Midlands Business Profiles

I have lived in Columbia for coming up on eight years now.  A couple of weeks ago, I took in my first baseball game at Sarge Frye Field.  We went on a warm, pleasant, Wednesday to watch the Gamecocks play the College of Charleston.  At the risk of hyperbole, it was one of the nicest outings I have had in Columbia, and I came away from the experience wondering why I had not done this sooner and also why they are building a new stadium.

I am a sports fan and a baseball fan.  I have attended big league games in a few big cities.  It may be comparing apples to oranges, but watching a game at Sarge Frye was 10 times more enjoyable. What a great location!  The grass was so green it looked fake.  You feel as though you are not in downtown Columbia.  No large buildings loom on the horizon. 

Both teams played hard and never sat down when they were up to bat.  Players supported their teammates and ran up and congratulated each other on good plays.  The two teams shook hands at the end of the game. 

I was there with my whole family; it didn’t cost a fortune to get in and a fortune to eat some food.  Other families were there, too, including someone I know from around town who was in the row behind me with his whole family, including his nine month old granddaughter.

The highlight of the evening came when all five of us went down onto the field to get some autographs of the players.  My son and I threw a ball around a little bit and I rolled a few grounders out to him.  He made friends with another young boy and played the simplest of games for a few minutes.  Catch.  He ran the bases with his sisters.

It’s a night I will not soon forget.  I hope the new stadium will have the same magic.

As the Sarge enters its home stretch, I invite to share your favorite Sarge moment.  You know the place better than I do.

The op-ed for this website has turned into a blog.  Ten months ago, I didn’t really know what a blog was, and now I am looking to launch a component of the midlandsbiz website that will achieve what every publisher wants: a reaction, a debate, controversy, a meeting place for reasonably intelligent people.

I encourage you to participate! 

Do businesses recycle in this town (Columbia, SC), or any town in America?  Does recycling for businesses even make business sense? 

Here’s what I have learned from living in this town and that is probably a paradox that is being played out in towns and cities across America.  Plenty of resources exist to give business information about recycling, but the onus to actually implement a recycling program is on the business itself.  Unlike residential users of waste removal who have the option of weekly curbside recycling through their provider (Southland Sanitation in my case), businesses use dumpsters and do not have separate recycling options.

And that is exactly what dumpsters have conveniently become for businesses – a place to dump everything.  It’s a 1960’s free-for-all for whatever you want – plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, aluminum, needles, metal, and construction waste.  All tragically thrown in together in one massive heap of garbage that is destined to be entombed in some landfill site.

Here’s a local business that I am familiar with.  We have a dumpster.  Everything we generate at this place of business is thrown into this dumpster.  I’m only guessing, but easily 50% of what we throw into that dumpster is recyclable, maybe more.

Why don’t we recycle?  There’s somewhat of a will to do it at the club, and I have heard some long-time members say that years ago some “green” club volunteers tried to implement a recycling program.  But our sanitation vendor, Southland, does not offer commercial recycling (I assume because it’s not a viable business proposition), so any recycling program is basically an act of volunteerism and goodwill on the part of a person with a conscience.

The recycling program at our club failed and has not been revisited in a long while.  We are trying to go down this road again with this year’s Board, but when the onus – the time and the cost – is on the business, it simply does not get done.

In this town, residences recycle, but businesses do not.  All the talk of massive global warming and greenhouse emissions, but we can’t seem to even control something as rudimentary as recycling.

Any initiative is only as strong as its weakest link, and with this issue it’s commercial recycling.  Any effort to recycle in the home is more than undone by massive waste at the commercial level.

My proposal to fix it would be to:

• Recognize the problem.
• Ask questions as to why it is occurring? (Why is the private sector not dealing with this issue)?
• Decide whether you can take the existing infrastructure of companies such as Southland to implement commercial recycling or whether the delivery system should be in public hands?

I confess that I watched Michael Moore’s movie on the health care system, Sicko. Ever since he did Roger and Me way back during the first auto crisis in Detroit in the early 1980’s, I have been amused by the tone of his movies. I don’t think the movie actually played in Columbia, SC – it just sort of skipped this town. I suggest that you put aside your phobia of being painted a left-wing, liberal and secretly go out and rent the movie. I recommend it.

