Fortune favors the bold

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  • EDC members from left- Glenda Bassham, Roger Feagley and Mitzi Y'Barbo with glass paperweights that each represent a business relocated to Sulphur Springs
    EDC members from left- Glenda Bassham, Roger Feagley and Mitzi Y'Barbo with glass paperweights that each represent a business relocated to Sulphur Springs
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EDC’s determination pays off for area development

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Economy

Luck: defined as success brought on by chance.

According to Sulphur Springs Hopkins County Economic Development Corporation (EDC) member Doug Moore, EDC’s Executive Director Roger Feagley has been very lucky over the past few years.

“I always say to Roger, ‘Keep being lucky,’” Moore said.

“I find that the harder you work, the luckier you are,” Feagley replied.

Feagley, along with EDC co-workers Mitzi Y’Barbo, Glenda Bassham and the support of the EDC board, have brought more than 20 businesses to Sulphur Springs in the last 15 years. Two businesses, My Perfect Pet and NextLink, broke ground just in the last month.

In fact, the EDC has been the recipient of the prestigious Community Economic Development award not once, but four times, in 2009, 2012, 2017 and 2018. It’s almost unheard of in the world of economic development corporations, but Feagley, Y’Barbo and Bassham make their own luck.

According to Feagley, however, “We’re not doing anything anybody else isn’t doing.”

DEVELOPMENT FOLLOWS INFRASTRUCTURE

When Feagley first came to Hopkins County, he said everyone asked him, “What do you think?”

“You’ve got some really fine farmland that we’ve got to turn into industrial parks,” Feagley answered.

Real estate agents will say “location, location, location,” Feagley says. For the EDC, although the location is important, it’s location paired with infrastructure that really makes a business relocation happen.

“When you look at a piece of land and it doesn’t have the road or water or sewer in there, it’s hard to get a customer to see that vision,” Feagley said. “Once you have the infrastructure, a customer will come up there and they’ll say, ‘Everything I need is here, I just have to move the building.’”

The EDC currently places businesses in two business parks. Heritage business park is located on the northeast side of town near Thomas Road and consists of 117.33 mainly grassland acres. Pioneer business park is located on the southwest side of town near C M H Road and consists of 103.05 mainly grassland acres. The earliest roads placed in these business parks were in 1995, according to city data.

“It’s pretty mundane stuff, but it has to be done,” Feagley said. “Once you get that stuff done, then you’re really in a position to start the marketing process.”

SELLING HOPKINS COUNTY

“Marketing is like marketing anything else,” Feagley said. “We have a website, we have videos, we have handouts. It’s just as if you were selling widgets.”

The EDC attends trade shows, although Feagley says they are cautious about which ones they attend.

“You have to develop what we refer to as target markets,” Feagley noted. “Target markets are those that fit the skill sets that your community has.”

Although many businesses, he says, are interested in relocating computer graphics factories, this would not fit our area’s workforce since Sulphur Springs and Hopkins County are not located close to any research facilities that churn out data scientists to work in those factories.

“Our people could learn how to make it, but we don’t have the junior colleges to teach the subjects, and these are things that are just not available,” he said.

The same goes for businesses such as biomedicine and other tech, Feagley says.

“The industries we tend to focus on are the basic industries such as food production, plastic and steel,” Feagley said. “Those are the sort of things that work out here.”

Of the number of companies the EDC has helped bring to Sulphur Springs, many fall into food production or manufacturing, including Ocean Spray Cranberries, Bob Evans Food, Saputo, ArmoRock Polymer Concrete, Clayton Homes and others.

Furthermore, Feagley says, the EDC is looking to entice companies from a region of the country where Hopkins County’s tax structure will compare favorably to what they experience in their current location.

Hopkins County EDC is most likely never going to hook a business from rural Georgia, Feagley says. With tax codes similar to Texas and metropolitan Atlanta mirroring Dallas, the environment is just too similar for a company from the peach state to see a benefit in relocating to Sulphur Springs.

However, Feagley said, he could make a dozen trips to New York, Chicago or California a year, where high tax rates and high government regulations that stifle business expansion make Hopkins County look like a perfect place to move.

“That’s why you see a lot of things from California. That state out there taxes them like crazy, and then when they’re through taxing them, they have a whole bunch of fees they have to pay every year,” he says.

Also, according to Feagley, California has “some of the most liberal courts” which essentially says to business owners, according to him, “We don’t want manufacturers. We want internet providers and home offices and insurance.”

Hopkins County, on the other hand, is more than happy to welcome a healthy and growing manufacturing sector, whether it is comprised of new Texas business or California tax refugees. In fact, one of Sulphur Springs’ newest businesses, My Perfect Pet, relocated from San Diego and broke ground July 31 for a 19,000-square-foot industrial kitchen to manufacture high-quality pet food.

My Perfect Pet’s owner, Karen Neola, not only mentioned the convenient central location of Sulphur Springs in relation to “distributor partners in the midwest, northeast and southwest,” but also the more laid-back lifestyle she found here.

“One of the biggest draws to Sulphur Springs, for me personally, was how friendly and welcoming I found the people to be,” she said.

Even relocating 100 miles from Arlington was a huge change for Feagley, when he took the position at the EDC.

“They asked me why I wanted this job, and I told them it was a quality of life issue,” he said. “I sat in traffic for 45 minutes every day, and I couldn’t imagine doing that for the next 20 years.”

ALL-WEATHER FRIENDS

Feagley, Y’Barbo and Bassham will be the first to tell you that for every line they cast, they hardly reel any in.

“I think the best thing we do is what I’m going to be doing next week,” Feagley said. “We pick a state; usually it’s California because that’s where the low-hanging fruit is. We set up meetings. It starts out with meetings associated with our target industries. Then emails are sent out, followed up by phone calls, and then we start making appointments.”

Over the course of four days in southern California, Feagley met with representatives from 15 different companies. He’s unsure if these meetings will result in any companies moving to Sulphur Springs, and he says he’ll likely be unsure for some time.

Feagley says this is because a timeline for the business to move can be incredibly varied. The San Diego company My Perfect Pet took about two years to finalize their move, whereas the Hudson Oaks, Texas company NextLink only took about six months, according to Feagley.

“In a lot of cases, you can meet with people and they’ll sound real gung-ho. Then you’re outlining what the steps are to make the move happen, and then they kind of slow up. Then you talk to them about the costs, because it’s a very expensive project to move from one state to another,” Feagley said. “They stop dropping off…because they didn’t realize what all it took.”

However, dimmed enthusiasm or even a total loss of communication from the interested party doesn’t stop the EDC team from soldiering on. They’re there to pop in via email or phone call to check up on the company, even if they’ve chosen to relocate somewhere else—or not at all.

At her groundbreaking ceremony, Neola told the crowd that the driving factor behind her selection of Sulphur Springs as her company’s new home was the persistent friendship and helpful emails from the EDC team.

“It’s something every business owner should do once in their life, but that’s it,” she said. “Roger and Glenda answered every single question I could come up with.”

MEASURING SUCCESS

According to Feagley, it is not uncommon for any EDC to have a low success rate. He says that for every 300 EDCs that exist, only one company ends up relocating. He’s not discouraged in the least, he says.

“For you to have multiple moves in a 10-year period, that’s incredible,” he said. “People go years without getting a new company.”

If Feagley’s numbers are correct, two companies breaking ground in Sulphur Springs within 30 days of each other, though not impossible, should be highly improbable.

Maybe his theory about luck is more right than we know.