The business retention CRM for economic development.
Know your businesses. Keep them. Help them grow. BRE Pulse is a continuously updated relationship management system for the organizations responsible for a place's economy. It builds a profile of every business from the data you already have, spots retention risk and expansion opportunity early, turns each one into an accountable action, and measures what happened. Routine operation needs no one from BRE Pulse.
Collecting business information is where most systems stop. Here it has to lead somewhere — an organized response, accountable follow-through, and evidence of results.
of economic-development practitioners named business retention, expansion and attraction a priority strategy.
of gross private-sector job gains in Q4 2025 occurred at expanding existing establishments.
runs most local BRE programs, often part-time, with the record in a spreadsheet and the follow-up in someone's memory.
Your list is ranked by what the work is worth
Get the right things done that make a difference, not just stay busy. A date-ordered list quietly rewards whatever is easiest to finish, so the same work can be ordered by payoff instead.
Scored on what is at stake
Jobs and investment at stake, how significant the employer is, whether they are at risk, whether you promised, and whether anyone has ever engaged them.
Every item explains itself
One sentence containing the raw figures, so a ranking can be argued with rather than taken on faith. Age counts, but is capped — an old trivial task can never outrank real jobs simply by having waited.
Unknown is not worthless
Work with nothing recorded shows as “nothing recorded” rather than low value. That gap is a management job, not a low priority.
Six jobs, one system
All six jobs are included in full, at every price. There is one product and one subscription — nothing below is held back or sold back to you.
A few items are marked Customize. These are not parts of a job that have been removed: they are optional extras that either connect to a system your own IT runs, or cost real money every time they run. They exist so that the handful of organizations who need them carry their cost, instead of it sitting in everybody’s price. Most customers never turn any of them on, and nothing in the six jobs stops working without them. When you’d need each one, and what it costs.
Your business universe
Licenses, assessor exports, chamber lists and your spreadsheet, matched into one record per business, with the source of every fact. A map with drawn areas, saved views and candidate sites and buildings. Local unemployment, wages and Census data beside the record.
Your own GIS layers as evidence Customize
More about Know →Visits and check-ins
Prepare, visit, capture notes by voice and review what gets saved. A two-to-five-minute Business Check-in with no login, by link or QR code. Built-in forms and a portal where a business sees its own record.
Custom form logic Customize
More about Listen →Follow through
Risk and growth flags confirmed by a named person. Retention and expansion cases, projects with milestones and playbooks, government commitments with owners and dates, a planner, and one follow-up list. A partner and team roster for referrals and shared work.
More about Act →Ally, your BRE assistant
"Prepare me" before any meeting. Suggestions to accept, edit or decline, each with its evidence. Plans drafted for your approval. Nothing Ally writes changes a record until a person approves it.
Online research and watched agendas Customize · Planning & Analysis Customize
More about Prepare →Reports
Jobs and investment tracked as proposed, committed and completed. Program scores, a monthly scorecard, dashboards you can click through to the record, and monthly, quarterly, annual and board reports as PDF, Word, Excel or CSV, on a schedule if you like.
More about Prove →Integrations and security
Outlook calendar sync for visits and meetings. Two-step sign-in, sign-in history, session control and a full audit log. Business information marked confidential stays with the people allowed to see it.
Single sign-on, API and webhooks Customize · Network roll-up Customize
More about Connect →Start with useful data, not an empty CRM
Upload what you already have. BRE Pulse does the rest before your first visit.
Business universe
Business licenses, assessment exports, chamber lists, your spreadsheet. Matched and de-duplicated into one canonical record per business, with contacts and locations. Conflicts between sources go to you, never silently overwritten.
Every fact shows its source
Each material fact carries where it came from, when it was observed, how confident we are, and whether a person verified it. An estimate is never shown as a verified fact.
Knowledge Score
Every business gets a 0–100 score for how much you know, how current it is and how reliable it is, with the missing fields listed and the next thing to ask.
Give businesses a reason to participate
The Business Check-in takes two to five minutes. A business confirms its profile, reports its outlook and plans, says what would help, asks a confidential question, and chooses who may see its answers. No login. No email required: you share the link, print a QR code, or point businesses to your organization's public check-in page.