I am not going to get into the dreaded health care debate. Here is a different point that was brought up in the movie, and, like a lot of Michael Moore points, I have a very hard time believing it.

The French have surpassed the United States in terms of productivity! Their output per worker is better than in the United States. If that’s true, forget the banking crisis, the low dollar, the crazy stock market, if we can’t out produce the French then we are in for serious bad times ahead.

Here was the point. The French don’t have to worry about health care, or about expensive university bills, and they have plenty of time off during the year for rest and relaxation. They have 2 hours lunches, siestas in the afternoon, and as for vacations, they start by taking at least the entire month of August off. The French are so relaxed and contented that they are more productive.

I would like to make one suggestion.

Can we all agree that people, the South Carolina worker included, need at least some time off to recharge their batteries?

Why is it then, that the only holiday, the only long weekend here in South Carolina between New Year’s Day and the 4th – is Memorial Day? I think Memorial Day is a state holiday, isn’t it? I actually remember not too long ago when there was confusion over Memorial Day, but we got that worked out, didn’t we?

Unless you work for a bank or the Post Office and take off Martin Luther King Day, President’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fools Day, and Earth Day, for the average working stiff, there is no time off between January and late May.

Can we not get the legislature to agree to one, long weekend holiday somewhere in that stretch where everybody shuts down?

Call it something neutral like Palmetto Day so that no one will fight over whether it’s appropriate to take the day off. Or maybe just call it something not so neutral like Good Friday.

Maybe it would make us more productive.

Alan Cooper

Recently, the governments of Singapore, Kuwait and South Korea provided as much as $21 billion in cash to two American banks, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. I never cease to be amazed at the dramatic ironies inherent in the promotion of the free movement of goods and capital, and labor. Sky high oil prices and record Asian exports have created a situation where emerging countries are bailing out developed countries.

It’s simply international capitalism at work as money flows around the world in search of a good rate of return. The United States, beacon of light, promoter of democracy and freedom for the rest of the world, has to play a lead role in this worldwide global movement.

“If you want to dance, you have to pay the band”. (One of my favorite sayings is, “Why go to the market when you can milk the cow through the fence”, but that is only mildly relevant here).

But when you take money from someone in business, you have to give up some degree of control. More seats on the Board so they can have a direct influence on the CEO?

Alan Cooper

Fair Tax
Income taxes were implemented early in the last century as a temporary measure to fund WWI. Mike Huckabee says that abolishing these taxes on income and implementing a Fair Tax will be like “waving a magic wand over our pain and unfairness.” The Fair Tax makes the IRS redundant and effectively eliminates April 15th from the calendar. Let‘s just try it for a while, on a “temporary” basis and go back to a 20,000 page income tax code if it doesn’t work out.

I think there is widespread panic in the Republican Party that this Fair Tax thing is too radical a change, and that this is the main reason there has been a shift away from Huckabee towards McCain.

Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com

Globalization has become an overused term. Although it has been going on for decades, if not centuries, you hear the term so frequently these days that is has become almost a buzzword.Paul Freidman describes the flattening of the world; it’s a good way of visualizing how interconnected things are in the global economy. Globalization, free trade, the fight for intellectual property rights, the loosening of the movement of capital and labor are certainly the big topics of the day.

As with every economic interaction, there will be winners and losers. Globalization will come with some severe economic pains – to individuals, businesses, communities etc. People will need to be retrained. People will lose their health care and they will need some form of income support mechanism.

But the movement towards globalization holds the promise that things will get better – both economically and politically – for all mankind. There is the opportunity also for a more equitable distribution of income. In a perfectly competitive environment, prices will be lower. Tremendous opportunities exist for all involved.

Complaining about globalization is akin to complaining about gravity. It might be a popular stance to take for the Presidential candidates, but how can the United States not embrace the FREE movement of capital and labor.

Yet, strict immigration rules will lead to fewer bright people coming here from other nations into our graduate programs. More graduate students are already choosing to go to other countries or stay at home. Microsoft announced this summer that it was locating a research and development center in Canada because the entire allotment of visas for high-tech workers had been used up in the U.S. The immigration debate at the national level seldom seems to go beyond the do we build a wall on the Mexican border issue. The truth is we need more immigration and “the ability to attract global talent” has been a traditional engine for the US economy. (See David Brooks’ OpEd in The State on Wednesday, November 28).

