Didi Caldwell built Global Location Strategies around a decision that can shape a company and a community for generations: where to put a new operation. Her firm helps companies, primarily manufacturers, assess locations and negotiate incentives. A second business, Global Location Technologies, puts that site-selection expertise into software.
In this Founder Factor interview, Caldwell explains how a business she bought in 2008 became the starting point for a consulting company and, eventually, a technology business. Her account connects the practical work of surviving a downturn with the slower decisions that create value beyond a founder’s own working hours.
What you'll learn.
- Existing customer revenue helped Caldwell survive the early years, while a family safety net made the risk more manageable.
- A dedicated business development role took several years to show its full value.
- Software gave the firm a way to distribute site-selection expertise beyond the consulting hours its team could sell.
- Caldwell credits growth to preparation, people, and economic conditions together.
A location decision involves much more than real estate.
Caldwell describes site selection as a combination of factors that have to work together. A building or piece of land matters, but so do the available workforce, utilities, logistics, taxes, incentives, and environmental requirements. Her team typically joins after a company has decided it needs more capacity to serve a market.
That breadth attracted her to the work. While working in Argentina in the late 1990s, she helped a colleague with market research for a site-selection project. He became a mentor, and the work offered a combination she liked: travel, consequential business decisions, and effects on the communities receiving investment. She subsequently moved to Greenville and joined Fluor’s site-selection group in 1998.
The technical decision and the human consequences remained connected. Near the end of the interview, Caldwell describes the firm’s purpose as matching companies and communities for mutual, sustainable prosperity. The location needs to work for both sides over many years.
The business began with an unexpected acquisition.
Before starting the consulting firm, Caldwell ran a smaller business advising school districts on financing capital projects. A legislative change in 2007 removed the financing method the company relied on for new work. Existing customer contracts still needed service, however, and those obligations created a different possibility.
She asked the owners to let her purchase the business out of future revenue and continue serving its customers. They agreed. Caldwell remembers the acceptance as exciting and frightening: she was recently divorced, had two young children, and was taking responsibility for a business during a difficult economic period.
She dates the start to December 1, 2008. She initially thought she might leave site selection because of its travel demands, but projects arrived in 2008 and 2009. Customers were willing to pay for expertise she already had. That work helped establish what the business would become.
Surviving the downturn required resources beyond optimism.
The acquired company’s customer revenue provided some protection, but Caldwell describes periods when she took no paycheck and used credit cards. Taxes due on the previous year’s income added pressure. The interview does not present those choices as a financing model for other founders to copy; they explain the difficulty of her particular start.
She also names an advantage that entrepreneurial stories often leave out. Her parents could have helped if she and her children needed it. She never had to request that loan, but knowing the option existed made taking risk easier.
That experience informs her interest in economic development and support for minority-owned and women-owned businesses. When a community wants more entrepreneurship, access to a safety net matters alongside enthusiasm and individual persistence. Her own account makes clear that the consequences of a failed venture are not equally manageable for everyone.
Investing in growth meant accepting a long wait.
Asked what she would change, Caldwell points toward earlier, more deliberate investment in brand, referral relationships, and people. She had strong colleagues early on, but she describes some of those hires as fortunate rather than the result of a mature hiring process. As the team grew, assessing cultural fit required greater care.
One consequential decision was hiring a full-time business development professional. The role expanded beyond finding the next engagement to thinking about growth, building referral networks, and establishing the firm’s reputation.
Caldwell says the investment took roughly three or four years to show its value. That time horizon matters. A founder evaluating a relationship-based growth role only on immediate revenue could miss the work required to become known and trusted. Caldwell’s experience supports patience with a defined strategy, while offering no promise that every such hire will produce the same result.
Software changed what the company could sell.
Caldwell originally wanted a good job doing work she enjoyed. Over time, she wanted to build something with value beyond her own ability to complete consulting projects. People, the organization, its reputation, and eventually technology became part of that value.
She compares an unsold consulting hour to an empty airline seat after departure: the opportunity to sell that particular unit of capacity has passed. Software offered another way to use the firm’s knowledge. Once developed, a product could be licensed repeatedly and support customers the consulting team could never serve individually.
At an annual retreat around 2018, the team set a vision of offering a product or service for every corporate location decision. Eight or nine people in Greenville could not personally advise every company. A cloud-based product made that ambition more plausible by giving outside organizations access to the methods the firm used internally.
Two business models needed different support.
The technology business initially used the consulting company’s infrastructure. At the time of the conversation, Caldwell was considering whether the software operation had reached a size that justified its own infrastructure and corporate structure. She describes separation as a possibility, rather than an already completed reorganization.
The interview also discusses the company’s growth, including its appearance on the Inc. 5000 list in 2021 and 2022 and doubling in size in 2022. Caldwell attributes that progress to several causes: brand work, search visibility, content, referrals, and additional staff.
She also credits the market. Activity dipped early in the pandemic, then demand accelerated around late summer. Having lived through the earlier downturn, she initially expected a difficult period. Instead, preparation coincided with unusually strong customer demand. Her explanation preserves the contribution of both management decisions and circumstances outside management’s control.
Leadership became a practice of trust and accountability.
Caldwell recalls sitting in a branding agency meeting and suddenly seeing the cost of every person around the table. She had to remind herself that building the business required spending money on capabilities that could produce future returns. Becoming more comfortable with those investments was part of her development as a leader.
Managing people required practice too. She distinguishes experience leading projects from experience leading employees. She tries to give colleagues room to do their jobs and remain available when they need support. Her husband’s management experience and a peer group give her places to discuss difficult situations.
The peer group sets quarterly goals and holds members accountable. Caldwell was also interested in bringing more of the Entrepreneurial Operating System into the company. She closes with optimism tempered by risk reduction: founders need enough confidence to act, while still addressing the risks they can see.
Caldwell’s story gives founders a concrete way to think about growth: protect the business long enough to make patient investments, build a team that can carry responsibility, and find ways to make expertise useful beyond the founder’s calendar. Her software business grew from repeated consulting work and a clear limit on how many hours that work could consume.
