“In 1988, I was an executive of a Parisian SME when I felt a calling to return to my roots. I was recruited by the Development Agency of the Ardèche and tasked with identifying and locating businesses for the region. I then discovered that the major difficulty lay first and foremost in entering into a relationship with those companies with actual business set-up projects even before trying to convince their leaders. Like my counterparts in other regions, not only in France but abroad as well, I saw that results were not always related to the energy and means committed. Despite the motivation and professionalism of the “developers”, the market potential for business location projects remains woefully small for an extremely dense regional offer (national and international).

Meanwhile, in my contacts with business leaders, I saw that they were more often than not at sea amongst the large number of local contacts of whose skills and organization, and regional offer they knew little about, often lacking experience in managing business location projects.

Five years later I created “Implantation Express” (Location Express), a company specialising in identifying business set-up projects for the economic development agencies of different regions. It was designed as a tool to promote the availability of their support services to companies, with the following promises: speed, confidentiality and expertise in submitting fully packaged personalized business location proposals for investors. In 2001, with its first steps in international business location projects abroad, Implantation Express became Regional Partner

Today, after 15 years of experience, more than 6,500 projects handled on behalf of more than 300 regions in France and abroad, Regional Partner has become the benchmark in France for business identification for local authorities and economic development agencies.