Health care is too big an issue not to fix, but as pointed out in a recent article by Brad Warthen of The State, it has proven incredibly resilient to change. There are just too many built in profit centers in the delivery system for us to expect any major change. Still the media is starting to hammer away at this critical point: high health care costs affect our competitiveness.

The escalating cost of health insurance means that fewer people will want to take the risk of starting their own business.

Deficits are too high. We will have to borrow money to pay this back and this is done by selling bonds on the international markets. In order to entice foreigners to buy these bonds we will have to raise interest rates. High domestic interest rates will curtail consumption and investment. We need investment in our technology start-up companies – that’s our strategy in the knowledge-based global economy. Isn’t it?

I heard an amazing story on NPR last night about the sock industry in the state of Washington. They outlined how global competition has decimated the sock manufacturing industry and caused huge job losses in one particular town. The owner of a sock company was fighting hard to impose a tariff on imports of socks coming into the US from Honduras so that his business would be saved. As fate would have it, Congress had passed some quirky stipulation that allowed the US to re-impose protective tariffs on sock manufacturing in 2007. The sock industry of this town will potentially be preserved, but the irony is that much of the now defunct sock manufacturers have already converted their businesses to other, higher paying industries.

I like David Brooks’ attitude. The foundations of American prosperity are strong and we still have much more to gain by openly competing in the global market than by retreating into a protectionist, defensive stance.

Fix immigration. Fix health care. Control the deficit financing. Stop complaining about gravity.

Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com

My wife was disappointed and disillusioned last night about the bond referendum in Lexington School District 5. She had worked and volunteered over the past couple of months on the Yes campaign. We have three kids in two different schools in the district, and this seemed like no-brainer to us. I guess I was wrong about that – it wasn’t even close.

This state should support anything to do with education, shouldn’t it? How can you vote against improvements to education?

I haven’t looked at how it broke down, but I can only assume that people with kids voted yes, and those that no longer have kids of school age voted no. Maybe some retired folks who are not even from South Carolina originally and whose kids work in Manhattan voted no. Who knows?

Lexington 5 is a good district with good performing schools and good teachers and good facilities. Correction. Lexington 5 is an “Excellent” district. I just checked the website, and it says it’s says that our “Absolute Rating is Excellent”.

Still, I’m not sure that maintaining the status quo will be a good strategy for this district. In business, you have to adopt an attitude of, “Build it and they will come”; “You are either growing (improving), or dying”. So many businesses over the years have failed through a lack of vision. Just ask Ford, or Kodak.

I did an interview with Dr. Karen Woodward, the Superintendent of Lexington One this past summer. During that interview she indicated that she felt fortunate that the people of Lexington One had voted in a referendum to issue bonds to pay for new facilities. She pointed out that there were areas of the state that were less fortunate, less affluent, that could never afford the luxury of financing a major bond issue. And she questioned the whole way that education is financed in the state, and in particluar, the move to the elimination of the property tax.

Dr. Karen Woodward.
There are many problems. Poorer districts will never be able to put in place now some of the educational opportunities that we have here in Lexington One. In the past the citizens of Lexington One were willing to pay for the increased cost of an excellent education. Other districts do not have the tax base able or willing to do that. Now this change in strategy freezes those inequities in place.

The current system does not go far enough in providing the additional resources that are needed in poor districts. Additionally, school districts will be unable to reach or maintain the type of educational excellence that our children deserve.

For fast growing districts, too, that funding formula simply does not provide enough money to keep up with growth. We are worried about the impact on Lexington One. We are growing 500 students a year, the equivalent of one school. All the projections show that we are not even going to be able to maintain the budget we have with that type of growth. We will have to cut educational programs.

The taxes that we raise within the cap can only be applied against business and other non owner-occupied property. We think that is going to hurt economic development and our local business owners. We don’t want to shift the tax burden onto businesses.

Read the interview.

There’s a sentence that I like, “School districts will be unable to reach or maintain the type of educational excellence that our children deserve”.

I don’t know whether I am more disappointed at the No vote or that that we had to vote at all on this issue. We need to fix the way schools are funded, and I don’t think I’m alone on this issue. If there is a school in Dillon County that is falling apart, fix it! If you need to improve schools in Lexington 5, do it! We don’t have referendums on where we are supposed to build roads, do we?

