The Buck Stopped Here

Tweet

Through his contacts, Potter had heard that Buck was scouting locations around the Northwest. Like most Idaho residents, he was familiar with the Buck brand, which commands a cult following among outdoorsmen. "If you live in Idaho, you've got to have a Buck knife," he chuckles. Potter called to see if Buck might consider moving to the Idaho panhandle. Would the company be willing to let him perform a cost analysis? A few weeks later, Potter flew to California to present his report.

"Uprooting a company is a tough, tough thing to go through. You're uprooting families."

His numbers made CJ sit up straight. Electricity rates were about half what Buck was paying in El Cajon. Workers' compensation was a third. Wages for manufacturing jobs were 20 percent less than what Buck was paying. According to Potter's figures, Buck could shave at least $600,000 off its manufacturing costs every year by moving to Idaho. It was an impressive presentation, and CJ needed time to mull it over. Potter sympathized. "It's a tough decision--especially for family-owned companies," he says. "Uprooting a company is a tough, tough thing to go through. You're uprooting families, uprooting kids." But he continued to press his case, pointing out that Idaho boasted good schools and affordable homes.

While CJ agonized, Buck's electricity bills kept mounting. In January 2001, Governor Gray Davis declared a state of emergency as blackouts rolled through California. Then came September 11, which shattered the knife business. Sales plunged. CJ laid off 40 employees, froze salaries, and took a 30 percent pay cut.

One day that fall, CJ drove to work and looked at the El Cajon plant with fresh eyes. His father had built it back in 1979; a youthful CJ had even turned the first spadeful of earth at the groundbreaking. He knew every inch of the factory floor. The whine of mandrels grinding steel in a fountain of sparks, the sweet aroma of coolant gurgling through machinery, the prickly heat of the tempering furnace, the white clouds of condensation boiling from the nitrogen freezer--these were the sights and sounds of his childhood. Many of the workers here had known him since he was a young boy catching polliwogs in a drainage ditch while his dad sweated away another Saturday afternoon at the plant.

Now as he eyed the factory, a terrible thought entered his mind: This place is sinking. In his gut, he knew Buck had to get out of California--soon. "There's a momentum required to move a company," he says. "It's like having an operation that can save your life. We had to do the move before it was too late."

A bidding war begins

The hunt for a new location took on a sense of urgency. Behind closed doors, Buck's executives drew up a wish list for their dream home. Cheap electricity. Good climate for business. Low taxes. A plentiful supply of labor. Good highway and rail connections. Proximity to a major airport. Access to a major port through which to import the cheaper knives from Taiwan. Most important, it had to have a good quality of life. After all, they were planning to move themselves and their families along with the factory.

With these criteria in mind, the Buck team scoured dozens of glossy brochures touting locations across the country. Within a couple of months, they had narrowed the search down to three major contenders: Redmond, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Post Falls, Idaho, a growing suburb of Coeur d'Alene.

CJ and Duckett made their first pilgrimage to the region in the late fall of 2001. They booked a hotel overlooking Lake Coeur d'Alene, where geese honked their way across the sparkling water. "The air felt good," Duckett remembers. He picked up a real estate magazine and goggled at the prices. The median home price in Kootenai County was about one-third of that in El Cajon.

Strung out along Interstate 90, just west of Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls is the kind of town where business attire consists of jeans and a Pendleton shirt. Forty years ago, there wasn't a single stoplight. "When I first came here, you worked in the woods, you worked in the mill, you worked in the mines, you pumped gas, or you were a bartender," says the mayor, Clay Larkin. Today the population is about 21,400, three times what it was in 1990. Everywhere you look, subdivisions burst through the fields where the teenagers used to go four-wheeling. Seltice Way, the town's main drag, echoes with the bleat of backhoes digging up dirt or leveling vast mounds of sand. Call centers, furniture makers, electronics, manufacturers, software developers--they're moving here. "The growth has been phenomenal," says Larkin. "We've been discovered." Why do people come? Some are drawn by the rugged grandeur of the mountains, lakes, and forests; some by the abundance of cheap land and affordable housing; some by the dream of escaping the rat race. Above all, they are drawn by the same force that propelled pioneer wagons and immigrant steamships--the promise of a fresh start.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: