MAKING PROGRESS: Education, attitude and technology lead manufacturing in N.C.

• Author: Kinney, Ben
• Position: MANUFACTURING ROUND TABLE

The discussion, hosted by Dixon Hughes Goodman in Winston-Salem, was moderated by Business North Carolina publisher Ben Kinney. The transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.

NORTH CAROLINA IS A MANY-FACETED MANUFACTURING STATE. But it faces 21stcentury challenges that come with attracting high-tech companies along with educating and training a talented workforce for those jobs. BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA magazine gathered a diverse panel to discuss these issues.

HOW'S BUSINESS IN GENERAL?

CRUSE Business is good. We're facing the challenges of any small company trying to grow. We can't keep bags on the shelf. We can't hire people fast enough. We can't find enough trained [staff] or people in our area to grow our business fast enough to keep up with demand. So I think we're in a really good spot. I'm still looking at the reports saying, "Is this true?" for this year's financial increases, because of the new tax laws. That's exciting for us. We'll be able to put much more back into what we're doing with things that are happening right now in the political landscape.

PEDLEY Ours has been good. Obviously, in the robotics world, we do mostly automotive things. I think, in 2018, we'll maybe see just a little flattening out in the automotive industry. It's still good, but I don't see the growth that we saw over the last five or six years. Automotive is important, but we also have some medical-device companies for whom we're doing some assembly machines. So our business continues to grow, and I think manufacturing is very strong right now.

SAGE Business couldn't be better, quite frankly. Competitors are strong. But North Carolina is pretty much the worldwide source for skid-steer loaders --a couple of hundred a day are shipped out of Sanford. It's just fantastic. But we have the same challenges that other folks have: Finding qualified candidates and students who are interested in the manufacturing world. Manufacturing is not the same as it was. We're running robotics and doing a variety of other things. There's some manual labor to it, but one of the things we need to work on is changing the perceptions of what the jobs are, what they are not, the types of earnings and living you can make holding one of those positions, and the opportunities beyond that.

LEATHERWOOD When business is good for you all, we have the challenge to try to get not just the workforce that you need but one that is trained and has the transferable skills that each of you need in a manufacturing environment. So we find that when business is good for you, it's a challenge for us, but we rise to the challenge. More important than ever is our customized training that we do for our industries. GF Linamar has come into Henderson County, making a $270 million investment in our community. We were able to come in early on and actually build a high-pressure die-casting training sill just for their company. That's one of the reasons that they chose to locate in Henderson County.

WOOD From a public accounting standpoint right now, there's a lot of movement going on in business as a whole. Right now, there is not a client or a potential client who generally won't accept a meeting from us when we say, "Can I talk to you about tax reform?" Almost everybody, whether they want to talk to you or not, will, because of that. For the most part, the corporate reform is going to put some money back in businesses' pockets. And what I'm hearing the most is, "Help me think through, where do I invest those dollars?" Is it in...