THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 15, 1996 TAG: 9604130251
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD
STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Long : 231 lines
It's 5 p.m on a recent weekday and Bobby Harrell has been on his best behavior for a visiting reporter all day.
Harrell, a regional director for Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology, is a renowned practitioner of the nearly lost art of ``pea vining.''
That's an old Southern term for talking about all manners of things before getting to the subject at hand. In a more leisurely time, it was essential to making friends and influencing people - an elegant conversational dance that helped consummate agreements and build understanding.
But on this day, Harrell has barely mentioned his two daughters' storied basketball playing days at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy, or his passion for tennis, or the time he appeared on ``What's My Line'' to stump the panel about his first career curing hams.
All day, he has kept it ``in the road,'' as he likes to say.
Tooling along in his dark green Lincoln Continental, he has described in great detail his role at CIT, a state agency whose purpose is to help Virginia companies commercialize emerging technologies. He has pitched this CIT program and that, profusely praised his associates and superiors in the agency and unblushingly taken for himself a share of the credit for CIT's recently improved image in political and business circles.
Fanning out of CIT's Greenbrier office, Harrell covers a region that stretches from Emporia to the Eastern Shore and includes most of South Hampton Roads. ``The most exciting job in Virginia,'' he declares at one point in his buttery drawl. ``I love the excitement of being able to help companies develop things.''
But with 70 outfits currently depending upon him as their technological bridge to the state's universities and research labs, it's a challenge, he later confesses.
``You've got to constantly reprogram your brain,'' he says. ``One minute, you're trying to learn something about satellite frequencies and all of a sudden somebody calls you about composting or a computer program.''
Along about then is when the dam in Bobby Harrell finally bursts - and he starts the conversation to wandering. Soon he's off on a tangent far from CIT.
He's talking about the time in the early '70s when he and his wife Monette, then eight months pregnant, went on a Channel 13 talk show to tell viewers how to use up their leftover Christmas hams. ``We got 2,300 letters out of that,'' he says. ``I said, `If that many people are interested, we can write a cookbook.' '' Their volume, The Ham Book, is now in its ninth printing.
Which leads him to another story about a certain wooden Indian: the one he had painted in the College of William & Mary's colors and bused back from San Juan Capistrano, Calif., to his Suffolk home after swinging a deal with the local carver.
Harrell gave the man four hams, the ham cookbook, and an undisclosed amount of money - undisclosed even to this day because at the time his wife wanted to buy an Oriental rug instead.
He could go on. And he did, by the way.
Forgive him his detours.
Big, bubbly Robert Wesley Harrell Jr. wouldn't be nearly as productive if gabbiness, needling, name-dropping and bragging were against the rules for state government employees.
For nearly a decade, the 57-year-old Harrell has been guilty of all these and yet still accomplished his mission: creating jobs and business investment.
Those who've learned to appreciate his style say he more than makes up for any shortcomings with his ingenuity, encyclopedic knowledge of the state's businesses and technological resources, and his good-natured devotion to the well-being of his clients.
More than a few who've worked with him say he's the most effective of all of CIT's business liaisons.
``I've never been around anyone who can network people quite as well as he can,'' says Clare Dorsey, director of Old Dominion University's Technology Applications Center.
``I've spent half my life trying to convince Bobby to teach everybody else what he knows,'' says CIT Managing Director Catherine S. Renault, who adds with a chuckle, ``without making them all get tired of listening to him.''
Renault says what most sets Harrell apart is his ability to think unconventionally. ``He's brilliant in his ability to make connections that other people simply don't see,'' she says.
The more circuitous and whimsical the connection, the higher the chance Harrell was the CIT junction box through which it was made.
Take peanuts.
Harrell, having grown up in Suffolk, is naturally inclined to be interested in the subject.
He was fascinated by the idea of making something useful out of discarded peanut hulls, and kept a close watch on research in the field. In 1992, he'd found his angle.
A Chesapeake company, Consolidated Launcher Technology Inc., was trying to win a federal grant to build and test a crash barrier for high-speed rail crossings. The company's chief executive, Daniel S. Lynch, called Harrell for help.
Lynch still laughs about their first meeting. ``The first thing he told me when I told him what our plan was is, `We need to go talk to some people about peanuts.' I was thinking maybe I made a mistake in going to see him.''
But Harrell was on to something. He knew that peanut hulls, combined with high-density polyethylene, would be highly energy-absorbent and could make the barrier cheaper and more effective. Consolidated Launcher incorporated the idea into the design of its test barrier and won a $400,000 grant from the Federal Railroad Administration. It's hoping to eventually build thousands of the rail barriers in Chesapeake.
Meanwhile, since then two other companies have committed to build a $2 million pilot plant in Suffolk for manufacturing shipping pallets made from peanut hulls. That was after Harrell connected the companies, Birdsong Corp. in Suffolk and Environmental Solutions Inc. in Richmond, and helped them win a $425,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Harrell has been doing stuff like this since 1987, when he was hired as one of the first of what are now 11 CIT regional directors. Until last year, his office was at Tidewater Community College's Chesapeake campus, and he was technically an employee of the college, which paid his salary out of a grant from CIT.
