Hendricks's reputation started to change in 1993, when he pulled off his first local coup de théâtre. Like almost everything else related to Beloit's revival, it involved the waterfront. Leaders here have long viewed the Rock River as key to luring businesses and people; in 1988 they formed a civic development organization called Beloit 2000 (now Beloit 2020) and cleared dilapidated bars, bowling alleys, and gas stations from the river's banks. In their stead, the group built a park replete with running paths, playgrounds, and paddleboats. The new waterfront is the first thing visitors see upon entering town. Green and vibrant, it practically begs you to stop and take a stroll.
But across the road from the river, a monstrosity loomed--the rotting remains of Fairbanks Morse, a maker of diesel engines that at its peak employed more than 5,000 people. Over 50 years, the company's Beloit operations had dwindled until two-thirds of the 120-acre campus sat vacant--a brooding eyesore of colossal proportions. Hendricks bought the property. And rather than demolish it, he transformed the buildings into the castle-on-a-hill that is now ABC's headquarters.
Ask almost anyone in town what established Ken Hendricks in Beloit, and they cite the resurrection of Fairbanks Morse. That act also introduced the city to his doctrine of preservation and unearthing buried value, which has guided much of Beloit's recovery. Gary Grabowski, executive director of the Beloit Foundation, a local philanthropic organization, remembers driving past the Fairbanks Morse and thinking, This has got to go. "What makes Ken Hendricks Ken Hendricks," Grabowski says, "is that he stood on the roof and said, 'My God, look at that view! Why would you destroy this?"
Beloit Ironworks, the old Beloit Corp. property rehabilitated and renamed by Hendricks, isn't just a boon to workers present. It is also a memorial to workers past. The pale-brick and metal buildings are swathed in massive murals, mostly black-and-white photos of real workers and scenes from the plant's glory days blown up and reproduced on vinyl. An old man in a tatty sweater stares wistfully into the distance; beside him are a cocky-looking fellow in a cloth cap and other faces captured generations ago. Panoramic scenes from the old plant's interior cover entire walls. At night, when lights shine down through colored glass panels near the roof, those walls seem shorn away. Viewing the building from a parking lot across the river, I imagine I am gazing at an operational factory floor, albeit one with eerily immobile workers.
Interrupted every few minutes by the cascading trill of his cell phone, Hendricks is giving me the grand overview. "The photos are people who actually worked here--not the owners, not the executives. To hell with the executives," says Hendricks, who is in fine eat-the-rich fettle. "The workers are the ones who built this community, paid taxes, built the roads and schools. I take people on tours of the building and they get tears in their eyes. It reconnects them, gives them their history."
There is no good time for the implosion of a major employer. But at least the bankruptcy of the Beloit Corp. occurred when Hendricks had leisure to devote to the problem. In 1998, he had hired David Luck, former president and CEO of Bridgestone/Firestone Retail Operations, to be president of ABC Supply. That allowed Hendricks to, as he says, "do my entrepreneur thing." So while Luck embarked on a plan to take ABC to $5 billion by 2009, Hendricks was able to fling himself at the Beloit Corp. project--body, soul, and canyon-deep pockets.
Confronting 35 acres of decaying buildings and 3,500 out-of-work people, he applied his trademark six-word formula: create jobs, eliminate waste, preserve value. His first act after buying the property was to persuade Metso, the Scandinavian papermaking company that had acquired Beloit Corp.'s intellectual property, not to retreat to the land of the Vikings with its spoils. He offered to construct a new building to Metso's specifications in Beloit's industrial park and lease it on generous terms if the business would stay. Five months later the 80,000-square-foot facility was ready, a speed record that won Hendricks an award from the governor. The feat retained 165 engineering jobs in the community.
Hendricks then commenced structural rehabilitation, transforming the old campus into sleek, exposed-brick offices and bountifully appointed manufacturing space. Simultaneously, he began prospecting for businesses to fill it. It takes a village to raise a village--Hendricks is by no means one-man-banding the revival of Beloit, which has dozens of smart and deeply engaged civic leaders. Still, Beloit Ironworks houses 17 companies, all of them there at the behest of Ken Hendricks.
Some Ironworks inhabitants are tenants, lured by attractive rents. Others are companies Hendricks bought and moved, such as Specialty Automation, a maker of robotic machines for the automobile industry. Two companies in the building are pure start-ups. Another, Stainless Steel Tank, predates Hendricks's purchase of the site, having leased a building from Beloit Corp. before its demise. That company, which makes fluid-carrying tanks that ride on trucks, was financially wobbly when Hendricks bought it and restored operations, preserving 80 jobs and creating another 60.
Sam Popa's company took a more serendipitous route to the Ironworks. Popa, a 41-year-old Romanian immigrant, begins his tale as we are removing our safety goggles in a blessedly silent room above his cacophonous factory floor. It is an entrepreneurial story inside an entrepreneurial story: two neophytes' humble start-up sprouting within a veteran's ambitious vision.
