The $10 million nobody came back to collect

it's a pleasure to be here. I look forward to your questions and having some fun today.

So the the interesting story is that when American Standard was interested in moving their world headquarters from New York City to New Jersey, which they actually ended up doing, they received a letter from the then governor of New Jersey that said, if you do that, we'll give you lots of incentives. Actually they said ten million dollars worth of incentives. But American Standard moved because they got so concerned about the move, they moved and they didn't Check in with the governor. it was three years after they moved, and I was handed the letter that the governor wrote to them saying, We'll give you $10 million. And I was asked, because I was a consultant to them, working with a number of the senior executives, to essentially get to projects that they couldn't get to and get those projects done. So the VP of government affairs gave me the letter and said, Go down to Trenton, the state capitol. See if you can get any of this $10 million, which they promised us. And the short story is three years later, I got them all of the $10 million, and I'm in a business that I didn't even know existed. I didn't know there was such a thing as government. So of course I read the the newspaper articles and saw it, but I didn't really understand how those would come about. And I'm the guy who, for American Standard, anyway, for the one move. was able to facilitate the relationship between the state and the company and get them the ten million dollars.

Well the last eight years has been very successful. We were entrusted by our clients with one point two billion of investment money. th those that was the money related to investing in property, plant, and equipment as they were expanding. And we were very successful in getting ninety million dollars of incentives for them in relation to that one point two billion. So If you look at it from the standpoint of offsetting the costs of the capital investment, it was seven and a half percent cost offset, which is pretty substantial and and most engineers and and folks who do the work to see if they can get the cost reduced for expansions would be very pleased with those kinds of numbers. And as a result of that, we have been able to continue that success. in getting expansion projects over the past year. So it's been a very successful period of time for us.

In terms of our business, we have partially because of the success we had and because we anticipated more of it and and we were trying to figure out how not to or how to hire people and train them. And in the process of all of that, of course, AI a year and a half, two, three years ago became fairly prominent. So we have been able to alter our processes. to accelerate the time it takes to get work done by using AI capabilities. So we have not needed to hire significantly more people and it has actually made our the quality of the work that we do at certain parts of our process much higher.

Yeah. One of the things that we do that so let me describe our business for a second. I you you could infer from what I said about American Standard what we do. So we help corporations who are planning an expansion. We help them to take advantage of the opportunities from state, county, and local governments for incentives that relate to those expansions. Most of the incentives are triggered by the jobs that are added or by the dollars that are invested. So we have a three-stage process. The first one is where the use case that you're asking about takes place. The first stage of our work is to make a forecast for a client of the incentives that we would get. in multiple states. Most of the time we're dealing with a client who says, I'm probably going to expand, but the expansion may be in Idaho or it may be in Illinois, for instance. And so they want to know up front, and we provide very specific identification of the opportun we call them opportunities for the incentives. So we'll delineate the incentives from the state, the incentives from the county, the incentives from local government, specifically what are they? How long does it take to get them? What are the criteria for getting them? what kind of reporting do you have to do on the back end? All of those kinds of considerations. And and very specifically, we end up with a number, which is here is the value combined of the incentives that we're going to be able to obtain for you. We also take that and we spread the impact of that over years to see so that we can. Project for them how it will impact their PL. So that process is unique. There aren't many firms that do that. We do it. We've always done it. And with the 30 years' experience, we have you know, a lot of history to rely on to make an accurate forecast. When AI came along, it just took that process from a work standpoint and made it much, much easier. w you know what we did with somebody who spent probably a week pulling all of the data together. now it's done in an hour or two. Obviously we have to apply our experience to the numbers that come out of that and to the likelihood of getting certain things and so forth. and that's the secret sauce that we add, but certainly has accelerated and and made our life much easier. and yeah it's been a very pleasant improvement to our process.