Oh, I forgot, we don’t build new roads either.

Good isn’t good enough. Today’s excellent is tomorrow’s average. We need great schools.

Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com

Recently, I traveled back to Winston Salem to a 4 year reunion and to watch a Wake Forest football game.  As I got caught up with some of the people in my graduating class, I was amazed at how much change had taken place in these four short years.  The words reorg, divest, and consolidate were flowing off people’s tongues left, right and center.  Most everybody I talked to had either changed jobs or changed companies.  Shift happens.

I heard the standard flippant comments about there being no loyalty out there anymore, but few complaints.  The driving force behind the wealth that this country has generated is the pursuit of maximizing shareholder value.  Business decisions and strategies have to keep pace with the rapid change in the marketplace.

One year ago to the day, for the first time in my life, and hopefully the last, I was fired.  The family business where I had worked for 7 years was sold.

I remember it was October 19th because it was my daughter’s birthday.

Here I was at age _____ (you have to read previous Op-Eds to discern how old I am), with three kids, a wife, a mortgage, and no idea of what I wanted to do.

Whatever my talents were, I needed to discover them quickly.  The Bible sure tells us not to hide them; in fact, it’s a sin to hide them, isn’t it?  Maybe it’s the curse of a Gemini, the split personality thing, but I always feel pulled in different directions.  But, I don’t put much stock in astrology.

I went through something similar to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (or as I like to call it in this instance, relief).  I am probably still going through those stages.  This I do know.  The 48 hours after the 19th, I felt sheer panic.

Maybe it was because I never wanted to be put in that situation again, or maybe it was because I didn’t feel my prospects at jumping into corporate America at age _____ were very good, but I decided shortly thereafter to form my own company.  I love books, newspapers, and magazines. I love learning about businesses and seeing them grow.  So, I launched a magazine in the spring called Profiles in Business, a second different type magazine will come out at the end of the year, and a couple more are in the works.  I also now have a new love and respect for web publishing.  (Check out the cool, sortable information in the Local Stats)

Running your own business is a different kind of a panic, a good panic.  The highs are higher and the lows are lower, but that’s what you get with ownership.

I admire ALL people who have ever formed and ran their own company.  When the timing is right, I encourage anyone who has ever contemplated it, to take the plunge. Entrepreneurship.  It’s a complicated 16 letter word.

I recall a memorable class in business school.  It occurred on the last minute of the last class when a marketing professor named Jim Makens told everybody to stand up.  Makens was the kind of a professor who did not take kindly to anyone showing up in his class unprepared or worse, anyone who waffled on an answer.  He made sixty executives look under their desks, then get down on their hands and knees and look under their chairs.  He had secretly taped $20 bills under a handful of chairs.  As the hooting and hollering died down, he told the class, “You have to poke around if you want to earn a buck,” and then he walked out of the classroom and straight into retirement.  What a cool way to end a teaching career!

I hope I get to celebrate a 2 year anniversary.  Shift happens.
Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com

The two latest South Carolina rankings are that we are first in violent crime and not very good at all at encouraging our children to participate in physical activity. Check out this sentence taken from the study done by the South Carolina Rural Health Research Center:”The proportion of children not participating in any after school sport teams or lessons ranged from 25.9% in Vermont to 54.5% in South Carolina.”

There’s so much great stuff being done to improve things in South Carolina, why do they have to keep generating these darned ranked lists?  See the weekly health tip being generated by First Lady Jenny Sanford.  Bike to work day.

Vermont?  Are you kidding me?  It’s cold in Vermont during the winter and I’m sure they have every reason in the world to hibernate for six months and not do a darn thing.  South Carolina has the perfect climate for year round physical activity.  I think it’s crazy, but people still run around a tennis court in August when it’s 100 degrees.  We have no excuse!

Have you ever noticed that there are just not a lot of joggers and bike riders in Columbia?  Sure there are some, but check out the Mall in Washington, D.C at any time of the day and you will see scores of people jogging.  Now I’m sure if they are living in DC that they are Type A overachievers, but it adds to the vibrancy of a city when so many people are exercising outdoors.  Where the heck do these people even go to shower in the middle of the day?  If our kids are inactive, then they are probably following the example set by the parents.  Don’t blame the age 10-17 group, blame the parents.

