BY GREGORY A. HALL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
FORT MITCHELL -- As Danny Fore leaves Fayetteville, N.C., to lead Northern Kentucky's business-recruiting company, people there credit him as the reason they don't have to pack their bags, too.
One of those is Max Headley, who heads up Mark IV's automobile parts distribution center in Fayetteville. He's sure that if not for Mr. Fore he'd be working somewhere else in North Carolina. Or Georgia. Or South Carolina.
When other towns started to look more attractive to his company's directors, Mr. Headley telephoned Mr. Fore, who has headed Fayetteville's recruitment firm. They tried finding something Fayetteville could offer to keep the center from going somewhere else. Then they'd talk about the soccer team Mr. Headley coaches.
"I was talking to him more than I was talking to people on my staff," Mr. Headley said, calling it corporate hand-holding.
Just more than a month from now, Mr. Fore will become president of the Tri-County Economic Development Corp. In that role, he'll use hand-holding to work similar deals for Northern Kentucky communities. "There's no cookie-cutter project. They're all different," Mr. Fore said. "Northern Kentucky is a product that must be sold in a marketplace of very competitive products."
Folks back in North Carolina are predicting he'll do a good job of it.
"Your community is better off," Mr. Headley said. "Ours has lost a terrific guy."
The 500,000-square-foot Mark IV distribution center sends out Purolator air filters and Dayco belts and hoses. Company officials looked at several Eastern United States locations before choosing Fayetteville.
Landing the project meant going from 80 employees to 146 now and 200 by year's end. Including the company's manufacturing operations, the company employs about 1,500 people in the town.
The facility opened last year, but the beginnings of the deal were a couple years earlier when the company closed a Missouri distribution facility. That created an immediate need for temporary space, so Mr. Headley said he called Mr. Fore.
"Before the end of the day, I was getting calls from half a dozen people with different proposals and different ideas," Mr. Headley said.
The company's biggest private employer is Kelly-Springfield Tire Co., with 3,000 workers.
"I've been mighty impressed with him," said Richard Evans, the plant's public relations manager.
About 2,300 workers went on strike for two weeks last year at the plant over a conversion to continuous operation.
Mr. Fore said the strike, the first since the plant opened in 1969, was a shock but didn't cause problems.
The fact that it didn't was good, but also alludes to what Mr. Fore called Fayetteville's biggest challenge -- diversifying the Fort Bragg military economy.
"The great problem for that county is that their greatest economic engine is not on the tax base," he said.
Fifty-eight cents of every dollar in the Fayetteville economy is related to the military economy, Mr. Fore said. When Desert Storm began, 17,000 people left town in one week.
Luckily for Fayetteville, the military operation at Fort Bragg is expanding, unlike many other defense bases. The town recently had an Army orthopedic hospital relocate from San Francisco, adding 650 people and an investment of more than $250 million.
"Our organization worked very closely with our congressional delegation to solicit interest for putting that hospital at Fort Bragg," Mr. Fore said.
The base also provides the town with a pool of well-trained workers. The Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce is looking in a similar direction, having a job fair this year at Fort Knox.
Mr. Fore jokingly suggested a mission at Fayetteville's base. "I'm not above a raid on behalf of Northern Kentucky."