So the typical experience with a prospect is we have a presentation that I make to one person, then a week later I make the same presentation to three people, and the a week or two weeks after that I send off a proposal, and then there may be another meeting of maybe six or eight people or not. We get the proposal agreed to. All of that takes place usually within a month, maybe two months, depending upon the complexity of the situation and the size of the company and so forth. And then we start the project and we do the the first meeting and is an alignment session. We talk with the client all about, you know, what are the what exactly are they doing, what states are they considering, how much are they spending. we don't get into really heavy specifics at that point in time. It's much more a conceptual discussion. And then following that meeting, we ask them for very detailed data to support the expansion and to have the conversation with state, county, and local governments. When we finish the when we gather all that information, we then put put it through AI. We make the modifications to the forecast and we make a presentation to the team that's on the other side. here's what we are going to be able to get, here's the time frame, these are the entities at state, county, and local government level we're gonna be talking to, and so forth and so on, and we get an okay from them to two things. We get an okay to the numbers re as presented or revised. And we get an okay to go out into the marketplace and have these conversations representing the company. And most of the time we do this without company accompaniment. There may be a meeting or two that occurs at either the state level or the or the local level, where we do bring in the the client to meet with the prospective providers of incentives. That whole process because of it there it's iterative in terms of here's the information we need, says the let's say the city. We send that information and they get back, they say, Well, either we need more information, we need this. Because it's a little bit of an iterative process. the the first offer letters come out, which is the appropriate endpoint for that part of the process. The first offer letters on the incentives come out usually at the end of three months. They can do if we have a rush project, we can get it done in 10 to 12 15 days, but usually it's two to three months. And and those offer letters are discussed with the client. the whole package is pulled together usually in month four or five. Client makes a decision decision on what state and what city they're going to locate in. And then we begin the process of getting actual contracts to back up the offer letters that that the client accepted. The client accepts those in writing. And we do the work to put the contracts in place and to and to put everything in place that perfects the client's real right to those incentives. Now, what happens after that is a lot of construction and one to two to three years of putting all of the expansion plans in place. And then our job is to report out to the state, county, and local governments on those contracts. Here's what the client did. They added some people, they expended some money, and as a result of that, usually there is a release of some of the incentives. tied to the some specifics that are in the contract. At the end of the first year, hire forty people and get this amount of money and so forth.

I'd probably hire a sales guy right off the bat to do what I've been doing for quite a long time and train that person to do it well. I'm by nature and by birth, I'm sort of the internal guy. I'm the guy who does the work, loves to get the incentives, loves to put together the spreadsheets. I I really enjoy doing the work of this company. by inclination, by birth, by by original skill set, I'm not the guy to go out and sell it. but I you know, we we all can learn and we all add skills that we didn't come to the party with as we go along and we need them and so forth. So I've gotten pretty good at selling, but I think somebody else could have done that job better than I over time.

AI will become more and more important in the business. There's just a lot of information out there and some companies will try and do this work on their own because that's is available. there is still a significant benefit to outsourcing this and and there always will be. Most companies don't expand but once every three years. I mean the the average company, if even if it's a growth company, doesn't do an expansion year after year. And as a consequence of that, people who step in to do the work of getting incentives are stepping into it probably for the first time, maybe for the second time, but they're just not experienced in it. And there are a lot of benefits to being experienced. One is the the work is a lot Easier, it's done much smoother. And secondly, when companies have done getting incentives on their own, and then we come in and do a similar project, we're looking at company performance that is anywhere from one half to one-fifth of what we could have gotten. We know that. I mean, we just know the business well enough so that we can see that project should have gotten two million dollars worth of incentives, they only got five hundred thousand. there is a strong need and and most of the time when we're presenting to a prospect, they don't want to do the work. they they really want to hire somebody to get this work done because it's unfamiliar and they realize expertise is is important.

it's easy to get in touch with me. my phone number is is pretty prominently out there on LinkedIn. My email address is out there on LinkedIn. you can go to LinkedIn and send me a message. and you know that really starts the whole process. I'm very available and and pretty well known at this stage in in the development of our business. Obviously, if you want to check out our website first, we're at www.org. The dash im group dot com.

Well thank you, Mugglis, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.