Economic Development Corporation of Utah (EDCUtah)
EDCUtah is a private nonprofit organization that works with state and local government and private industry to attract and grow competitive, high-value companies and spur the expansion of local Utah businesses.
Colby Cooley
Vice President of Business Development
EDCUtah
1987
Year founded
Nonprofit
Private organization
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, the Economic Development Corporation of Utah (EDCUtah) aims to attract and grow competitive, high-value companies in the Beehive State. As a private nonprofit organization, EDCUtah works with state and local government to spur new developments and recruit out-of-state companies to expand to Utah. From first call to ribbon cutting, the organization works alongside companies to provide professional and responsive support to help them succeed.
EDCUtah leverages PitchBook to research the market, pulling together lists of promising candidate companies. From there, the team can reach out, schedule meetings and work to close the deals they’re excited about.
Developing and scaling a pipeline of promising companies
Preparing for meetings better than ever before
Supporting companies through economic and supply chain disruption
Developing and scaling a pipeline of promising companies
As Vice President of Business Development, Colby Cooley leads EDCUtah’s proactive lead generation arm, which began in 2014 after a request from the state. The request was to create a program that, in times of economic ups and down, could consistently identify companies to fill the EDCUtah project pipeline proactively. So, the team stood up the Global Strategy & Outreach (GS&O) program, although “it was a fledging operation” back then, according to Cooley.
In the beginning, the team would go on about four “campaigns” a year—which is what they call their outreach efforts. Relying heavily on media superlative lists, such as “Tech’s top high-growth companies,” the team would research up to 75 companies single-handedly. They’d look at the fastest growing or best places to work—or anything of the sort—to assemble leads.
“That was tough,” Cooley recalled. “My position back then was grinding for 30 days out of the month, just trying to identify companies and find reliable contacts. That was the biggest challenge.”
In 2016, two years after the program began, the team started to discuss investing in a database. From there, they started researching market databases.
“We looked all over the place and we test drove all of them. We asked a given provider for a subset of their database that we could use for quality control,” Cooley said.
“We really found that PitchBook had the best quality of all the data providers that we reached out to.”
—Colby Cooley, EDCUtah
For EDCUtah, it’s crucial to understand company growth in terms of head count and revenue—in other words, the company’s footprint. Within PitchBook, the team can find financial information on more than 3 million companies and easily see where they’re headquartered as well as their other office locations. This information is always coupled with contact information.
“PitchBook has made an absolute world of a difference,” Cooley said. “We’ve been able to turn what was once a quarterly campaign into one campaign a month, with 10 domestic and two international campaigns.”
EDCUtah's targeted industries
Aerospace & defense
Financial services
Information technology
Life sciences
Manufacturing & distribution
Outdoor products & recreations
Going into meetings more prepared than ever before—and walking away more successful
Before the pandemic, the EDCUtah team created a campaign for Japan. They pulled together lists through PitchBook and went to Japan expecting to focus on research and development, but instead found that nearly 50 companies wanted to meet with them.
“Our COO, who created the GS&O program in 2014, was speechless that we could take three weeks to put together a campaign in Japan, secure 20 meetings, and have it be successful,” Cooley said. “And with zero no-shows. We didn’t miss a single meeting—that was an amazing success and something that the program could have never, ever done in the past without PitchBook.”
Michael O’Malley, Marketing Director at EDCUtah, said that’s just one example out of many. Timing can also play a big role in their business development conversations.
“We have been in meetings in Southern California, talking to high-growth companies that we identified through PitchBook and in the meeting, the person we’re talking to says ‘How did you know we were discussing expanding? We were just talking about it last week,’” O’Malley said. “In effect, PitchBook is our early warning system.”
Being prepared often comes down to quality research and reliable data. PitchBook understands that and works to package this information together so that users can find what they need quickly.
“To have it all in one platform, where I can look up the blurb on a company and get a qualitative understanding of what their business is, and then look at what their capital status is, absolutely helps us go into these meetings more prepared.”
—Colby Cooley, EDCUtah
Over the years, EDCUtah has been able to refine its front-end research and home in on companies they believe are already considering expanding to the region. For example, Cooley can use PitchBook to find companies that only have locations on the east coast but do business across the US.
This opens the door for EDCUtah.
“I can go in and pitch Utah as the optimal western U.S. location and cut right to the chase,” Cooley said. “We can get through what might have been a lot of guesswork on our end. We see their growth is all on the west coast, so let’s talk about some kind of logistics play to support that growth.”
Utah economic dashboard
Job growth
3.3%
Utah
1.5%
National
DWS, Nov 2019
Population growth
16.0%
Utah
6.3%
National
Us Census, 2010-19
Median wage
$36,790
Utah
$38,640%
National
BLS, May 2018
Median age
31
Utah
38.2
National
US Census, ACS 2018
Cost of living index
101.3
Utah
100.0
National
C2ER, Q3 2019
GDP growth
3.2%
Utah
1.9%
National
BEA, Q3 2019
Supporting companies through economic and supply chain disruption
The GS&O program, which was borne with an economic downturn in mind, has proven to be valuable regardless of the market. But in 2020, the team did face disruption and volatility as the COVID-19 pandemic took over the world. Like many other organizations, EDCUtah paused its campaigns and outreach as the team tried to navigate the unknown.
An opportunity presented itself among the chaos in early summer, a few months into the pandemic. “In that timeframe, a lot of our supply chain in pharmaceuticals and medical devices came from Asia and that was all shut down,” Cooley said.
The shutdown, Cooley said, left Utah and the country as a whole exposed, but spurred an opportunity to re-shore life sciences companies.
“Utah has a very strong life sciences sector,” he said. “It makes up a larger share of Utah’s employment now than it did 10 or 15 years ago.”
Building on that momentum, the team was able to reach out to companies to get an understanding of the kinds of supply chain disruptions they were facing, whether they’re considering a re-shore and how Utah can compete for that business.
“We used PitchBook to gain better information on all the companies that we know are in Utah,” Cooley said. “We were able to call somebody that’s already here and say ‘Hey, why don’t you grow your space and take some of that exposure out of Asia?’”
Combining powerful market analysis and business development instincts, EDCUtah has tapped into a winning strategy that it hopes will serve the Utah community for many years to come.
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