Outsourced ED Partnership

GLDPartners has developed an innovative model for economic development delivery. While it won’t be right for every situation, in the appropriate setting our Outsourced ED Partnership is a tool for next-generation regional and local economic development. Our team’s economic development credentials, global presence, business relationships and business intelligence provide a unique partnership platform to support a limited number of economic development organizations. We see our tools as additive to an existing organization’s capabilities and when combined with our resources, create a special public-private partnership capacity.

What is it exactly? The GLDPartners Outsourced ED Partnership has 6 main components:

  1. Business Leadership: GLDPartners assumes a day-to-day management role in an organization, placing an executive with world-class business credentials into the organization’s Executive Director or President role who would be fully accountable to the entity’s Board or political leadership. But in this case, GLDPartners would be accountable to the Board or Mayor, creating a depth of accountability tied to defined success metrics. From a management perspective, existing staff would remain employees but on a daily basis there would be a business professional with the weight of GLDPartners and its resources behind it.
  2. Strategy: Some economic development organizations periodically undertake a targeted industry or strategy study. This can be expensive and in many cases, while interesting, doesn’t generally provide much explicit value. Via GLDPartners’ Outsourced ED Partnership, we develop an Annual Business Strategy for the entity, which is then supported throughout the year with ongoing business intelligence and sector information. We see the combined tools as continuous and seamless strategy development and implementation.
  3. Business Development Emphasis: Our leadership will bring a management style and strategy that will tend to navigate away from broad and wasteful marketing, and instead toward more precise and cost effective targeted business development. Instead of advertising/trade shows and displays, the focus will be to deliver high-spec customized business development propositions to a well-vetted roster of targets. This is far more cost-effective and in the end produces the best opportunity for business investment.
  4. Intelligence and Information: Perhaps most importantly, our client partners have direct access to GLDPartners’ latest industry sector intelligence dossiers. These dossiers provide information about the key factors that are driving change in each sector with current information about technology, competition, market and sourcing changes, regulatory issues, transport and logistics. This kind of information is tremendously valuable when trying to determine match prospects and then assembling specific business propositions. This is a level of sophistication that few if any economic development organization can attain.
  5. Relationships and Global Presence: Our client family gains access to GLDPartners’ wide and deep set of business relationships in targeted business sectors, site selection, property development, institutional investment, 3PL, legal and transportation spheres. Our offices and strong business relationships that are valuable bases when pursuing business from foreign markets. Working with GLDPartners is like having a presence in other geographic markets, without the ongoing costs and challenges in maintaining offices or staff.
  6. Funding Credibility: Enhanced confidence in the business proposition translates to corresponding value in attracting both public and private funding. Where there is not a private funding component in-place, the ED Partnership can create an opportunity to involve private stakeholders. GLDPartners involvement provides a significant boost to private and public program investments.

We understand that your economic program is about demonstrated results and we’ve created a formula for success that assures local control while also blending hands-on local capacity with world-class strategy, business intelligence, and business development support.