You don’t need another list of industries to pursue
You have one. It’s in a binder, it was adopted three or four years ago, and it names eight to twelve sectors your location quotients say you’re strong in. Your BD team can recite it. Nobody uses it to decide anything.
That’s not because the analysis was wrong. It’s because the study answered “where are we concentrated?” when the board was asking “which of these can we win a competitive RFP for, against the regions that actually beat us?” Those are different questions, and they require a different methodology.
Analytically defensible. Operationally useless.
The conventional study is a growth-and-concentration exercise: run location quotients, find the sectors trending up, produce a list, hand it over. Three things go wrong, and they go wrong almost every time.
It never tests cost
A region can be perfectly concentrated in an industry it cannot win, because its power, water, or construction stack loses to a peer 200 miles south. Concentration is not competitiveness. Location quotient measures what you have — not whether you can win it again.
The thresholds drift
When a screen produces an unpopular answer, the threshold quietly moves, and the study confirms what the room already wanted. That isn't analysis. It's validation theater, and it's the reason your last study never eliminated anything.
It's never validated
The framework gets asserted, not tested. Nobody asks whether it would have predicted the deals you already lost. A methodology that can't explain your history can't be trusted with your pipeline.
We built this engagement to close all three gaps — every threshold locked before analysis runs, cost tested at RFP standard, and the framework run backward against your documented losses before a single verdict is reported forward.
Screen. Cost. Eliminate. Deploy.
Six phases in six to ten weeks — not because it’s a lighter study, but because a principal running a locked methodology doesn’t need two quarters of staff time to run it.
The rule: every threshold is locked in a registry before any analysis runs, and every figure traces to a source. Sourced, derived, and pending data stay distinguished throughout and are never conflated. Where a number isn’t confirmed, it’s carried as a flagged placeholder — never invented, never rounded into confidence it hasn’t earned.
The constraint map every later phase inherits.
Labor force and commuting-shed analysis, cluster mapping, and a full infrastructure inventory: power, water, wastewater, rail, river, fiber. We benchmark you against the specific out-of-state regions you actually lose to — not the peer list in your strategic plan — and build a documented-loss ledger from your own deal history.
A sourced baseline and a written constraint map, including the capacity ceilings that will decide later eliminations.
The full universe, five independent screens.
Roughly 200 industries enter. Five screens run against thresholds locked in advance: location quotient with a parallel wage-bill LQ as quality control, two-window shift-share separating genuine local competitive effect from national trend, automation risk drawn from published research rather than analyst judgment, wage quality tested against real inflation, and supply-chain gap analysis quantifying the import leakage you're already paying for.
A tiered shortlist — active-recruit targets, strategic opportunities identified deliberately outside the LQ screen, and a watch list carrying conditional scores into cost analysis with elevated scrutiny.
The phase most studies skip.
Each surviving region-industry pair is modeled the way a corporate consultant models it inside a live RFP: a prototype prospect specified across ten dimensions, a binary fatal-flaw screen at 150% of peak demand, a Total Cost of Project model pairing Year-0 CapEx with a 10-year NPV, a four-layer incentive overlay calibrated against real peer-region wins rather than statutory maximums, and a competitive position verdict re-run at 80% and 120% on labor, power, and construction. A verdict only counts as robust if it survives the band.
Fatal flaws come before cost for a reason: you never spend a week costing a project your infrastructure cannot host. The eliminations stop being judgment calls — not "this looks expensive," but "the water draw exceeds available capacity at the headroom standard, and here is the specific utility investment that would reopen it."
A pass / conditional / fail verdict per target, with the cost differential, the sensitivity band, and the costed path to close where one exists.
Written for the prospect's pain, not your pride.
Prospect-grade personas for each surviving target: operational footprint, decision triggers, dollar-quantified ecosystem asks, and named target-firm shortlists. Plus a concurrency stress test — an honest read on whether your labor shed can actually staff all of these wins at once.
A persona set your BD team can carry into a room, and your live pipeline mapped against it so coverage is validated rather than assumed.
The part that turns a study into a program.
An outbound firm register tiered by siting signal, battlecards and call scripts, collateral and web copy, a trade show and events plan, and a sequenced implementation roadmap with owners and lead times.
A prospecting program with assigned ownership — not a recommendations slide.
The decision narrative, board-ready.
