THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 20, 1995 TAG: 9511190082
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Hampton Roads, a pragmatic place of engineers and administrators clad in military khaki, also has its roll-the-dice entrepreneurs like Michael S. Campbell of Virginia Beach.
When Tidewater talks about entrepreneurs, and you do hear a lot of talk since the U.S. Navy scaled back, you seldom hear about Campbell or his company, Katec Inc. Often what you hear is this: The region lacks entrepreneurs.
You hear Boston and San Jose, maybe Raleigh, Durham and a few other cities can equal, per capita, the engineering firepower found in Hampton Roads. What's relatively scarce in the region are entrepreneurs, the folks able to organize and manage new ventures.
The talk naturally turns on how Hampton Roads can equip its engineers and scientists with the innovative wile of someone like Ross Perot, the political celebrity who early on would have blended with Tidewater's khaki legions. Once a U.S. Navy officer, Perot later sold computers for IBM Corp. and created his own Dallas data processing empire, Electronic Data Systems.
No one would mistake Mike Campbell for Ross Perot. Campbell prefers small business. Katec employs three. Perot's EDS became a big deal in Dallas. But look at this. Campbell and Perot are both salesmen. Each saw a problem, found a solution and sold the solution.
``A lot of people don't realize the importance of salesmanship,'' Campbell said. ``Airbags were invented in the 1930s. No one knew how to sell them.''
Ask what are the best towns for business in America, and Atlanta and Houston surface for entrepreneurial zeal, though pragmatic Tidewater has made one remarkable feat. The number of companies here has increased 50 percent in a decade. Virginia's Employment Commission counts about 30,000 covered businesses in Tidewater - commercial enterprises which pay unemployment insurance. In 1985, about 20,000 businesses were covered.
That's quite an increase. Hampton Roads has 250 more factories than in '85, 500 more construction firms, 700 more wholesalers, 1,000 more restaurants, 1,000 more financial and real estate firms, 2,000 more stores, 4,000 more service establishments.
Many of the new enterprises sprouted in the '80s as chains and branches of out-of-town companies. However, some were the work of entrepreneurs like Mike Campbell.
Campbell, 44, relocated from Houston with his wife, Katherine, who had grown up in Tidewater. Just as the government had created opportunity for Perot - EDS made its fortune computerizing the first waves of Medicare patient records - so did Campbell find a niche created by government.
His was an environmental product, but the idea almost stalled in the cradle. Campbell convinced no bankers there was a viable market for a $695 can opener, until he came across Lawrence Smith, head of Resource Bank in Virginia Beach.
With a loan in hand, Katec began production of Aerosolv. It emptied gas from used aerosol cans so the can could be safely discarded. The Navy became a big customer. The profits paved the way last year for the introduction of Prosolv, which empties propane cylinders.
In the next few months, Campbell intends to sell the Prosolv patent and use the cash to develop Toolminder, a lock concept that controls access to large hand tools. Someone else invented the concept, but he sees the market.
``I've been in and out of the shipyards,'' Campbell said. ``Toolminder when you look at you say, `That's just what we need.' The Navy can use these for the spill response carts they have on every ship.''
Tidewater in one way resembles Detroit a century ago when the unknown Henry Ford was tinkering with the gasoline engine. Once he was ready to build cars, Ford found close at hand engineers, lots of them, who understood internal combustion and mass production.
Detroit, after all, was a port where the marine engineers had converted the wood-burning steamships on the Great Lakes to oil as the Midwest forests were cleared in the late 19th Century.
Engineers fill Hampton Roads. And there are entrepreneural touches that rebuff the pragmatist image. For example, Information Technology Solutions Inc. in Hampton learns to manage Coast Guard paperwork. S3 Ltd. of Virginia Beach, originally a technical company, supplies the Navy with temporary workers.
But the notion lingers: the entrepreneurs and the engineers aren't paired together. No Henry Ford has brought it all together. by CNB