- Businesses control visibility: organization staff, a named project team, or the program administrator only.
- Requests and confidential questions become a named person's action the moment they arrive.
- Staff visit notes, spoken or typed, become proposed facts, flags, actions and commitments for review before anything is saved.
What a business sees back
Where its request stands, what the organization committed to and when, and a person who follows up. That is the difference between a survey and a relationship.
Individual answers are never published. Aggregate results appear in reports without identifying a business.
See risk and opportunity early
Retention risk
Relocation, closure, a serious unresolved permit or zoning problem, a critical utility constraint.
Needs attention
A lease ending, a succession question, staffing trouble, process friction, a strategic business you know too little about.
Growth
Expansion, hiring, capital investment, a site search.
Context
Useful to know, no action required.
Coordinate action and make sure follow-up happens
Cases and commitments
One click turns a flag into a retention, expansion, assistance, site, workforce or infrastructure case with jobs, investment and square footage tracked as proposed, committed and completed, never combined. Government commitments carry an owner and a due date; overdue ones are impossible to miss.
The follow-up list
Every item answers who, why, what changed, what we know, what we don't, what to ask, the outcome we want, the owner, the due date, and what happens if it is not done.
Projects, planner and partners
Projects with milestones, a board and a timeline, eleven ready-made playbooks, a day-week-month planner with Outlook calendar sync, and a roster of partners and team members with the roles they play on each case.
Quantify results, without letting one big project hide everything else
- Investment proposed, committed and completed; jobs retained, projected and created; square footage; open and overdue commitments.
- Businesses assisted and small businesses assisted, contacted, verified; issues resolved; response and resolution times.
- Three operational scores your board can read: Intelligence (how well you know your businesses), Engagement (how consistently you engage them), Execution (how well you follow through).
- A monthly report and a board or council briefing that regenerate from the record and never name a business without its permission.
What we do not claim
BRE scores are operational indicators computed from your own record. They are not a certification, not a ranking of communities, and not a statement about any individual business. Fiscal-impact estimates always show their formula, inputs and assumptions.
Read the BRE Program Methodology and the Data & AI Trust Standard.
Customize Options
Added to your subscription when you need them. They cover work that depends on other systems or heavier AI use. Pricing on request.
- Planning & Analysis: master plan and zoning documents, cited Project Fit Analysis, fiscal-impact models.
- GIS Connect: your ArcGIS and GeoJSON layers as evidence on the map and each business.
- Enterprise Access: single sign-on, two-way calendar sync, the organization API and webhooks. Your IT team owns and maintains these connections, with self-tests and health alerts from us.
- Research & Watch: online research and watched public agendas and notices.
- Custom Forms: conditional questions and answers written straight into records.
- Network: partner organizations on shared cases and roll-up reporting.
Easy to start, on your own
- Tell us who you are and what you serve. Organization type, service area, roughly how many businesses.
- Give us what you already have. A CSV of licenses or a spreadsheet is enough. The universe, profiles, scores and outreach list build in minutes.
- Share the check-in link. In your own email, on a letter, on a QR code at the counter. No BRE Pulse email goes to your businesses unless you turn that on.
- Run the first pass. Dashboard, follow-up list, 30/60/90-day plan and a first-run report, ready for your next staff meeting.
Pricing is by capability package and the number of businesses tracked, with unlimited users for your organization. See pricing. Government buyers can pay by card or by invoice and purchase order. Federal procurement thresholds increased effective October 1, 2025 to a $15,000 micro-purchase threshold and $350,000 simplified acquisition threshold; BRE Pulse packages may fall within simplified purchasing levels for some organizations, but applicable local, state, grant and organizational procurement rules must always be checked. Michigan townships have no state-mandated bidding threshold; each board's purchasing policy governs.
Ready to start?
See pricing for your organization, then order by card, invoice or purchase order.
Prefer a written briefing?
Tell us your community and we will put together what is already known about its businesses and what a BRE program would establish, then follow up by email.
We use your details only to prepare and send the briefing. Privacy
