The Fedtrade® podcast recently interviewed Tracey Hyatt Bosman, Managing Director of Biggins Lacy Shapiro & Company (BLS & Co.), as part of our SelectUSA Investment Summit Spotlight series. BLS & Co. is one of the largest specialty site selection and incentives advisory consulting firms in North America, helping companies compete and flourish by optimizing location choices. Members of BLS & Co. will be attending the 2025 SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, from May 11-14, 2025.
Learn more about BLS & Co. on their website or follow them on LinkedIn. Connect with Tracey on LinkedIn.
Key Takeaways:
- BLS specializes in U.S. site selection and incentives.
- U.S. market entry often evolves as companies uncover new information, making flexibility and the ability to pivot essential.
- Other key aspects of U.S. market entry—such as legal, engineering, and accounting—should be launched in parallel with site selection to prevent downstream delays.
- Geography impacts access to labor, suppliers, and markets.
[a copy of the written transcript is here]:
Hello, welcome to Fedtrade®. I’m James Hastings of Rothwell Figg. Joining us on the podcast is Tracey Hyatt Bosman, Managing Director, Biggins, Lacy, Shapiro & Company (BLS & Co.), one of the largest specialty site selection and incentives advisory consulting firms in North America. Tracey will be sharing BLS’s mission and how it helps international companies identify the best locations and secure incentives to go to market in the United States. Tracey, welcome to Fedtrade®.
Thank you. Looking forward to the conversation.
What is BLS and its mission?
BLS is a specialty consultancy focused exclusively on location economics. And location economics is a registered trademark we use – I believe you know something about trademarks – that we use to encapsulate site selection, incentives advisory services, utility services, and redevelopment services, and in the latter case, particularly around repositioning of legacy assets. So today’s conversation is really about those first three – site selection, incentives, and utilities. In other words, it’s our mission to assist companies in identifying and securing the optimal location for a new or expanding operation. And this mission means our service goes well beyond knowing the facts about the various locations. Rather, we bring not only the data, but also the experience and processes and decision-making tools to move clients efficiently and effectively from where to here.
How did BLS get into this business, which is a very specialized area?
Right, it’s a very niche field. The firm began over 25 years ago in a law firm and was really focused on economic development incentives. And as the practice grew, the firm spun out of the law firm and became independent. And then over the years the site selection practice was built and other elements of that, including the utility services, around the original firm that was focused on incentives advisory services. So for the past 15 years, we’ve been full site selection and incentives.
That’s great. What types of companies or entities does BLS serve?
So we work with all kinds of companies from the Fortune 100 to startups and everything in between, including private, public, family held, domestic, foreign, you name it.
International businesses have many options to locate when going to the United States. What are some of the factors or considerations you take into account in advising them?
Well, you bring up a really good point that companies do have many options in the U.S. And the U.S. is a big country. And it’s perhaps not always fully appreciated how different the various parts of the country are. So there are material differences in the cost structures and business environments, labor availability, transportation, and utilities, just to name a few. So the services that we’re bringing to the table to help companies evaluate these factors include the labor analytics, the logistics modeling, the utility assessments, and really the whole process around how we combine all of these factors into a coherent assessment; a coherent evaluation of the potential locations for companies.
What are some common characteristics of international startups or established companies who seek out your services and particularly your U.S. market entry services?
My mind first goes to really how diverse these companies are. So they’re all sizes and industries and from various country backgrounds. Some have a lot of experience and some have virtually none. But I think the one thing I would say they do have in common is that they have a lot of balls in the air. International expansion is a big deal. We’ve witnessed this firsthand. I’m sure you have as well, even if you know the destination market well. So in addition to everything that goes into evaluating the location and securing that location, companies entering the market are also dealing with entity formation, how and where they will be legally incorporated in the U.S., they’re setting up banking resources, they’re addressing accounting considerations, they’re looking at IP protections, supplier contracts, personnel relocation, and a host of other things. So that’s one thing that I see that they have in common. The other thing that I think is really interesting to consider that we’ve observed is the learning curve. And by that, I don’t just mean familiarization with the U.S. market, but I’m also referring to what really becomes an iterative process that frequently causes the project to evolve from how it was initially conceptualized. Foreign companies often discover that something is less expensive, more expensive, slower, faster, available, not available, somehow different than what they had assumed. And then that discovery causes them to redefine what they want to do in the U.S. Maybe it’s a bigger facility, maybe it’s a smaller one, maybe they decide they want to move faster or they need to move slower. Maybe they want to switch up their utility strategy where they realize that there’s secondary markets they hadn’t even known about that might be a good fit. These things happen with domestic projects too, of course, but they’re especially prevalent with the foreign investment projects. And that’s okay. It’s important to be open to the need and/or the opportunity to pivot when entering a new market. Our team is always ready to make those adjustments in response to client directives. And we advise clients to expect a few of those twists and turns along the way.
Does BLS focus on certain sectors or industries?
We are relatively industry agnostic, but I would share that we have particularly deep verticals in life sciences, mission critical facilities aka data centers, financial services, and food and beverage. We’ve naturally seen a decided swing towards manufacturing since the pandemic, but we do have a breadth of experience and headquarters in shared service operations as well.
Are most of your clients who are international establishing new businesses in the United States or do they sometimes work with United States manufacturing and distribution partners?
There’s some of both. We primarily work with companies that are looking for their own location. We’re not doing the matchmaking services, so to speak, so we don’t always see those. But the companies that are coming to us are evaluating a host of options. So we have worked on site selection for companies that are concurrently also exploring other avenues for market entry, such as finding distributors or working through contractors as you mentioned.
In your experience, how important are legal and regulatory compliance issues in the United States for international companies?
