Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404260005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GALAX LENGTH: Long
It started in 1979, with 12 employees.
In the years since, Consolidated Glass and Mirror Co. has been touted in Inc. magazine as one of the nation's fastest-growing privately held companies, has opened a new state-of-the-art factory, and become a required stop for visiting politicians trooping through Southwest Virginia who want to marvel at the technology and extoll the region's work ethic.
``It is the most modern glass-cutting and mirror-silvering plant in the world,'' vice president Bill Dickerson boasts.
Oh yes, Consolidated also employs 1,000 people today - no mean feat in a rural part of the state where jobs are scarce and many natives wind up moving away.
Forget the new-fangled gadgetry that causes most visitors to gawk; what matters most to folks here is that Consolidated is an old-fashioned economic success story.
Ask 18-year-old Eric Bemis, fresh out of high school and already operating one of Consolidated's computerized glass-cutting machines. What would he be doing if he hadn't found a job here? ``I have no idea,'' he admits.
Dickerson underscores the oddity of Consolidated's location at every opportunity. ``We're world class and we're doing it all with good ol' country boys,'' he says. And country girls, he might add.
So what's it doing in Galax, of all places?
The answer can be given in one word: Clusters.
Consolidated is a prime example of a point preached by many economic development advisers these days: A small community, small like Galax or small like Roanoke, needs to concentrate on building a cluster of similar industries.
Why?
Because, they say, a cluster of industries enables a community to develop a specialized talent pool that makes it attractive to even more employers in that field. One reason Hanover Direct decided to put its new distribution center in Roanoke County was that, thanks to Orvis and the now-closed Sears Telecatolog, the Roanoke Valley already had a large workforce familiar with the mail-order business.
Yet it was because the Roanoke Valley doesn't have a large cluster of technology firms that FiberCom had difficulty recruiting senior engineers to the region - and decided to locate its new NetEdge subsidiary in Raleigh, N.C.
Also, with a ``critical mass'' of industries in one field, it's more likely that they'll start reproducing, spinning off additional employers - witness the way technology firms have proliferated in North Carolina's Research Triangle, or, for that matter, Consolidated's birth in Galax.
Galax in the 1970s was already home to two small mirror factories. Consolidated was born when some managers quit one of those existing mirror plants and started a third. It so happened, Dickerson says, that Consolidated invested in new technology - and pursued new markets - so the new company wound up eclipsing the others in size.
But why was there a mini-cluster of mirror companies in Galax in the first place?
The answer, once again, is clusters.
Galax may seem out of the way, but sitting near Interstates 77 and 81, it's actually close to the center of gravity of the Southeast's furniture industry, a regionwide cluster. And it's the furniture companies in Virginia and the Carolinas that constitute the majority of Consolidated's customers, Dickerson says. One of the company's biggest customers is 45 minutes down the interstate in the New River Valley - Pulaski Furniture.
In this way, Consolidated illustrates another key point about job creation: Know your place.
A community's size doesn't mean anything, says Michael Gallis, an urban planning specialist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
Small communities, he says, need to study the region around them, figure out what the key industries are in the nearest big cities, and set themselves up as suppliers for those industries - just as the mirror industry in Galax is a supplier to the rest of the furniture industry in Virginia and the Carolinas.
Marshall Univesity President Wade Gilley, who has studied the economy of small and mid-sized cities, calls this the ``shopping mall'' pattern of urban development.
A shopping mall is anchored by four or five major retailers. They're the stores that draw the most customers in. Smaller specialty shops feed off the traffic the anchors draw.
Economically vibrant cities evolve the same way, Gilley says. There are usually four or five major types of industries in the community. Their presence gives rise to other businesses, which make a living supplying the major companies.
The same thing is happening today in the New River Valley with Inland Motors and Industrial Drives, two Radford companies (both owned by Kollmorgen Inc.) that manufacture industrial motors.
``There are a number of companies cropping up in the Radford industrial park related to Kollmorgen,'' Radford University economist Michael Hayes says. ``They're small, but they're growing and they were attracted to some extent by Kollmorgen, because they supply speciality service.''
This kind of clustering of companies and their suppliers is a phenomenon that happens naturally. Consolidated Mirror's presence in Galax, for instance, is really just an accident of entrepreneurship - not because the city set out to create a specialty in mirror-making jobs.
But it's a process that communities can try to duplicate and accelerate, says Bob Hines of Tech Resources, a Columbus, Ohio, company that offers economic development advice to municipalities and utilities.
``Most people in economic development spend time trying to attract industries from the outside,'' he says. ``They spend a lot of money traveling around. But one of the best things to do is to take stock of what you've got already, figure out who is in a position to grow and work with them.''
``Look at what's growing in your region and how you can capitalize on it,'' he says.
That's something the Roanoke Valley Regional Economic Development Partnership has started to do in the past few years, executive director Beth Doughty says.
However, it's important, she says, to take a broad view, and not just focus on the cities nearby. For instance, one economic sector the partnership has high hopes for is companies that supply the automobile industry. ``It used to be all the automakers were clustered in Detroit,'' she says.
But now there's a cluster of automakers developing in the South - with Saturn near Nashville, and the new BMW plant near Spartanburg, S.C., and the new Mercedes factory going into Alabama. As a result, Roanoke may now be centrally located for auto suppliers, she says.
Of course, so is Galax.
One of Consolidated's growing markets, Dickerson says, is the auto industry.
by CNB