What actually does
Walk into any investment promotion conversation and the brochure leads with incentives — tax holidays, capital subsidies, custom-fitted concessions. They’re not nothing. But for a $20M–$200M company, they’re rarely the thing that makes or breaks the decision.
Here’s the math most CFOs eventually do but few do upfront. A five-year tax holiday on a still-loss-making subsidiary is worth less than it sounds. A capital subsidy on equipment you’d buy anyway moves the IRR by a percentage point, sometimes two. Meaningful, but not decisive.
What actually moves the needle for mid-market and scaleup expansion:
Speed to operate. Six months versus eighteen months to be hiring and billing is a real number with real payroll behind it. Most teams underprice this.
Talent availability at your specific level. Not “the city has 200,000 engineers.” How many mid-senior engineers in your stack, willing to move at your salary band.
Predictability of compliance. The cost of a clean, fast renewal cycle versus a city where every permit becomes a negotiation. The former is invisible. The latter is corrosive.
Quality of government access. Whether you can get a real meeting with a real decision-maker when something needs solving. This is worth more than any incentive line item.
Logistics and infrastructure that actually works on the day you need it.
This isn’t an argument against incentives. It’s an argument for ranking them correctly. Incentives are the tiebreaker, not the criterion. Make the decision on fit, speed, talent, and access — then negotiate the incentive package from a position of clarity.
The mid-market often gets the worst of both worlds: the incentive is small because the headcount is small, and the operational pain is large because nobody pre-empted it.
Nueconomy assesses locations against what actually drives mid-market success and facilitates direct conversations with the government stakeholders who can compress timelines. The incentive matters. The path to operating matters more.
