Chad Chancellor: I want to thank Research Consultants International for sponsoring today's podcast. They are a globally renowned lead generation firm that helps economic development organizations create real prospects. They've helped over five hundred economic development organizations. Let me tell you exactly what they do.
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They recently launched a service called FDI365 which provides you a lead a day of fast-growing companies that will be expanding soon. Their research has helped over $5 billion in projects get sighted since inception. I encourage you to go to www.researchfdi.com to learn more about Research Consultants.
As far as I'm concerned, they are absolutely the best lead generation firm in the business for economic development organizations. Call them now. They can help you create real prospects. [music]
Welcome to this episode of Next Move Group’s We Are Jobs podcast. I am Chad Chancellor, the co-founder of Next Move Group. I'm happy to have with us today Robby Burgan who is a site location consultant for Evergreen Advisors based out of their Atlanta office. Robby, why don't you tell us a little bit about Evergreen?
Robby Burgan: Absolutely, Chad. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to be here. What
Evergreen Advisors does is a number of things. We do corporate advisory, sell-side and buy-side
analysis and helping companies both from acquisition standpoint but also capital raise, valuation, really full scope of growing a company and then getting out of the business from that stage of life.
We also have a service of rent-a-CFO type work for companies that aren't quite big enough or just need additional manpower on the CFO side. Those are just some things we're doing and then, of course, the location work that my group does helping companies with site selection, but also working backstream even further than that on some things in the supply chain and network realignment realm.
Chad Chancellor: I know you guys are really renowned for your supply chain analysis work and your network realignments. Why don't you dive into that?
Robby Burgan: Yes, absolutely. So, that's something that really kind of sets us apart from a lot of other site selectors that we're able to go in and actually help companies earlier on as they're looking. We’ve done work with companies where they've grown by acquisition over years and years then they look up one day and they’ve got locations spread across the country that really aren’t optimized for what they're doing, where their suppliers are, where their products are being delivered.
That's where we come in and we're able to really help them look at their entire network facility by facility, to look at cost outlays, supply chain costs, logistics, and just everything involved with what it takes to make their product and get it to market. So, we're able to come in and help them do As-is analysis, but also look at what would happen if we opened a plant here, closed a plant there and help them with, obviously, the site selection, real estate and incentives alongside that.
Chad Chancellor: So, you can run multiple models, I guess, if a company is thinking do we need two plants or three plants or one plant? You can help them figure out if we put two we need one in the southeast or north, all that kind of stuff.
Robby Burgan: Yes, absolutely. We’re able to-- obviously their inputs are different depending on the company and what they're looking at, but we're able to help them take all those things and really make sense of it and make sure that they're not looking at things from a biased standpoint because of their experience in the company or where they're at.
So, the CFO is going to look at things one way, the HR manager is going to look at things another way, operations are going to look a totally different way. So, were able to come in and bring that third-party advantage to looking at it without bias and help them decide what's important and what's most important. Ranking those things and really understand what their options are.
Chad Chancellor: Talk about your background. How did you get on the Evergreen team?
Robby Burgan: Yes, absolutely. My partner Vicki Horton and I came over to Evergreen from a tax firm previously, so a lot of site selectors are aligned with tax firms traditionally. What happens with that is you kind of get locked in with the big organization of a tax firm and it's really restrictive as to what you can do and what your client base looks like. So, we were looking for a while for a solution that aligned better with what we do and really gave us a good end-to-end solution.
A lot of our work comes from mergers and acquisitions and so at any given time about 70% of our projects are by-products of an acquisition or a merger. So, being involved with an M&A firm, with Evergreen is just a natural alignment for what we do. It brings Evergreen the ability to have that full service, full scope of helping companies from early stages, growth stages as they grow, bringing us in to help them grow efficiently and effectively in optimal cost situations and then, like I said, having that planning, that how are we going to get out of this business whether it's to retire and sell the business, whether it's to be acquired or merger, have a merger event with a bigger company, things like that.
Chad Chancellor: Evergreen's headquartered in Baltimore and you're based out in the Atlanta offices. It’s a big team. I was looking on the website. It's a large organization.
Robby Burgan: It is. We've got a lot of-- a good group there in the mid-Atlantic region, a lot of the M&A deals are focused there, but they do a lot of cyber work, government contracting work and so that brings them really across the country.
We’ve got our Atlanta office where Location Strategies group is housed out. We’ve got the Baltimore office, DC, and New York. So, there’s a lot of coverage from that standpoint. We’re able to be really flexible with them.
Chad Chancellor: Give these folks your website in case they want to look you up and learn more about Evergreen.
Robby Burgan: Absolutely. It's evergreenadvisorsllc.com I’m sure we'll have a link to it as well to easily click through for those of you that don't like writing down those long websites like me.
Chad Chancellor: All right, Robert. Thank you for being with us today. We really appreciate it.
Robby Burgan: Absolutely. Thank you, Chad.
Chad Chancellor: I want to thank the University of Southern Mississippi’s Masters of Economic Development program for sponsoring today's podcast. We work with Southern Miss a lot and they do tremendous research for us whether we're working with a site selection project and we need Southern Miss’s help to understand labor and the market around that area, transportation, they do a lot of research here or whether we need talent from the University of Southern Mississippi.
We have hired-- their students actually work for us as both interns and full-time employees. So, you can get a master’s degree in Economic Development from the university. They have two options to do that. One is mostly an online option where you go in a few weekends and one is the more traditional classroom option.
So, whether you run an organization and need talent or whether you run an organization and need research, you should really consider the University of Southern Mississippi’s Masters of Economic Development program. [music]
A special thank you to Younger Associates for recording, editing, and publishing this podcast for us. I encourage you to visit their website at younger-associates.com