Not a data dump. A defensible answer to the question your board has been asking for years: why do we keep losing, and what specifically do we do about it?
A ratified target roster and a narrative that survives contact with a prospect's CFO.
Methodology isn’t differentiation. Executing it is.
The threshold registry
Every LQ floor, automation ceiling, wage floor, verdict gate, discount rate, and headroom multiplier is set and recorded in a control tab before analysis begins, and carried unchanged through every calculation. When a top-tier industry fails, nobody can argue the goalposts moved — because the goalposts are in writing and dated.
Fatal flaws before cost
Physical capacity gets screened first. That ordering makes the eliminations arithmetic rather than opinion, which is what makes the approvals credible. A target list that never eliminates anything is a marketing document, not a strategy.
The framework has to predict your losses first
Before any verdict is reported forward, we run the methodology backward against your documented losses. If it doesn't reproduce the mechanism behind the deals you already lost, you don't know what it's measuring. A framework that explains your history is a framework you can take to a board.
We have no stake in the answer
We've been the party running the cost model against you
Fifteen years on both sides of the table. The cost stack, the headroom standard, the sensitivity band — this is the same arithmetic that eliminated your region in somebody else's spreadsheet. Better to run it yourself, first.
We will tell you what you cannot win
We have eliminated a client's most-wanted target on a physical constraint, documented the utility investment that would reopen it, and redirected the thesis into an adjacent sub-sector that fit inside existing capacity. That elimination was the most useful sentence in the report.
We don't oversell the glamour target
When a data center track cleared the cost gate only under an abatement that pushed the host tax base to its limit, the verdict was Conditional — and it went into the client's own collateral in amber rather than green, caveat included. Prospects find out the real constraints eventually. Better that they find out from you.
We don't paper over a structural disadvantage
If your power rates run above your southern peer set, we say so. The defensible claim isn't that power is cheap — it's that for the specific targets on your roster, power cost isn't the decisive line, and here is exactly where and by how much the incentive framework closes the gap.
Structured for the way EDOs actually operate
Fixed fee, never hourly
You know the number before we start, and it doesn't move when scope clarifies.
Weeks, not quarters
Six to ten weeks from kickoff to board presentation. You'll have a working roster inside one budget cycle.
Phase gates, not a black box
Each phase ends with a deliverable and a decision. Continue, pause, or stop — the work you've paid for stands on its own either way.
You get the workbooks, not just the report
Every model, every threshold registry, every version-history entry. You can recreate any number in the report from first principles, which is what "defensible" actually means.
Built for boards and funders
We'll help you build the approval packet, present to your board, and package the outcome for the state, the utility partner, or the funder underwriting the work.
We work with your team, not around it
Your staff learns the model as we build it. When the engagement ends, the knowledge stays in the building — and the roster can be refreshed without hiring anyone.
Good fit
- Regional partnerships and EDOs whose target list is more than three years old or has never survived a cost test.
- Organizations with a documented loss record they're tired of explaining.
- Utility ED teams, port authorities, and certified tech parks that need a targeting thesis their infrastructure can actually support.
- Boards that want to stop debating targets and start working a roster.
- Typically 3 to 25 staff. Based in Indiana, working nationally.
If your leadership needs the study to confirm a target that’s already been promised publicly, we’re the wrong firm. This methodology eliminates things, and the eliminations are the point. If nothing can be cut, you don’t need analysis — you need a brochure, and somebody else should write it.
We are direct about fit during the discovery conversation. If a full engagement isn’t the right entry point, we’ll tell you what is.
We told a regional EDO which industry it could not win
A four-county manufacturing region with $1.6B in documented lost projects needed more than a target list. 198 industries screened. Fatal flaws tested before cost. Five locked recruitment targets the BD team could work Monday morning.
More on targeting and competitiveness
What a Targeted Industry Study Is Actually For
Why concentration and competitiveness aren’t the same thing — and why most studies answer the wrong question.
You Already Know Who Won This RFP
Why the deal was decided before the response was submitted — and what communities that keep winning have in common.
Start with a conversation
No pitch deck required. Tell us which targets you’re currently chasing and which regions keep beating you, and we’ll tell you honestly whether you need a full study, a cost test on two or three targets, or just permission to retire a list nobody believes.
20 minutes, no cost.
Schedule a Fit CallOr email [email protected]