Show and sell.

• Author: Johnson, Clint
• Position: Piedmont Triad Partnership

Building on a decade of success, the Piedmont Triad Partnership wants to show the world what it - and the Triad - can do.

In the mid-1980s, High Point was changing. Dave Phillips, then president of Phillips Industries and of the High Point Chamber of Commerce, felt that what was happening to his city would change its face forever. "We were concerned about the slow transition of the old textile and furniture companies that were merging or going out of business and disappearing from the city, taking jobs with them. We could see that High Point was changing before our eyes, and we wanted to see what we could do about it," he says.

The result was the creation of the Piedmont Triad Partnership, one of the state's first and most successful cooperative economic-development organizations. The catalyst that started Phillips seriously thinking about the future was when the City Council voted down approval for a new regional shopping mall. Business leaders had thought the mall would help make the city more attractive for companies. With it, High Point's merchants would be on equal footing with competitors in neighboring Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

"I went to the mayor and suggested that we form a public/private partnership that would have the business community sit down with the public sector. I told him that the business community wanted to help diversify this city and to make it successful. We wanted to be more proactive in deciding the future course of the city and help in any way that we could," Phillips says.

Out of the frustration born from the zoning rejection sprang what today has become the Piedmont Triad Partnership. The partnership is a public/private economic-development cooperative of corporations and City and county governments representing 12 counties (Guilford, Forsyth, Alamance, Caswell, Davidson, Davie, Montgomery, Randolph, Rockingham, Stokes, Surry and Yadkin). With the three largest cities, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point, as a triangular core, the partnership stretches from Surry, Stokes, Rockingham and Caswell counties on the Virginia border to the geographic center of the state in Randolph County. It reaches from Alamance County, which borders the Research Triangle region, to Davie County.

Known for more than a century as a manufacturing center, this region is home to a wide variety of traditional manufacturing industries, including giant furniture, textile, apparel and cigarette makers. High tech has also come to the Piedmont Triad. 3C Alliance, a consortium of battery manufacturers, has built a factory in Alamance County to supply worldwide demand for batteries to power portable computers. Pharmaceutical companies have built factories to supply the need for capsules. It is home to growing financial institutions such as Wachovia and BB&T and service centers such as American Express. Growing right along with these industries has been the Piedmont Triad Partnership.

With offices near the Piedmont Triad International Airport, the partnership has evolved from a volunteer organization of business and government leaders to a...