ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997 TAG: 9703140018
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: HEADQUARTERS
SOURCE: JOHN LEVIN
The community's groan was almost audible when Advance Stores Co. Inc. said it had put its 660-store company up for sale. By midyear, the Advance Auto Parts chain likely will no longer have its headquarters in Roanoke.
It was the same day in February when Innotech Inc., an entrepreneurial outfit that developed and sells eyeglass lens-making machines, said it would merge into Johnson & Johnson, the health products giant. What has been a home-grown, Roanoke-based company would become a division of the New Jersey conglomerate.
Even more audible was support for the proposal that Roanoke pool its resources, buy controlling interest in a company and move its headquarters to town. Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, after listening last summer to area residents and business operators, suggested if half the region's households agreed to buy $10,000 worth of stock apiece, the $450 million investment would effectively control a $2.5 billion corporation - an outfit we'd be proud to say is Roanoke-based.
Why headquarters here?
"Any time you take the white-collar payroll out of the market, we take a back seat," said Chip Lawrence, president of Lawrence Transportation Systems Inc.
He said his household moving company has talked about locating its base elsewhere - logistically it would make more sense to be in the Carolinas - "but from a headquarters point of view, there's no place we'd rather be."
Only about 10 percent of Lawrence's business comes from the Roanoke Valley. "We move more people in and out of Chicago than in Roanoke," he said. But the work ethic of employees available in this region helps keep the 400-employee company here.
Also, having sizable companies based in a community provides face-to-face relationships that tend to yield corporate support for the arts and social-welfare nonprofits.
For example, Fink's Jewelers frequently is asked to contribute money or merchandise for fund-raisers in other cities where it operates stores - Lynchburg, Richmond, and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C. - but "it's bound to have more significance [in Roanoke] where you get positive feedback personally vs. a thank-you letter from out of town," said Marc Fink, the company's president.
The region's past losses
With the headquarters departures over the past 15 years of some of Roanoke's biggest corporations - Norfolk Southern Corp. to Norfolk, and the merger of Dominion Bankshares Corp. into First Union Corp. of Charlotte - Lawrence and Fink said their companies are looked to more often as bigger corporate contributors.
"We continue to get increased solicitations from nonprofits," Lawrence said. "When we have a good year, we do our share."
But Lawrence also thinks being a headquarters town means less than it used to.
Technology and reorganization in many corporations have diminished the number of executives who populate a headquarters office.
"Seven or eight years ago, we did a lot of business moving upper-middle managers," Lawrence said of his company. "This was a man ... who had to move every three or four years to go up the ladder.
"Today, with restructuring of corporate America, he's gone, he's not moving anywhere; and now at headquarters, only half of those people still exist."
LENGTH: Medium: 68 linesby CNB