Tess Fay

Principal + VP of Location Intelligence

As Vice President of Location Intelligence, Tess leads GLS’s consulting platform and the firm’s approach to integrating comprehensive location strategy into rigorous, defensible business decisions for client executives. She serves as a strategic advisor to corporate leaders navigating the most complex location decisions, while also playing a central role in firm leadership, capacity building, and the execution of GLS’s most sophisticated consulting work. 

With a decade of experience in location strategy, Tess has built a reputation as a trusted advisor for companies facing their most consequential location decisions. Her work focuses on solving for complexity, including workforce resiliency, energy scarcity, shifting regulatory environments, infrastructure readiness, supply chain vulnerability, and long term execution risk. 

Tess has advised on several landmark investments in the United States that are unprecedented in the modern era and represent a new generation of highly complex manufacturing projects. This includes Novelis’s $4.1 billion investment in Alabama, which will create 1,000 jobs and become the most advanced and sustainable aluminum recycling and rolling facility in the world, as well as the first integrated aluminum rolling mill built in the United States in more than 40 years. She also advised Emirates Global Aluminium on its $4 billion aluminum smelter in Oklahoma, the first new primary aluminum production plant in the United States since 1980, expected to create 1,000 jobs and nearly double U.S. primary aluminum production. 

Across her work, Tess helps companies strengthen domestic manufacturing capacity, reduce supply chain risk, and support broader national competitiveness and defense priorities. Her advisory experience spans industries and geographies, with a consistent focus on aligning corporate strategy with locations capable of sustaining long term performance. 

Earlier in her career, Tess worked in manufacturing and served at the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, where she evaluated billions of dollars in potential investment, developed competitive incentive strategies, and partnered closely with communities pursuing major investment projects. This experience gave her a deep understanding of the public sector perspective and the importance of partnership between companies, site selectors, and economic developers, a foundation that directly informs her advisory work at GLS and aligns with the firm’s mission to match companies and communities in pursuit of mutual, sustainable prosperity. 

Tess is a Certified Site Selection Consultant (CSSC) and serves as a board advisor within the Site Selectors Guild, the only association of the world’s foremost professional site selection consultants. She is actively involved across multiple Guild committees and speaks frequently at national and regional conferences on complex location strategy, executive decision making, and how communities can prepare for transformational investment. 

She holds dual bachelor’s degrees in English and French from Centre College and an MBA from the University of West Georgia. Tess lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband and two children.