached — because that email is the real test of whether the meeting meant anything. Next-touch dates assigned with owners. CRM entries that a successor could use.
Then the readout: what moved, what didn't, what it cost, and what to do differently next time. Including the count your board asked for, stated honestly.
Tiered contacts, drafted follow-up, a next-touch calendar, and a board-ready readout with an honest assessment rather than an activity report.
Where this applies
FAM tours and consultant visits
The highest-cost, highest-waste event most EDOs run — and the one where outside help pays for itself fastest. We rebuild the itinerary around what a consultant needs to leave with, right-size the vehicle and the guest list, prep the electeds and partners on their five minutes, and make sure the utility representative in the room is the one who can actually commit to something.
National conferences
Target lists, pre-booked meetings, briefing sheets, and a senior second voice for the conversations that matter. Also an honest read on which events are worth your travel budget at all, which is sometimes the more valuable finding.
Active prospect site visits
When a real project is coming to look, this is the highest-stakes day on your calendar. Choreography, room composition, question anticipation, and rehearsal — including the questions you're hoping they won't ask.
Industry trade shows
Sector-specific shows where the audience is operators rather than consultants. Different targets, different materials, different ask — and usually a much shorter list of people worth talking to than the exhibitor guide suggests.
Missions and delegations
Multi-stakeholder trips where the coordination problem is as large as the recruitment problem. Roles, message discipline, and a defined ask per meeting so a delegation of nine speaks with one voice.
We’ve been the person you’re trying to get twenty minutes with
Fifteen years on both sides of the table, and years spent as the consultant receiving these pitches — deciding which communities got a follow-up call and which ones got a polite exit. That’s the useful part. We know what a good approach sounds like, what makes a consultant quietly write you off in the first two minutes, and which of the forty people at the reception are actually deciding anything.
We'll tell you not to go
Some events aren't worth your travel budget for your target industries, and that's a costless thing for us to say on a per-event fee.
We'll say the thing your staff can't
That the mayor needs to hold it to five minutes, that the bus tour should be a van, that the lunch should be forty-five minutes shorter. Your director may know all of this and be in no position to say it out loud. We are.
We'll tell you the truth in the debrief
Including when a meeting your team felt good about produced nothing — a specific and common failure mode worth catching early.
Preparation is the product
If you only buy one piece of this, buy the before. Presence without preparation is an expensive observer.
Structured around your event calendar
Per-event fixed fee
Priced per event, quoted before you commit. Travel and expenses handled transparently and separately.
Prep-only is a real option
You can buy the before alone — target list, bookings, briefing sheets, scorecard — and run the event yourself. Many organizations should start there.
One event or a season
A single high-stakes FAM tour, or a full conference calendar with continuity between events so the follow-up from March informs the meetings in September.
Senior only, on the ground
The person who builds the prep is the person who travels. No handoff between the planning and the room.
Booking windows are real
Meeting calendars close two to three weeks out at most national events, and good preparation needs lead time. Six weeks ahead is comfortable; two weeks ahead means we're buying you less.
Your team runs it next time
The briefing sheet format, the target vetting logic, the follow-up standard. It's all reusable — the point is that you don't need us for the third conference.
Good fit
- EDOs with a real event budget and no systematic way to evaluate its return.
- Organizations hosting a FAM tour for the first time, or hosting one again after a disappointing round.
- Teams with a live prospect visit on the calendar and one chance at it.
- New directors inheriting an event calendar they didn't build.
- Regional partnerships where multiple jurisdictions travel together and message discipline is the actual problem.
- Organizations that just completed a target industry study or new positioning work and need the event calendar rebuilt around it.
Typically 3 to 25 staff. Based in Indiana, working nationally.
If you don’t have a marketable site and materials that survive a question, don’t buy conference support yet — you’ll be paying us to help you get told no more efficiently. Fix the position first.
And if leadership’s real goal is to have the trip approved rather than to make it work, we’re the wrong firm: our debriefs say when a meeting produced nothing, and that document exists whether or not it’s comfortable.
We’re direct about fit during the discovery conversation. If a different engagement would serve you better, we’ll say so.
Often paired with
Event support is downstream of position. The pairs below address what needs to be true before the calendar is worth building.
Community Profile & Marketing
The materials you'll be handing over and being questioned about. If they don't survive a consultant's follow-up question, the meeting was wasted regardless of how it went.
Target Industry Study
The target list at the event should follow the target roster. If the roster is stale, the calendar will be too.
Advisory Retainer
Continuity between events, and a read on the prospects that emerge from them while they're still live.
Certified Site & Economic Development Strategy
For when the debrief keeps identifying the same site-readiness gap.
What actually happens on a site visit
You’re Not Going to See the Arch. You’re Going to See the Substation.
FAM tours, site visits, and why boots-on-the-ground still closes the gap between what a community says it is and what it actually is.
You Already Know Who Won This RFP
What the project brief, incentive language, and timeline are actually telling you about which community already has the deal — and why preparation is the only variable you control.
How to Host a FAM Tour That Actually Impresses Site Selectors
Keith Gillenwater of The Enterprise Group of Jackson on what it takes to host a top-tier familiarization tour — and what separates the ones that generate next steps from the ones that don’t.
Start with a conversation
Tell us which events are on your calendar this year and what came of last year’s. We’ll tell you honestly which ones are worth going to, whether you need support on the ground or just better preparation, and what a successful version of each would look like.
20 minutes, no cost.
Schedule a Fit CallOr email [email protected]