First Person: René Buck, President & CEO, BCI Global

René Buck has spent the last four decades helping global companies choose where to build. As founder and CEO of BCI Global (Buck Consultants International), he’s led location strategy, site selection projects and supply chain projects across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He launched the Netherlands-based firm on the same day he received two university diplomas, based on insights he gathered from his master’s thesis on U.S. and Japanese investment in Europe.

Today, BCI Global is a boutique firm with 75 consultants and offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia — and it has been recognized by Forbes for seven straight years as one of America’s and for 3 years as one of the world’s best management consulting firms. We caught up with Buck to talk about the evolution of site selection, the impact of tariffs and geopolitics, and the advice he’s giving manufacturing executives right now.

Area Development: You mentioned starting BCI Global right after college. What convinced you there was a market for this work?
René Buck: As a student, I interviewed U.S. and Japanese managers who had recently opened factories in Europe. What I found was that good information was hard to come by — no internet, not even fax machines at that point in time. If you knew how much a warehouse worker made in Birmingham, UK, you could charge money for that data. The second thing I noticed was that most of the managers I interviewed were doing it all for the first time. There was no internal legacy knowledge about site selection. So I figured: companies need help.

What was the original vision for the company?
Buck: Honestly, I thought I’d be mainly working for small and mid-sized companies. I started in my dorm room. But over time, we expanded internationally and started advising European, American, and Asian companies not just in Europe but also in the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, and Asia. Today, we’re a global firm, but still boutique and specialized. We like being on the front lines of how companies are responding to changing conditions around the world.

How has site selection changed most in your 40 years of experience?
Buck: One big change is the way companies view energy. For decades, energy was just a cost item. Today, it’s about reliability, grid capacity, and the ability to source green power. We have clients that want to build solar farms onsite just to make sure they have control over their supply.

What about incentives?
Buck: In the U.S., incentives have always been a strong part of the equation. States, counties, and cities are often aggressive with what they can offer. That hasn’t changed much — but what’s changed is labor.

What are you seeing on the workforce side?
Buck: Workforce is critical. In tight labor markets, there are always winners — companies that are more attractive to job seekers. The question is: What do you offer to be the preferred employer? Not just in salary, but in benefits, career development, even company culture. We’ve developed a specific, tailormade method called IDEAL — In-Depth Assessment of Labor Markets — to help clients figure that out.

And these challenges aren’t just in the U.S.?
Buck: Not at all. If you go to Central and Eastern Europe — Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary — you’ll find labor market tightness in certain regions there, too. Even in China, on the east coast near Shanghai and Shenzhen, the labor market was until recently tight. There’s no such thing as an unlimited supply of cheap, available labor anymore.

You’ve also said that external pressures — like tariffs and global politics — are becoming bigger drivers of location decisions.
Buck: Absolutely. There are three reasons companies change their footprint: internal drivers, like new products or capacity needs; industry drivers, like regulatory changes, which play a role for everybody in a certain industry vertical; and external drivers — things you can’t control as CEO of a company, like trade policy, super-inflation, or pandemics. It’s those external drivers that have become much more important over the past decade.

Is that why you recommend scenario planning?
Buck: Yes. You can’t afford to sit back and wait anymore. We’re helping companies model different scenarios now — even if they don’t plan to move for another six months or a year. One recent client asked us to calculate when it made financial sense to leave China and invest in the U.S. Our tipping point was 41.3% in import tariffs. That kind of planning gives you a head start.

When we asked you to pick one word to describe the next year in site selection, you gave us three: proactive scenario planning.
Buck: [Laughs] I did! But it’s true. The world is moving fast. Look at the current U.S. import restrictions. If you're not planning proactively, you're falling behind. Even if you’re not ready to make a move, you should be doing the groundwork so you're ready when conditions shift.

Which industries are being hit hardest by recent changes in global trade?
Buck: Industries with low profit margins — industrial goods, certain foods, for example — feel the pain more than sectors like semiconductors or pharmaceuticals, where margins are higher. When tariffs go up, someone has to pay. In many cases it’s the customer, sometimes the company eats the cost.

What are foreign companies thinking now about FDI into the U.S.?
Buck: The regionalization of manufacturing was already happening before COVID — the idea of having a plant in the U.S. or Mexico to serve the U.S. market, one in Europe for EMEA, one in SE Asia for Asia, and so on. Tariffs and trade uncertainty have only accelerated that trend. If you’re producing closer to your customer, you’re less vulnerable for disruptions and tariffs and closer to your customers.

So if you’re advising a CEO today, what’s the one message you want them to hear?
Buck: Be ready. You can’t control everything — especially not geopolitics — but you can prepare. Understand your business case. Know what your tipping points are. And don’t assume the way you did things in the past will work going forward. The companies that are planning proactively now will be in the best position to compete tomorrow.

Interviewed by: Area Development.