But it is also the role of schools to encourage, and I might go far so as to say, insist on extra school activities for children.  Teach children to balance the rigors of education and homework with the need to pursue outside passions and physical activity.  Learn the true spirit of team work by participating in team sports.  And throw yourself 100% into an individual sport (or hobby) to help discover your true passions.  Whatever happened to exercise the mind (read, study, play games, do crossword puzzles) and exercise the body.

Here’s another quote from the study.

“The proportion of children spending at least two hours a day on electronic media ranged from 37.8% in Vermont to 57.6% in New Jersey”.

South Carolina is not number one in something!  I love these lists.  Video games and TV are serious temptations for children (and adults) and are serious time wasters.  Parents need to insist on strict limitations here. Or just don’t even have video games in the house.  Or keep kids so busy they don’t even have time to think about TV.

Are schools cutting back on time during the day devoted to gym?  I asked my little kindergartener as he went out to school today why he was wearing his Crocs and not his running shoes. He said he didn’t have gym today.   I’d like to see my five year old having gym every day.

Balance between work and play, between what you have to do and what you love to do, between intellectual and physical activities.  It’s something that is practiced and reinforced at countless good schools around the state and I dare say, at every private school in the country.  If we teach our children good habits, good balance in life when they are young, then they will carry this philosophy with them for the rest of their days and grow up to be productive, involved citizens.

I can’t imagine getting through my school years without after school activities and in particular for me, after school sports.  It was a chance to blow off some steam, muck around with people and teachers who shared a common interest.  That’s when you get to know the teachers on a more personal basis and see that they are human.  That’s when you cement your potentially lifelong friends.

And it made school fun.

Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com

(A Lack of) Synergy
The relationship between the Governor’s office and the legislators is like watching a fight break out between two rookies at a Black and Garnet scrimmage.

How are we ever going to get to the next level of economic development and prosperity in South Carolina, achieve our goal of higher per capita income, and solve our problems (underperforming schools etc.), when the executive and legislative branches of state government are constantly at loggerheads with one another?

Nepotism
Have you ever looked at a wall of golf or tennis champions at a small, local private club and seen it has been dominated by one or two players for decades?

Well how about this.

1988 – George Bush
1992– Bill Clinton
1996 – Bill Clinton
2000 – George W. Bush
2004 – George W. Bush
2008 – Hilary Clinton
2012 – Hilary Clinton
2016 – Jeb Bush
2020 – Jeb Bush
2024 – Chelsea Clinton
2028 – Chelsea Clinton

Welcome to the United States Golf and Country Club.  You’ve got to admit, it’s not beyond the realm of the possible.  If Hilary is elected and reelected, we will have close to 30 years of Bushes and Clintons.  Can we please just throw in a Huckabee for 8 years and put an end to this dynasty?

Correlation
Here are a few other The Economist rankings to mull over.  The United States is:
• Number 1 in the world on its Innovation Index (measuring the degree of interaction between the business and scientific sectors)
• Number 2 in the world for E-readiness (broadband and cell phone penetration).
• Number 3 in the world in terms of its information and communication technology (measuring per capita usage of Internet, cell phones and personal computers)
• Number 2 in the world in terms of number of patents granted to citizens.

The relevant question to ask is how does South Carolina rank within the US on these key measures?

Paradox
As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the US spends way more than any other country on health care, yet life expectancy and infant mortality are better in Cuba.  Put in business terms, the US health care system delivers a lousy return on investment (ROI).  Lousy ROI means someone gets fired.

With the aging population, health care is expected to rise to 22% of GDP.

The best way to deliver any product or service to the marketplace is to let the free market do what it does best – deliver better quality and more competitive goods and services to market.

But when they admit in The Economic Report of the President that “poorly functioning markets may have led to excessive spending and inefficient patterns of medical care utilization”, you have to figure there is a problem.  Isn’t it the role of government to ensure functioning markets? They broke up Standard Oil in 1911. Isn’t it time that the government intervened in the health care market in one epic antitrust battle?

There’s no panacea for the health care system.

Nihilism
I’m all for globalization and open and free trade, and the new owner may very well be able to build a global brand like we have never seen in the industry, but I still think it’s sad that Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal.

Alan Cooper

Publisher, MidlandsBiz.com