BRE (Business Retention & Expansion) Program Methodology
Business Retention and Expansion (BRE) is the practice of understanding the businesses already in a community, keeping them, and helping them grow. Roughly four in five gross private-sector job gains occur at expanding existing establishments (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Q4 2025). This page explains how BRE Pulse operates and what it does not claim.
The principle the whole method rests on: collecting business information is where most systems stop. Here it has to lead somewhere — an organized response, accountable follow-through, and evidence of results. A survey that produces a report nobody acts on has cost a community the goodwill of every business that answered it.
The operating loop
Build the business universe → gather data → score knowledge quality → detect changes → identify risks and opportunities → engage the business → create actions → follow through → record outcomes → refresh → repeat. After onboarding, routine operation needs no intervention from BRE Pulse.
How profiles are built
From the customer's uploads (licenses, assessment exports, chamber lists, spreadsheets), business-submitted check-ins, staff notes, and approved public sources. Records are matched on normalized name, address, parcel and phone; ambiguous matches go to a person, never auto-merged.
How source provenance works
Every material fact stores its value, source, observed date, recorded date, confidence, verification status and who verified it, sensitivity, review date, and what superseded it. A differing value from a new source never silently overwrites a verified or equally confident fact; it becomes a conflict for a person to decide.
How confidence and freshness work
Confidence follows the source: business-submitted and staff-verified facts are high; uploads medium; self-added businesses low until verified. Each field has a review window (contacts and employment six months, plans 60 days, active issues and risks 14–30 days). Stale facts lower the Knowledge Score and are listed.
Business Knowledge Score
Each business receives a 0–100 score answering: how much do we actually know, how current is it, how reliable is it? Weights: completeness 25%, freshness 25%, source confidence 15%, direct verification 20%, relationship depth 15%. The score lists the missing fields and the next information request.
How businesses control confidential information
A business chooses who may see its check-in: organization staff, a named project team, or the program administrator only. Consent to be contacted and consent to share in summary with partner agencies are separate and recorded. Sharing grants can expire and be revoked, and every grant is logged. Individual answers are never published.
How risks and opportunities are identified
Deterministic rules read the latest facts and propose flags with evidence and a confidence: red (relocation, closure, serious unresolved permit or zoning problem, critical utility constraint), yellow (lease ending, succession, contraction, workforce need, process friction, strategic business with a large information gap, stale case), green (expansion, hiring, capital investment, site search), info.
Red and yellow flags are proposed until a named person confirms them. An adverse pulse for a business is likewise proposed and becomes the record only on confirmation. Confirmation, dismissal (with a reason) and resolution are audited.
How action plans and impact are created
Cases, commitments, actions
A confirmed flag becomes a case in one click. Cases carry the business need, the government need, jobs and investment by stage, agencies, owners and due dates. Government commitments carry an owner and due date; overdue commitments are escalated. The rolling 30/60/90-day plan regenerates nightly from open flags, cases, gaps and commitments, and never duplicates an action.
How impact is calculated
Proposed, committed and completed investment are stored and reported separately and never combined. Jobs retained, projected and created are separate counts. Breadth outcomes (businesses assisted, small businesses assisted, contacted, verified, issues resolved, response and resolution times) sit beside project outcomes. Fiscal-impact estimates, where offered, expose formula, inputs, assumptions and confidence and are never presented as audited fact.
How small businesses remain visible
There is no single priority score that always sends attention to the largest taxpayer. Retention risk, growth opportunity, support need, actionability, coverage and data confidence are kept as separate dimensions, and small-business coverage is reported on its own. A six-person company with a solvable barrier can outrank a 700-person company with no active need.
What the BRE (Business Retention & Expansion) scores mean
| Score | Question it answers | Components |
|---|---|---|
| Intelligence | How well do we know our businesses? | Coverage 30 · freshness 25 · verification 20 · relationship coverage 15 · confidence 10 |
| Engagement | How consistently are we engaging them? | Priority-business cadence · overall cadence · small-business representation · participation · business-initiated use |
| Execution | How well do we follow through? | First-response time · commitments on time · overdue rate · case progress · business confirmation |
Outcome and Health scores follow once outcome data exists. All scores are versioned, show their components, and are labeled operational.
How human review is preserved
- Adverse classifications require a named person.
- Staff notes are structured by an AI assistant into proposals; a person reviews and commits them.
- Report narratives are drafted from a payload the reader can see; every figure appears in the payload.
- Board briefings never name a business without permission and suppress small cells.
- Zoning, planning and legal questions get preliminary analysis only, never an official determination.
What BRE Pulse does not claim
- BRE scores are operational indicators, not a certification, ranking or accreditation.
- No estimate is presented as a verified fact; no modeled fiscal figure is presented as audited.
- BRE Pulse is not endorsed by IEDC or any association; the statistics cited are from their published sources.
- Nothing here is legal advice about public-records law. Public bodies should confirm confidentiality practices with counsel; the platform records the authorization and public description Michigan law expects, it does not substitute for them.
