Winston-Salem Business

TriadEntrepreneur.com

A consortium of business groups, including the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, Piedmont Triad Research Park, the Wake Forest Babcock Demon Deacon Incubator and the Piedmont Triad Entrepreneurial Network are sponsoring the new site TriadEntrepreneur.com.

The name says Piedmont Triad but this has a distinctly Winston-Salem flavor.  It's a nice site with links to lots of local, state and regional resources for entrepreneurs.

Rhonda Bonfield, Winston-Salem Based Marketing & Graphic Design

Received an email today from Rhonda Bonfield pointing us to her website.  She provides marketing, graphic design, branding and PR services among other things.  Nice site design and her portfolio looks very good.

Contact page is here.
Phone: 336.926.9882

Will Mortgage Meltdown Suck in Triad Guaranty?

Is Triad Guaranty going to start mass layoffs soon?  Their credit rating was downgraded by S&P in November.  Shares of mortgage insurers plunged yesterday on the news that MGIC Investment, the largest mortgage insurer, expects claims to swell this year.  Triad's stock has rebounded slightly to the $6 range from a 52-week low of $5.50, but that's off of a 52-week high of $58.62.   Piper Jaffray just downgraded them from "Buy" to "Neutral". 

Maybe the question shouldn't be "Will Triad start mass layoffs soon" but rather, "Will mass layoffs be enough to save Triad?"  With the Fed's rate cut and the stimulus package being proposed maybe Triad can avoid the grim reaper, but either way there's probably some nervous folks over there these days.

Silkroad Is Shutting Down Its Blog Service

According to Stowe Boyd's blog Silkroad Technology is shutting down its Silkblogs service.  As Boyd points out it looks like Silkroad is homing in on its core HR offerings.

Piedmont Triad Partnership Sponsors Creation Autosportif Team

PTP gets a little ink from their sponsorship of the Creation Sutosportif Team.  The team competes in the Le Mans Series and FFSA GT series. Kind of wild for a bunch from NASCAR country, huh?

More on Incentives, Regionalism

The Piedmont Triad offers an interesting economic development story.  While there's an organization that touts the region there's also competition between Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point (and Forsyth and Guilford counties).  Winston-Salem/Forsyth probably overpaid in incentives to get Dell because they wanted to make sure that they got the plant and not Greensboro/Guilford.  Well, the plant ended up near the county border so the folks in Guilford get the benefit of jobs and didn't have to provide infrastructure while giving up tax revenue in the incentives deal.  It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the municipalities had cooperated rather than competed.

Now comes word of a bio-tech company in High Point that might be lured to Virginia or South Carolina, and one factor is that the owner feels that the regional bio-tech industry is too focused on Winston-Salem.  From a Biz Journal article:

On the one hand, TransTech, which last fall signed a licensing agreement with Pfizer potentially worth $2 billion, needs to expand its research capacity for treating diseases such as nervous system disorders, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity. Mjalli fully occupies the 43,000 square feet he now leases for TransTech and its 85 employees.

He is interested in buying 50 acres, building a 100,000-square-foot R&D and headquarters operation and having room for future expansion in a campus-like setting. He intends to hire more than 100 additional employees within the next five years. He also needs more space for his biotech subsidiary, Pharmacore, and its 40 employees. He will likely add 30 employees there in the coming years.

"We will start with one building, but the growth could be huge for TransTech in the future," says Mjalli, who estimates a move could cost $50 million to acquire land, build, upfit labs and relocate.

On the other hand, Mjalli appears disappointed with the state of the Triad's biotech effort, arguing that it is not truly regional in nature and perhaps too focused on Winston-Salem. A bothersome example of that, he says, was when no company or individual achievements from High Point were recognized at the second Triad BioNight in March.

"High Point has a much bigger health care (R&D) cluster than any other city in the region, with (companies like) Banner Pharmacaps and Merz and Ciba," Mjalli says. "By not recognizing not just TransTech but any biotech company in High Point, it just does this community and the Triad a disservice."

Mjalli has not yet decided to leave High Point. But his decision to contact neighboring states and suggest that he is willing to move has set off alarm bells in the Triad and in Raleigh, where Secretary of Commerce Jim Fain has gotten involved.

So here we have a company, already proven to be on the fast track in an industry that has been identified as a major engine for economic growth in the Triad, and with roots here in the Triad being treated like Cinderella before the ball.  If we're going to play the incentives game (and until the rules change we're going to have to) then let's hope that we are equally aggressive with keeping our existing companies as we are with luring new companies.  And since recognition costs nothing let's do a better job of pulling together the players in each city and building a united force.  The folks promoting the bio-tech industry need to recognize that they'll be getting enough competition from the folks in Kannapolis without stabbing each other in the back. 

Hat tip to Ed Cone for covering this and rightly questioning the Greensboro News & Record's lack of coverage.

Flying out of GSO Ain't Cheap, or Is It?

I've been flying a lot the last couple of weeks and will be flying again next week.  By some miracle I haven't been cursed with significant delays or cancellations this time around (knock on wood), but I'm more than a little confused by the airfares I'm seeing.  For example:

• Flying from Greensboro to New York (Sunday), New York to Chicago (Tuesday morning) and then Chicago to Greensboro (Tuesday evening) would have cost $1,500 (coach or 1st class, which is in itself weird).  By booking the trip through Charlotte the airfare went to $750.
• Flying one way from DC to Charleston the Tuesday before Thanksgiving cost $320.
• Flying from Greensboro to San Francisco cost $220 round trip.

That last one really floored me.  Why is it cheaper to fly to San Francisco from Greensboro than it is to fly to New York or Chicago (I checked for the same dates and times)?  And to top it off I connect to San Francisco in Chicago, so it would be cheaper to fly through Chicago to San Francisco than to fly to Chicago and back even though I'm on the same planes.

Some other observations about my recent flying experience:

• I love flying out of National, which some people insist on referring to as Reagan National.
• LaGuardia is a hole.  It is quickly becoming my least favorite airport.
• Getting in and out of Charlotte is easier than I thought it would be, and it takes no more time than it used to take me to get in and out of Dulles when I was living in DC.  If Greensboro isn't careful they're going to lose another regular passenger.
• The big differentiator between airports, to me, is the food service available in the gate area.  All of them seem to have places to sit and eat outside of security, but the problem with LaGuardia and Greensboro is that they only have crappy food stands or hole-in-the-wall joints that serve tepid coffee and day-old sandwiches inside of security. Blah.

Small Business Center Moving

The Small Business Center at Forsyth Tech is moving from the Chamber of Commerce's office to a new 55,000 square foot facility at the Piedmont Triad Research Park.  The center will also be renamed the Southern Community Bank and Trust Small Business Center thanks to a contribution that Southern Community made to Forsyth Tech's capital campaign.  From the press release:

Construction of the new building is slated to begin in 2008. The building, which will enable Forsyth Tech to work in closer proximity to Wake Forest University Health Sciences, Winston-Salem State University and the North Carolina School of the Arts, is projected to open in 2009.

The Small Business Center was established at Forsyth Tech some 25 years ago and was first housed on the campus. It moved to the Chamber Building in 1996, where it offers workshops, seminars, individual counseling, and a library of resources for owners of businesses and people who want to start businesses. The purpose of the center is to increase the success rate of small businesses by providing information, advice and training.