The Site Selectors Guild is an association of site selection consultants who provide location strategy advice to companies across a myriad of industries, sectors, and geographies. The Guild is comprised of 41-members, each of whom are peer-nominated, vetted, and demonstrate a significant amount of location advisory experience.
Having attended The Site Selectors Guild 2016 Fall Forum in Little Rock, here are a few major takeaways I return with from my first Guild event.
- Invest Buffalo Niagara must continue to take advantage of all opportunities to discuss our business attraction efforts with site selectors and their clients who are searching for a location to site an expansion project. Site selector generated opportunities generally have large job and investment numbers attached to them and create a greater economic impact in the region. Most recently, Invest Buffalo Niagara along with our local partners worked with Site Selectors Guild Board Member Mark Williams and his client, Bridgestone APM, to site a manufacturing facility in Niagara County. The project will create 60 jobs and carries a capital investment of over $15,000,000 and a total economic impact of over $31,000,000.
- Economic developers must stay abreast of changing business environments, both domestically and internationally, and educate themselves how external factors influence corporate site selection decisions. The Fall Forum organized insightful breakout sessions on current hot-button issues such as: workforce development, foreign direct investment, transportation infrastructure, regulatory environment and incentives.
- Expanding professional networks and meeting new colleagues is a great way to share best-practices and lessons learned. Economic developers and location consultants depend on each other to successfully site a project. Having positive, professional relationships with the members of The Site Selectors Guild helps improve the competitiveness of our region in site location decisions.
The site selector community is a small, but influential, one. Invest Buffalo Niagara staff will continue to elucidate the benefits of our region for business attraction projects to site location consultants and their clients over a variety of platforms.
