Mike Randle, Editor

After Nine Years, A Review of SB&D 100 Fundamentals and More

Fundamentals. You've heard that word used by coaches, presidents, clergy and other leaders and thinkers. It's also used in economic development circles. If you don't understand the fundamentals of something, forget about it. It's not going to work.

For example, my father is the owner of the Columbus (Ga.) Wardogs Arena 2 football team. He called me in during the season to help out. Now he wants me to run it. Apparently, I don't know the fundamentals of owning a professional football team, yet. The Wardogs went 0-16 during the recently completed af2 season, setting a record for most losses in a season by a professional football team. With that record, it's apparent the coaches and players don't know the fundamentals of Arena Football either.

While running the magazine and helping out with the Wardogs this summer, I coached my son's allstar baseball team to the Metro tournament championship game. It's the second consecutive year of making it to the championship game. It's the second consecutive year of getting beat in the championship game. It's becoming apparent to me that I don't know the fundamentals of coaching in the "big game."

In contrast, I do know the fundamentals of the SB&D 100. I created it and for you corporate heads looking to expand in the South, the SB&D 100 is valuable information. But it's valuable only if you know the fundamentals of it.

The SB&D 100 was first published in 1994. It is designed to expose markets and states in the South that are adept at turning large job and capital intensive corporate deals. It also ranks the top 100 corporate announcements that occurred in the South the previous calendar year.

Why track the biggest deals? The biggest deals have the highest corporate risk. They also have the greatest effect on the South's economy. Finally, they demand the largest incentives.

Why is this information fundamentally sound when used by you and your site selection team? Let me compare it with the two other jobs I had this summer. Like the Wardogs and our Oak Mountain allstar team, if we would have done a better job of scouting, maybe we could have pulled off a few more critical wins (in the case of the Wardogs, one win would be sufficient). Consider the SB&D 100 a major part of the scouting of sites in the South. It could be the difference between a win and a loss.

The fundamentals of the SB&D 100 are easy. We simply track and note all corporate deals announced in the South the previous calendar year with 200 jobs or more for the SB&D Job 100. Then we do the same with corporate investments of $30 million or more for the SB&D Investment 100. We then rank the top 100 deals in both categories, which creates a threshold that separates the 100-largest job announcements and 100-largest investment announcements from the rest. For example, the 100th-largest job deal in the South last year created 600 announced jobs. The 100th-largest investment announcement was $80 million.

Those are your "100" deals and they are worth 10 points each. On the job side of the ledger, deals between 200 jobs and 599 jobs (those that didn't make the "100"), are what we call "Just Missed Deals." On the "I-100" side, investment announcements between $30 million and $79.9 million are JMDs as well. All JMDs are worth five points.

After all of that work is done, we count up the points in five categories: state, mega-market (over 2 million), major market (750,000 -- 1.99 million), mid-market (200,000 -- 749,999) and small market (under 200,000). Then we publish which states and markets turned the biggest deals based on their points earned. This is not an arbitrary ranking.

Those are the fundamentals of the SB&D 100. Now if I can just get those ballplayers to become more fundamentally sound.

As always, we introduce the SB&D 100 with how we judge each market. In the small print found with the "methodology" heading, you'll discover how we accomplish our ranking. We go by a simple points system. Nothing is left for chance. No arbitrary picks here.

We begin with the SB&D Job 100, which ranks the South's largest employment announcements. In this section we track which industries are hot and which are not. Following the Job 100 is the SB&D Investment 100, which ranks the top 100 investment announcements in the South for the previous calendar year.

Following the Job 100 and Investment 100 is the "Top Deals and Hot Markets" section. This section highlights the Top 15 markets/economic development groups in the South in five categories: state, mega-market, major market, mid-market and small market.