What to trust, what to verify, what to politely ignore
Every Investment Promotion Agency has a deck. The good ones are useful primers. None are neutral.
You’re being marketed to by a team whose job is to bring you in. That doesn’t make the deck dishonest. It makes it incomplete. Knowing how to read it saves months.
Trust the macro structure. GDP composition, sectoral footprint, infrastructure pipeline, the list of large investors already present. These are usually accurate because they’re easily checked.
Verify the talent math. “Two hundred thousand engineering graduates a year” is technically true and operationally useless. Verify the specific layer you’ll hire from — mid-senior, your stack, willing to relocate or already local — through your own conversations, not the brochure. Verify wages through recent hires, not published averages. Verify attrition by asking peer companies in the city.
Verify the incentive package carefully. Headline numbers are real. Conditions, claw-back clauses, employment thresholds, and timing of disbursement are where the value sits or leaks.
Politely ignore the case studies of much larger companies. A Fortune 500 setting up a 5,000-person captive solved different problems than you will. Their experience tells you the agency can deliver at scale. It tells you little about how they handle a 40-person scaleup that needs answers in three weeks.
Also ignore the photography. Every IPA deck has the same six images of glass towers and smiling engineers.
The useful question to ask in the second meeting: “Who’s the mid-market or scaleup company most similar to us that set up here in the last two years — and can we speak to them?” The quality of that answer tells you more than any slide.
Nueconomy helps scaleups and mid-market firms read these conversations correctly — separating what’s real from what’s positioning — and runs the right government dialogues directly, so the path from interest to operating compresses meaningfully.