Yeah, I mean, look, no matter what country you’re talking about, we need to acknowledge that there are market specific regulations, protocols, and practices that are important to the operation’s success. In the U.S., that ranges from the federal level to the state, the municipal, to the specific fire protection district. So companies are going to want to have a team around them who can help them confidently navigate the unknowns in the legal and regulatory areas.
Do you find that many clients acknowledge the importance of legal and regulatory compliance and or protection either in contract law or intellectual property or product regulations or any other requirements? Or do they usually put that off towards the end?
Right, well, and it’s a great question because the U.S. has very strong intellectual property protections, right? But you have to go through the process to activate those protections. And so we do see companies that wait longer than they should to address these concerns and these processes. It’s maybe a common theme in the companies that we see that they think that it’s first about finding the location and then taking care of the legal, the accounting, the design engineering, et cetera. But these functions really need to be started simultaneously with the site selection process so that all of these work streams can inform the others and so that when you get to the point where you’re ready to move forward, you don’t have a lagging process that is going to hold you back.
Is site selection for international companies largely a geographic consideration or are there other factors that you consider?
So location determines a lot. The geography will first impact your access to other things, right? Whether that’s access to your market, access to your suppliers, access to the ports that are bringing in the materials that you need, access to the labor that you’re going to need and the training infrastructure, the educational infrastructure that will be producing the labor that you need. It’s access to utility capacity. So when you ask is it just about geography, it is just about geography, but it’s about geography because of everything that it allows you to access and the cost at which you can access it.
Once geography is established, there are also incentives considerations that you assist with. Can you please tell us a little about those?
Absolutely. The first thing we always like to really emphasize about incentives is that it shouldn’t be the starting point for a site selection process. We have a saying in the industry, everybody uses it, incentives can make a good site better, but the incentives will never make a bad site good. So the first objective is to find the site that works operationally for you. The incentive dollar value is not going to close a gap for a site that doesn’t operationally fit. But once you are to the point of having a few sites, your finalist sites, this is when incentives can become very impactful. And we like to also emphasize that you shouldn’t get too focused on thinking about incentives purely from a financial standpoint because they’re not always just about the direct dollars, you know, in a grant or tax credit type of form, but they can also be about expedited permitting. They can be about infrastructure improvements to service site that you would like to purchase. And they can be about training, specialized training resources that may even be custom built for a particular operation that is being courted. So it’s a broad topic and it’s one that I think frequently gets treated as if it’s just purely transactional and it’s commoditized, but the incentive negotiations are very strategic. The timing is important. The breadth of the incentives is very important and the positioning of the project is key to those conversations.
BLS will be attending the SelectUSA Investment Summit taking place this May at National Harbor, Maryland. What are the benefits of attending?
Yeah, so we’re excited. We’ll have three senior members of our team there. We invite everybody to come visit our booth. We’ve been attending for many years and what we find is that it is a truly one of a kind opportunity for companies of all kinds and sizes to learn about the resources, public and private, that are available to them as they explore the U.S. market. And there’s really robust programming around all of the considerations that go into market entry, from financing to site selection to the incentives to data gathering and what’s going on in your particular industry in the U.S., as well as an opportunity to learn about all of the economic development efforts throughout the U.S. as well.
Part of the benefit of your attendance there is you’re able to speak a little more about Location Economics® model that you are known for. Can you explain that a little bit?
So Location Economics® in the way that we apply it is really a very multidisciplinary effort. It is bringing together our expertise across all of these fields that impact your site selection decision. This includes, and I’ve mentioned a couple of these before, but this includes our utility engineers, this includes our labor analytics capabilities, our support supply chain and logistics, and our ability to look at the tax structures and the operational cost structures across these markets and then ultimately bring in the incentives conversations. It is a process of starting with the company’s priorities for the project. And that seems like it’s an easy question, right? Hey, what’s important to you? Well, it’s these two things: it’s labor and it’s taxes, you know, pick a factor. But those have to be quantified. We want to explore those further. We want to understand the relative priority of those. Another thing that we say frequently in the industry is you have to understand there’s no perfect site out there. If it’s the most expensive site, it’ll have the best labor, but then it’s the most expensive. So you have to understand where your priorities are and have a plan for intentionally moving from the beginning of the process through an efficient review of the data and find a way to not get stuck in this paralysis by analysis, right? There’s a lot of data that comes into play and you want to stay focused on what’s important to the success of that project. And so that process of moving from many sites to your finalist sites is a big part of what we’re bringing to the table, and helping companies not just look at the data but understand what it means for their project, how to prioritize, and how to move through it efficiently to get to that final answer.
Does BLS ever work with international trade promotion agencies on behalf of their domestic companies who are seeking to go to market in the United States?
So we don’t work with those organizations directly, but they are a conduit for us to be able to reach those companies that they represent and help them understand how to approach the U.S. market and how we can help them. Once that IPA has made the introduction to the client company, we would typically work directly with that company from there.
How can people find out more about your organization and your attendance at SelectUSA?
Well, we will be at booth 228, so I’ll share that and make that part easy. And we’d love to meet any of your listeners. Another good source for information about our company is our website, BLSstrategies.com. And in particular, in the resources section of the website, there is a page dedicated to FDI and the resources and thought leadership pieces that we have to serve those companies. There’s also a section of the website on incentives where companies can find a listing of all the incentive programs for each of the states, on a state by state basis. So that is a particularly helpful resource for companies wanting to begin to familiarize themselves with the types of programs that are available.
Tracey Hyatt Bosman, Managing Director, Biggins, Lacy, Shapiro & Company. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Look forward to seeing you at SelectUSA.
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