Leading by taking orders.

• Author: Nelson, Luann
• Position: Includes alphabetical listing of fastest-growing North Carolina companies - Special Section: North Carolina 100 - Cover Story

Some companies moved up the list by getting down to the business of giving customers what they want.

Everybody says they believe it, but few live and breathe it, says James H. Corrigan Jr., CEO of Mebane Packaging Corp.

"If you make a good product -- a really high-quality product -- to the point of being a quality leader in the niche you're in, and if you deliver that product when you say you're going to deliver it, the rest of the things will take care of themselves," he says.

By following that philosophy and by expanding through acquisition, carton-maker Mebane Packaging Corp.'s revenues have increased almost fivefold, to $80 million, since Corrigan took over in 1980. The company now ranks No. 48 on the North Carolina 100 list of the state's largest private companies, up an astonishing 51 positions from the year before. Even without its acquisition last year of Kearny, N.J.-based Wilkata Packaging, Mebane still would have had sales of $58 million.

Prepared by Arthur Andersen & Co., the North Carolina 100 experienced some big changes last year. "An incredible number of companies made significant moves up," says T. Michael Henderson, the accounting firm's tax partner in charge of preparing the list. "Twenty-four of the 100 companies moved up by 10 slots or more vs. their 1991 ranking." In interviews with several CEOs of the big movers, a recurring theme was obvious: These thriving North Carolina companies treat their customers royally.

With all the headaches the economy generated for American business last year, you may not be surprised that Mebane Packaging -- maker of boxes for Nuprin, Excedrin and Goody's pain relievers -- did well in 1991. The company debuted on the list last year near the bottom, at No. 99, but its CEO is no Johnny-come-lately. A veteran of sales and operations with Revere Copper and Brass Co., Keller Industries Inc., a maker of aluminum doors and windows, and Maule Industries, a manufacturer of concrete building materials, Corrigan joined R.J. Reynolds Industries' subsidiary RJR Archer in 1967, as it was expanding its business from making aluminum foil for cigarette packages to producing foil sheets and flexible packaging for other uses. By 1972, he was president of RJR Archer.

"The nice thing about Archer is it was out of the mainstream of RJR, and so it was like running your own company," Corrigan says. In 1976, Corrigan became president of RJR Foods, whose mainstays were Hawaiian Punch and Chun King Chinese foods.

Three years later, when Reynolds bought Del Monte Corp., he became an assistant to Paul Sticht, RJR's chairman and CEO. "I realized Reynolds was a packaged, branded, consumer-products company, and people who are going to succeed and be the top executives in that environment are really those who have come up through that," he says.

That's when I began to realize that, long-term, my future probably lay somewhere else. I began to look outside.

When he heard that a troubled Mebane-based package maker was looking for a CEO, he put his name in the hat. He started there in April 1980, facing a difficult challenge. The board had fired the president, and the previous year the company had lost $1 million on sales of $16 million.

Corrigan did more than straighten out the company's core business of making inexpensive boxes for fast-food chains and bakeries. He took a new tack.

"Historically, the old focus |of pharmaceuticals~ was in the Northeast, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the manufacturing had gravitated toward Puerto Rico," he notes. But for their headquarters, "the fastest-growing area is right here in the Research Triangle area, being led by Burroughs Wellcome, Glaxo, Bristol-Myers, Organon-Technica, Edwards Weck and various other companies."

Corrigan says he and the already aggressive management team at Mebane Packaging took advantage of that shift. "We had to make a transition from being a supplier of commodity-oriented products to the higher quality and greater sophistication associated with the pharmaceutical and medicinal market that became our target," says Corrigan, 66, who is a brother of Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Gene Corrigan.

Soon after Corrigan took over, Burroughs Wellcome converted two major cold/allergy remedies -- Sudafed and Actifed -- to over-the-counter sales. Mebane Packaging, which already made boxes for the prescription forms of the drugs, worked with Burroughs Wellcome to make "a major change in the packaging and the graphics and structural design," Corrigan says. "Ultimately, it involved the production of those products on new one-of-a-kind packaging lines at Burroughs Wellcome, which were very...