Harrell moved into the Greenbrier office after he and the other regional CIT directors moved to the agency's payroll. He got a sidekick last October when CIT hired another director, Karen Jackson, to work out of the office. She covers Virginia Beach. (Another director, Robert Heffley, covers the Peninsula.)
One reason why he's effective, Harrell says, is that he worked in and eventually owned businesses himself. He knows what's it's like.
A day after he picked up his first college diploma at William and Mary, back in 1960, he was slaughtering and butchering hogs in the family meatpacking business. He worked 14-hour days on his rise to general manager. But he still found time to study for an MBA from Old Dominion. (He has a doctorate in education from W&M, too).
For a seven-year period in the late '70s and early '80s, Harrell co-owned and managed both a ham import/export company and a beer distributorship. Talk about burning candles at both ends.
``I was invited to the White House for a lunch with President Carter along with a group of 100 Virginians,'' he recalls. ``I got back to Suffolk about 8 o'clock that night and was unloading train cars with a forklift. That's what small business is all about.''
Harrell was serving on the board of the state community college board when he was offered the CIT position.
``They were looking for someone who'd been in business 10 to 15 years, had an advanced degree and had knowledge of the community college system,'' he says.
It also didn't hurt that he'd been a key campaigner for Democratic governors Charles Robb and Gerald Baliles and had chaired Suffolk's Democratic Party for 14 years - a subject that Harrell now prefers not to discuss. ``I'm apolitical,'' he declares. He folds over and deletes a section marked Politics from his six-page resume when copying it for a reporter.
Harrell concedes he was no technology guru when he was hired for the CIT job. But so what?
``They told me when they hired me for this that I wasn't supposed to know anything,'' he says. ``I was only supposed to know where to find it.''
For someone as resourceful as Harrell, it wasn't hard at all.
At his very first speaking engagement, in Virginia Beach, he landed two projects: one with a restaurant owner who wanted to put up a windmill to generate electricity, the other with a small company that was having trouble recycling silver from x-ray fluid.
The windmill went up and eventually died. But out of the latter Harrell sewed threads that still weave in and out of some of the most important projects he's working on today.
The Hampton Roads Sanitation District was so impressed that Harrell found scientists who prescribed a solution to the silver-recycling company's troubles that two months later it presented him with a problem of its own: what to do with ash from the incineration of sewage sludge.
Harrell's mind started working. He remembered that a Richmond company that CIT was working with had licensed an Australian technology to make blocks out of coal ash for use in erosion control.
``I called them up one day and said, `Why don't we use sewage sludge ash,' '' he recalls. ``Well, you should have heard the explosion. `I'm not going to put that in my product!' ''
Harrell pressed on nonetheless and when he learned that a pond at Tidewater Community College's Suffolk campus was in danger of being washed away by erosion from the James River, he made his move. The sanitation district and CIT agreed to help fund the project as a demonstration and the company jumped on board.
It worked, and the Seabees barrier went on to become one of three projects in which Harrell has been involved over the last several years to win Project of the Year awards from the National Association of Management and Technical Assistance Centers.
Now, Harrell is involved a wide range of projects to recycle all types of ash and manufacturing byproducts.
Exactly how many jobs and how much business investment he's helped stimulate in the last decade is hard to say. The Herndon-based CIT doesn't have hard and fast statistics going back that far. But Harrell tries to benchmark on his own. He says he helped launch 12 of the 27 new companies that CIT took credit for last year in a progress report released shortly before the General Assembly took up the agency's budget.
The legislature, impressed with CIT's claim of creating or saving 3,500 jobs in the year before, upped the agency's annual budget from $8.2 million to $10.3 million. Only a few years before a panel appointed by Gov. George Allen had proposed abolishing CIT, declaring it ineffective. Now Allen compliments the agency for improving Virginia's industrial competitiveness.
Harrell says, ``There are some that throw more money at it. But I would defend to anybody that for what we spend, we have the best technology-assistance program in the nation with CIT.''
He's successful, Harrell says, only because he gets a lot of help. ODU, particularly its engineering school and that school's Technology Applications Center, is an ``incredible resource,'' he says.
It also helps that CIT has access to an information center that gives him and other regional directors quick access to ``every technology database in the world.'' And Hampton Roads is rich with federal labs and military installations that are trying harder to spin off commercial technologies.
Harrell says the hardest thing he's had to learn is the difference between wild-eyed inventors and business-minded technologists. He spends a lot more time with the latter.
He's always hustling.
Ask his clients.
``One of these days, a critical mass of people will come together on a really significant project,'' says Ray DeRegis, whose Chesapeake-based multimedia training company, Praxis 3 Inc., was launched with Harrell's help. ``And we'll realize that Bobby was the one who put it all together.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Cover, Color photo]
PLANTING TECHNOLOGY'S ROOTS
MOTOYA NAKAMURA
The Virginian-Pilot
[Color Photos]
MOTOYA NAKAMURA photos
The Virginian-Pilot
Bobby Harrell believes he has "the most exciting job in Virginia...I
love the excitement of being able to help companies develop
things."
Ray DeRegis's multimedia training company, Praxis 3 Inc., was
launched with help from Harrell. "The guy knows people all over the
state," says DeRegis, left. "He is well-networked."
Harrell had a hand in the creation of Seabees blocks, and
knick-knacks known as Bio Critters, which are made from ash.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB