Finding the next high-growth US metro in five days

Client

Date

$5B+ Global Design and Engineering Firm

08/2026

The challenge

A $5B+ global design and engineering firm had to decide where in the United States to place its next growth bets, and was carrying 25 to 30 growth opportunities nobody had researched. Regional teams answered questions of that kind with phone calls and hand-collected data, one city at a time. The question was which metro comes next.

The solution

FifthRow ran a dedicated instance for the firm behind a single intake form. Any team could submit a brief and get back a sourced research report, with the evidence behind it kept queryable for follow-ups. The growth-market question ran through that same route, on a five-day clock.

5 days

naming the next growth market

25

stalled opportunities researched and cleared

Growth-market selectionSourced shortlist in five days

Opportunity backlog25–30 unresearched, 25 programmes delivered

Cost per new questionReduced to one intake form

01 — A STANDING RESEARCH DESK

Before the growth question could be answered in a week, the route to an answer had to already exist. One intake form replaced "who can look into this for us" across the firm's innovation network.

Core Activities

Published one intake form: no scoping call, statement of work or purchase order
Took 17 briefs in one batch, run in parallel not sequence
Delivered 14 market reports within three weeks
Covered supply chain resilience, transition finance, circular models, predictive maintenance, climate risk, nature-based solutions, zero-emission transport and grid resilience
Ran everything on the firm's branded instance

The Results

A backlog that had sat unresearched was cleared in one pass, and the firm kept a warm route from a consultant's question to a sourced answer for the following seven months. By the time the growth question arrived, nobody had to build a process to handle it.

market reports in three weeks

02 — THE GROWTH QUESTION

The firm's growth director wanted to know where the next fast-growing US metro would be, before it was obvious. The first move was not to guess at candidates. It was to build a full evidence base on the metro everyone already agreed was the benchmark.

Core Activities

Read the benchmark metro across four drivers: demographics and population growth, industry dynamics, real estate, cultural appeal
Framed it around what an investor needs, not what a consultancy writes
Collected the source base automatically, not by commissioned study

The Results

A sourced, queryable account of what had actually driven one metro's growth, broken into four drivers that could be tested anywhere else. That turned an unanswerable question into a measurable one.

1 day

brief to sourced evidence base

03 — CANDIDATE MARKET SHORTLIST

With the drivers isolated, the same analysis was pointed outward. Which other US metros were showing the same pattern early enough to matter.

Core Activities

Tested other metros against the benchmark's drivers, in a comparison rerunnable anywhere
Reran it with a wider source pull, surfacing candidates the first pass missed
Ran head-to-head comparisons against each shortlisted metro
Pulled hard data on population, industry mix and real estate, not commentary
Deepened the corporate expansion read mid-week, after a shallow first pass

The Results

A named shortlist of candidate growth metros, each with a side-by-side data comparison against the benchmark. What had been an opinion in a business development conversation became a defensible list with sources attached.

comparative studies in one day

04 — WHY PEOPLE ACTUALLY MOVE

Economic data shows that a metro is growing. It does not show why anyone chose it. The last layer of the growth read went looking for the stated reasons, in people's own words.

Core Activities

Mined public forum discussion for stated reasons for relocating
Upgraded mid-week from summaries to verbatim quotes, giving teams language not conclusions
Kept every quote attached to its source
Kept the relocation read rerunnable against any candidate metro

The Results

The growth read closed with both halves of the answer: which markets the data pointed at, and what people said was pulling them there. The systems were left behind as templates rather than as a single report, so the same analysis could be rerun on any market the firm chose next.

1 week

open question to actionable shortlist

05 — WHAT TO BUILD IN THE NEW MARKET

Knowing where to grow is only useful alongside knowing what to build there. Four building-typology briefs ran on the same instance in the same week, on the same source machinery.

Core Activities

Ran programmes on four residential and hospitality typologies for the new market
Answered each question in a brief separately, with its own sourced response
Published reports as live pages, sources attached and queryable

The Results

The growth read and the design reads sat on one instance, sourced the same way. A team asking where to expand and a team asking what to design for that market were working off the same evidence, in the same week, for the first time.

building-typology programmes in one week

What it proved

In five days the growth question went from a business development conversation to a sourced answer: a 555-source read on the benchmark metro, a comparative study that surfaced candidates, head-to-head data against it, and public discussion mined for why people relocate, quoted not summarised. Seven purpose-built systems came from that question alone, four comparative studies in one day, four building-typology programmes alongside. Behind it sat seven months of standing capacity: 25 programmes through one intake form, 14 in the first three weeks.

What the firm holds is a method, not a single answer. The comparison system reruns against any market, the relocation workflow against any metro, and the source base behind both stays queryable, not frozen in a document. Teams stopped scoping engagements and started submitting questions, answered inside the week, not the next budget cycle.

Results

Metric	Benchmark	Result	Improvement
Growth-market selection	Phone calls, one city at a time	Shortlist compared on data, five days	From opinion to a sourced list
Sources per market read	Tens, read manually	555, collected and cited automatically	Order-of-magnitude larger base
Rerunning the analysis	A new commissioned study	The same system rerun	Reusable, not one-off
Opportunities researched	25 to 30 identified, none researched	25 programmes delivered	Backlog cleared
Research throughput	One study at a time	17 briefs in, 14 out, three weeks	Parallel, not sequential
Cost per new question	Budget line and scoping call	Zero, inside a fixed monthly subscription	Removed

OPEN INTAKE

Any team submits a brief through one form without a scoping call or a purchase order, and briefs run in parallel rather than in sequence.

BENCHMARK-DERIVED DRIVERS

A complete read on the market everyone already agrees is the benchmark yields the drivers every other candidate is then tested against.

RERUNNABLE COMPARISON

The market comparison is left behind as a system that reruns against any new market, so a fresh study is not commissioned each time.

QUOTED EVIDENCE

Public discussion is mined for the reasons people give in their own words, with every quote kept attached to the source it came from.

LAYERED EVIDENCE BASE

One sourced evidence base is collected first and purpose-built systems run over it, so follow-up questions do not require new research.

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