The Situation
Lyte was a rapidly growing start-up operating primarily remote, with 140 employees projected by year-end and 180 the following year. Leadership had decided the company needed one or more central offices to accommodate growth and foster a new stage of organizational culture — but they had no consensus on where. Some markets were intuitively appealing; others hadn't been considered at all. They needed an objective framework before making a multi-year real estate commitment.
Without a rigorous process, the decision would default to where leadership happened to live, where the most vocal employees were concentrated, or where office rents happened to be lowest — none of which are reliable predictors of where the company would thrive.
The Approach
We built a multivariate market selection model benchmarking all major U.S. metros across labor availability, wage levels, economic dynamism in the company's target industry, workforce diversity, airport and travel connectivity, office rents, and core demographic indicators. After eliminating markets falling below the median on the combined opportunity scoring, 380 markets were narrowed to a focused shortlist.
Each remaining market was scored on a combined Opportunity Index — weighting customer service and field operations labor metrics separately and combining them into a single comparable score. The model was built transparently, allowing the client to see exactly which variables were driving each market's ranking and adjust the weighting if their priorities shifted.
The analysis validated some markets leadership had already identified as favorable — and surfaced several high-performers that had not been on their radar at all. That's the test of a real model.