Operator first. Broker second. Analyst third.
Most retail recruitment firms are run by analysts. We're run by an operator who became a broker who built the AI tools we now use. The order matters — and it shows up in every engagement we run.
The firm
TaxBase Advisors, LLC is an Alabama limited liability company headquartered in Huntsville. We were founded in 2026 specifically to do what most retail recruitment firms structurally cannot: run analysis and execution under one roof, with broker incentives pointed at the cities we serve rather than at retailers signing somewhere else.
We hold contracts with municipal clients. Our brokerage activity — land deals for development, landlord representation, build-to-suit — operates separately, paid by principals on individual transactions. The two revenue streams are firewalled by contract and entity structure. Cities pay us a retainer for service. They never pay our commissions.
Institutional partnership
TaxBase Advisors operates with a standing working relationship with the Alabama Small Business Development Network (ASBDN) — Alabama's federally-chartered small business assistance network, hosted at the state's universities. When a retailer deal needs evaluation of available incentive packages — abatement programs, capital access, workforce credits, retailer-applicable economic development incentives — we work through ASBDN to ensure the right options are on the table.
This is intentional structure, not a marketing line. Cities engaging us inherit ASBDN's institutional reach without paying for a separate government-relations practice. We do not draft TIF agreements (that's city-attorney and bond-counsel work); we ensure cities and retailers have a clear picture of what incentive packages exist and which ones fit.
Keith Hill, Co-Founder
Keith's path to municipal retail recruitment ran through three stages most analysts never experience.
Operator first. Keith founded a food truck operation in 2017 that won Alabama Food Truck Operator "Influencer of the Year" in 2018. Running a food truck teaches you, in a way no MBA program does, what retailers actually look for in a location: foot traffic at peak meal times, parking accessibility, line-of-sight from arterial roads, the drive-by speed at which signage becomes legible. Most retail consultants have never personally counted cars at a curb.
Broker second. Keith holds active commercial real estate broker licenses in Alabama and Tennessee. His brokerage practice focuses on land deals for development and landlord representation — the supply side of retail real estate. This is the structural reason TaxBase Advisors can do what tenant-rep brokerages can't: every conversation Keith has with a developer or landlord is in service of filling buildings inside the tax bases of cities that hire him.
AI builder third. Keith built SiteDeck (the location-intelligence platform that powers our trade-area analyses and per-site profiles) and Council IQ (the agenda-monitoring engine that surfaces retail-relevant items from neighboring cities' council meetings into our intel feed, synced to each city's council meeting cadence). These tools compress the analyst workload that traditional firms charge five-figure retainers to perform manually — which is why our pricing can include outcome bonuses without breaking the unit economics.
Jay Coshow, Co-Founder
Jay is co-founder and outreach lead. He carries the day-to-day retailer pipeline — the cold calls, the warm follow-ups, the RECon meeting calendar, the relationships with real estate directors at retail brands.
Analysis is necessary but not sufficient. The 50–100 retailer conversations per quarter that actually move pipeline are Jay's domain. This is the part most retail recruitment firms don't do. They produce a target list and stop. We work the list.
Where we work
Headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. Service nationwide. Our analysis, pipeline, dashboard, and recruitment work are not constrained by geography — we engage cities across the United States. Brokerage close-out work is handled directly where our principals are licensed, and through coordinated local broker relationships elsewhere.
We picked Huntsville as headquarters intentionally — central to the Southeast retail market, strong municipal density within driving distance for in-person briefings, low operating cost. But our service operates wherever a city's mayor wants to grow their tax base.
Why now
The pattern of frustration that brought our first inbound mayors to us was identical: paid for analysis, never saw retailers actually land. The structural conflict in conventional firms (tenant-rep brokerage versus city-recruitment service) was the diagnosed cause once we named it.
The opportunity is real and not regional. Across the United States, dozens of small and mid-sized cities watch tax base leak to neighbors with no execution-grade recruitment partner. We're building TaxBase Advisors to operate at that scale — with the structural advantages most existing firms can't replicate without dismantling their tenant-rep practices.
We don't compete on price. We compete on incentive alignment — retailers landing on parcels inside your tax base, paid for outcomes, not for reports.