What a site selector actually reads

A site selector is not looking for reasons to choose you. She is looking for reasons to remove you from a list of forty communities so she can get to a list of six by Friday.

That single fact should change how your community profile is written. Most profiles are written as persuasion, the way a brochure is written, opening with photographs of the square and a paragraph about quality of life. A document written to persuade takes several minutes to yield a usable number. A document written to survive elimination yields the first one in fifteen seconds. The average profile gets ninety seconds before it is set aside, and most of that time is spent looking for figures that are not there.

The order they read in

Labor comes first. How many people of working age are within a thirty and sixty minute drive, what they currently do, what they are paid, and whether the specific skills this project needs exist in any quantity. If the labor shed cannot support the headcount, nothing else on the page matters and she stops.

Infrastructure and available space come second. Sites and buildings with acreage, zoning, ownership, and whether the site is controlled or merely for sale. Power capacity and provider. Water and sewer capacity in gallons per day, not adjectives. Natural gas. Fiber, with the carrier named. Rail if the project needs it. Highway access measured in miles and minutes to the interstate.

Cost comes third. Property tax rates, the actual millage. Utility rates. Wage rates by occupation. State and local incentives, and whether the local portion has ever actually been approved by your board or is theoretical.

Quality of life comes last, and it is genuinely last. Not because it does not matter, but because it only matters after a community has survived the first three screens. At that point it becomes a tiebreaker between finalists and it matters quite a lot, particularly for the handful of people the company will relocate. Read at the wrong moment, a page of festival photographs signals that the chamber does not know what the reader needs.

Most chamber profiles lead with quality of life because it is the part the chamber controls, the part the board enjoys reviewing, and the part that requires no data collection. It is also the part written by people who are proud of their town, which is not a fault. It is just addressed to the wrong reader in the wrong order.

What gets you cut

Missing figures. A profile with no labor shed number is not an incomplete profile. It is a no. She will not call to ask.

Round numbers with no source. A workforce of 50,000 within 45 minutes, unattributed, reads as an estimate someone made in a meeting. Give the figure, the source, and the year: 47,300 in the civilian labor force within a 45-minute drive, Georgia Department of Labor, 2025.

Workforce claims with nothing underneath them. Strong work ethic, reliable workforce, and low turnover are the three most common sentences in economic development and none of them survive contact with an analyst. Replace them with employment by sector, average hourly wage by occupation, unemployment rate, and the number of relevant program completions at the nearest technical college.

A profile that describes rather than answers. Read your document and count how many paragraphs answer a question a selector would ask, versus how many describe the town to someone who is fond of it. If the ratio is worse than half, the document is a brochure.

Stale numbers. A 2019 figure in a 2026 document tells her the chamber has not looked at this since before the pandemic, and she will assume the same is true of the available buildings.

What to have ready before you are asked

Keep these current in one place, each with a source and a date, so you can assemble a profile in a morning rather than a fortnight.

Civilian labor force and employment within thirty and sixty minutes, from your state labor department. Employment by major sector, from the same source or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Average hourly wage for the eight or ten occupations most relevant to the industries you actually recruit, from BLS occupational employment statistics. Unemployment rate, monthly, from your state labor department.

Population and five-year change, educational attainment, and median household income, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Commuting patterns, in and out, from Census LEHD data. That last one is worth more than most chambers realize, because it shows a selector where your workers already drive to and how many of them might prefer not to.

Program completions at the nearest technical college in the trades that matter to you, from the college itself. Ask once a year.

Available buildings and sites with square footage, acreage, ceiling height, zoning, ownership, and control status. Update quarterly and delete anything that has sold. Utility capacity figures from each provider in writing: electric capacity and provider, water and sewer capacity in gallons per day and current usage, natural gas line size and pressure, fiber carriers by name.

Property tax millage for the county, the city, and the school district, and an effective rate on a sample industrial assessment. State incentive programs your projects would qualify for, and the specific local incentives your board has actually approved.

None of this is difficult. It is roughly a day of work to assemble and about two hours a quarter to maintain, and almost nobody maintains it, which is why the request for information sits on a desk for three weeks.

Most towns do not lose projects on fundamentals. Two counties with comparable labor sheds and comparable sites are separated by which one answered the questions in the order they were asked, with numbers that had sources under them, on the day the request came in.