Assignment: Assimilate a 2,000-Employee Automaker into Our Hometown

Making the Most of Volkswagen

By J. Ed. Marston

Volkswagen represents an unprecedented opportunity for our community, but it also represents a major challenge. How will we make the most of our newfound growth potential while maintaining our distinctiveness and quality as a community?

A few days after Volkswagen announced plans to invest $1 billion and create 2,000 jobs in the Chattanooga area, Tom Edd Wilson, Chamber president and CEO, began looking for communities which could teach us what to expect.

"After considering several options, I began to focus on the Greenville-Spartanburg area in South Carolina," Wilson said. "They had attracted a BMW auto assembly facility in the early 1990s, and we seemed to have a lot in common with them."

Like Chattanooga, the Greenville-Spartanburg area was a mid-sized community, which attracted a German company that established a single manufacturing center in the U.S.

According to Wilson, those resemblances formed the basis for coordinating an initial expedition in August. "We took Mayor Littlefield, Mayor Ramsey, and a few Chamber staffers to Greenville for two days," Wilson said. "We were so impressed that we had to go back."

That second expedition took the form of a traveling conference in which the Chattanooga Chamber worked with the Greenville Chamber to put on a three-day event in October.

The event featured four learning tracks: 1) K-12 Education; 2) Higher Education and Workforce Development; 3) Infrastructure and Industrial Development; 4) Relocation Marketing and Quality of Life.

About 110 of Chattanooga’s community leaders participated – including Mayor Littlefield, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Jim Scales, and a number of officials from surrounding counties in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.

Before returning to Chattanooga, the participants spent several hours identifying the top lessons they had learned from their counterparts in Greenville-Spartanburg. They also brainstormed next steps for Chattanooga to make the most of the Volkswagen opportunity.

Jim Kennedy of Kennedy, Coulter, Rushing, and Watson, who facilitated the Greenville-Spartanburg sessions, worked with Chamber staffers to distill the results of the expedition into a report entitled, "Applying Lessons Learned from Upstate South Carolina to the Tri-State Valley."

Here are the major lessons learned and starting points for the initiative:

• Regional Cooperation is Imperative: With so many issues to be addressed regionally, the Tri-State Valley should identify a mechanism with appropriate leadership to begin tackling regional matters, including those related to education (K-20), supplier recruitment, workforce training and hiring, private investment and development, and marketing.

• Brace for Changes in Education and Training: Regional cooperation will be important in order to create articulation between high school and higher education programs; to create the appropriate partnership among business leaders, school boards and elected officials; and to guarantee the efficiency in the delivery of training programs and the elimination of duplication where it presently exists.

• Be Transparent in Hiring and Vendor Contracting: The community will look to Volkswagen to communicate its hiring intentions. The business community can assist by creating appropriate forums in which to discuss the intentions and the opportunities they can create for area workers.

• Pay Attention to Minority Involvement: The region should work with Volkswagen to establish an advisory group of representatives from the company and the region to promote and monitor diversity in recruitment, hiring and contracting.

• Create Effective Communication Channels: The Chamber is committed to the establishment of the Volkswagen Project Team and collaborating with the state to create a local office to address all issues related to the opening of the Volkswagen plant.

• Bridge the Cultures: The regional conversation should lead to the creation of, among other things, an international relocation initiative to welcome and assimilate executives and their families.

• Prepare for Growth: Managing growth is always a potentially controversial subject, so communication will be critical. Growth planning should be central to the regional discussion with a shared goal of increasing the economic prospects of the entire Tri-State Valley while preserving the quality of life that played such an important role in attracting Volkswagen here in the first place.

• Calibrate Expectations: Creating realistic expectations is primarily a communications issue. Businesses and job applicants need to know how the company will be working and what skills they will be seeking. Once those guidelines have been established, we need to train appropriately and position local andregional businesses to provide their goods and services to VW and its suppliers.