Strategy Development and Evaluation

Location and Site Selection

Development of Implementation Tactics & Plans

Negotiations for Incentives and Real Estate Acquistion

Overview of Services

KLG provides a full range of services focused on optimizing the alignment between geography and overall corporate objectives. Our services result in rigorous strategy development and evaluation, selection of the optimal location and site to ensure success, creation of effective implementation plans and tactics, and negotiations for public sector incentives and real estate acquisition that provide truly dramatic results.

KLG has global expertise covering practically every major industry sector. Our scope is global and we have assisted clients throughout North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and in both the developed and developing nations of Asia. Our practice has spanned practically every major industry sector; financial services, high technology, pharmaceuticals and biotech, manufacturing, consumer products, publishing, professional services, transportation, and charitable foundations.

The fact that there are some services we don’t provide is also critical. Advisors have a responsibility to do everything possible to ensure that they have the freedom to offer their clients unbiased advice.

• KLG works only for corporate clients, and does not accept assignments from state or local governments (or their designees). KLG believes that our objectivity could be suspect if we also drew fees from those governing the locations we evaluate for our corporate clients. Often, advisors in our business have practices that support both corporations and communities. KLG believes that our credibility as an advisor among our corporate clients requires that we are not also being paid as advisors by the locations they may be considering.
• KLG does not perform relocation services, broker real estate transactions, or provide other follow-on services that occur as a result of a decision by our clients to deploy or relocate. We believe that a consultant shouldn’t offer advice about strategies and also sell the implementation services related to those strategies. Our job is to provide our clients with unbiased, objective advice regarding the range of options open to them, and to help them decide which will be most advantageous to them. This is best accomplished if there is no concern that we have any financial interest in which decisions they make. Critically, this means that KLG has no bias towards relocation or deployment occurring – except when it’s in the best interest of a client. Quite often, we have helped clients decide not to implement location strategies that would not have been effective.

Back to Top

Strategy Development and Evaluation

Our first mission in any assignment – before ever getting to the question of “where?” – is to make sure that geographic change will be an effective tool for accomplishing a client’s goals. There is little point in devoting significant resources to exhaustive evaluations of specific locations prior to knowing whether or not the benefits of such strategies are sufficient to proceed. In many instances KLG has helped organizations avoid moves that would ultimately not have been effective. When our clients do decide to proceed with geographic change, they do so knowing exactly what benefits they will receive and what risks must be mitigated. Further, they are pursuing a strategy that has been developed specifically to meet their unique business objectives.

Before our clients make any decisions to pursue location changes, our approach ensures that they have a comprehensive understanding of the benefits they will achieve, what it will take to successfully execute, and what risks and challenges they will face. Once a set of strategy options have been developed, KLG provides sophisticated analytics that accurately project the full range of outcomes – economic, operational, and logistical – that can occur as a result of each option. This ensures that potential strategies can be comprehensively compared with one another and with the firm’s overall goals, rapidly, and before making a major investment in either time or money.

These analyses include a complete and highly detailed projection of the costs and savings that will result from implementation. The economic forecasts that are created are based on a all relevant factors:

• Compensation restructuring, including the impact of job level and position restructuring as well as any impact from expected changes to productivity levels
• Relocation and severance program costs based on highly detailed and accurate statistical attrition modeling
• Cost of dual-operations during transition
• Real estate and capital investment
• Tax impact
• Operating savings

Because of our unmatched experience, KLG has the ability to develop innovative location strategies tailored to the unique objectives of each client. Our expertise extends across the full range of options: local moves, alternative domestic locations, cross-border global moves, and alternative sourcing and co-source joint ventures. Close collaboration with our clients allows us to fully understand their goals and develop sets of options that can help them succeed.

Back to Top

Location and Site Selection

KLG understands that it is critical that locations are chosen based only on the basis of the factors that are critical to determining the success of the business. Too often locations are chosen based on surface-level factors or off-the-shelf screening models, with inadequate attention to what really matters to an organization, poor information, perception and not fact, or driven by “trends” or “fashion” regarding what is the new “hot” city.

Choosing a location requires carefully selecting viable options, evaluating these options, and making a final decision based on a thorough investigation of business requirements and the ability of potential locations to satisfy these requirements. We specializes in developing a customized approach to location options identification, evaluation, and selection tailored to the unique needs of each client.

Our process leverages our vast experience and knowledge of potential options, detailed analysis of quantitative and objective data, on-site fieldwork to ensure that our clients personally experience each location and can form unbiased views, and sophisticated methodologies for using this information to make decisions that ensure the selection of a location that provides optimal “fit” with our clients’ needs. KLG maintains the necessary network of contacts, databases of information, and on-staff expertise to help companies select locations virtually anywhere in the world.

Our development of evaluative selection criteria is highly-customized to the specific needs of each client, and comprehensively incorporates critical information on a wide range of key decision-making variables.

• Labor Markets and the Competitive Environment
• Cost Structure: Labor, Real Estate, and Operating
• Quality of Life
• Transportation and Logistics
• Infrastructure
• Political Stability
• Potential Risk Factors
• Legal and Legislative Environment
• Taxation
• Incentives

Our methodologies and expertise ensure that the locations our clients choose don’t just satisfy their needs today but, instead, provide a long-term solution with sustainable benefits. Beyond simply satisfying today’s requirements KLG understands that a new location needs to be a long-term success and, further, should provide new opportunities that allow our clients to achieve unique competitive advantages.

Back to Top

Development of Implementation Tactics and Plans

A strategy is worthless if it cannot be successfully implemented. KLG provides clients with a full range of services aimed at ensuring that behind every strategy is an comprehensive tactical plan tailored to ensuring successful execution.

Further, these plans are developed by providing the full-range of options, developing models of each option’s costs, benefits, and risks, helping the client to optimize the plan based on these analyses and, finally, always providing a range of contingency plans that allow a predefined response to potential changes. This process is essential to ensuring that strategies aren’t just good ideas but can be acted upon to create real value.

KLG’s ability to advise clients on how to successfully turn strategies into real results is only possible as a result of our team’s years of experience with geographic change across a multitude of situations, for corporations with a wide variety of goals and objectives, each facing unique risks and challenges. As a result, our clients don’t just know where to go, but how to get there.

Back to Top

Negotiations for Incentives and Real Estate Acquisition

KLG has a long history of consistently obtaining record-setting incentives for our clients. In situation after situation, KLG has negotiated incentive packages for clients that significantly enhance the economic opportunities achieved through deployment.

Our view is that it is critical that the contributions our clients make by entering a community – in terms of taxes, job opportunities, and prestige – be fully recognized by these communities. These incentive packages are often worth tens-of-millions of dollars to companies, and we too often watch those without effective advisors leave this value “on-the-table.” KLG helps our clients to thoroughly calculate the economic impact their project would have on a set of finalist communities, develop a negotiating strategy for the incentives that are most important to their specific needs, create awareness of the importance of the project among finalist communities, structure and conduct the negotiations, select the optimal offer, and draft and finalize the terms of the agreement.

Beyond choosing a geographic location, KLG has consistently helped our clients identify and acquire specific sites that enhance the success they achieve through geographic change. We apply the full scope of strategic and analytical thinking provided by our Real Estate Portfolio Strategy practice to assist our clients to identify and acquire world-class sites and facilities.

Back to Top