I have delivered a lot of client briefing following site visits. I have never told a client that a community had a wonderful PowerPoint presentation or an excellent site brochure.

What I have told clients — whats actually discussed in those meetings and shapes the decisions that follow — is something different. That the economic development team was responsive and clearly knew their product. That the utility partners showed up prepared and could answer hard questions without hedging. That leadership was aligned and spoke with one voice. That we left the meeting believing this community could execute on what it was promising.

Those are the factors that decide close contests. And the communities that win consistently are the ones that understand this — not as a soft observation about relationships, but as a hard operational reality about how location decisions actually get made.

The Late-Stage Filter

Here is how the process typically works by the time you are in finalist position. The technical evaluation is largely complete. The sites that remain have passed the threshold screens — logistics, labor, land, infrastructure. If they hadn't, they wouldn't be on the list. The gap between finalist locations on hard quantitative factors is usually narrow, sometimes negligible.

What the consulting team and the client are now evaluating — consciously or not — is a different question: which of these communities can we trust to deliver on what they've told us? Which team will be a genuine partner when something goes sideways eighteen months into construction? Which place will still want us five years after the ribbon-cutting, when the novelty has worn off and we're just another employer in town?

You learn the answers to those questions in person. Not from the RFI response, not from the site package, not from the data. You learn them from how the community team behaves when they're in the room with you — and from everything the community has done, or failed to do, before you arrived.

What Trust Actually Looks Like

Trust in this context is not a vague feeling. It is built from specific, observable behaviors that experienced consultants are trained to notice and company represenatives are noticing whether they realize it or not.

Responsiveness is the most basic signal. When a consulting team sends an RFP, a significant amount of work has already gone into that document. Every question in it matters. A TBD with no explanation, a partial answer with no follow-up call, a response that arrives three days late without acknowledgment — each of these creates a data point about how this community operates under pressure. If you can't manage an RFP response well, why would a company believe you can manage a project?

Alignment is the second signal, and it is harder to fake. When the economic development staff, the elected officials, and the utility partners are telling the same story — when nobody contradicts anyone else in the room, when there are no sideways glances when a hard question comes up — that registers. Its absence registers even more strongly. A community where the ED staff and the mayor are clearly not coordinated, or where the utility rep seems to be hearing about the project for the first time during the site visit, is a community that is telegraphing execution risk before a single shovel has been turned.

Preparedness for the specific project is the third signal. There is a difference between a community that has memorized its own assets and a community that has thought carefully about how those assets map to this particular client's requirements. If you know I'm looking at a food and beverage manufacturing project, and you walk into the meeting prepared to speak to occupation-level data for production workers in your labor market, examples of food and beverage companies you've worked with before, and a realistic assessment of what utilities can deliver for that load profile — that is a different conversation than a community that brings its standard deck.

Building It Before the Project Arrives

The most important thing I can tell you about intangible assets is that you cannot manufacture them when a project comes to town. They have to be built in advance — through relationships, through practice, through the work of getting your team and your partners genuinely aligned around a shared economic development mission.

That means having frank conversations with your elected officials and your board about what industries you are genuinely pursuing and why — not waiting until a project is in-market to test whether everyone is on the same page. It means building real working relationships with your utility partners, your workforce development organizations, and your regional collaborators before you need to call them at short notice for a site visit. It means doing enough projects that your team has muscle memory for how to respond, how to escalate, and how to close gaps quickly.

It also means being honest about where you fall short. Communities that oversell — that claim a rail-served site that isn't really rail-served, or a shovel-ready property that has never been fully vetted — are not just creating a risk for the project. They are destroying the intangible asset that is their professional credibility, and that damage persists across projects and across years. The reputation you build on one project follows you to the next.

The Practical Standard

The question I would encourage every economic development team to ask after a project — win or lose — is not just whether you had the right sites or the right incentive package. It is: what did the client's consultant write in their briefing memo about us?

If you were responsive, prepared, aligned, and honest — if you inspired confidence that your community could execute — you are building the asset that actually closes deals at the end of the process. If you weren't, no amount of investment in site readiness or incentive programming is going to compensate for it.

The communities that understand this are the ones I call when a project comes to town. They are not always the biggest or the best-resourced. They are the ones I trust to deliver.