Welcome to the Business Journal Archives
Search for articles below, or continue to the all new BusinessJournalDaily.com now.
Search
McCracken Wears Two Hats, Strives for Same Goal
SHARON, Pa. -- Robert McCracken is a man who wears two hats at the same time. In the two years since he’s assumed the dual roles as executive director of the Shenango Valley and Lawrence County chambers of commerce in Pennsylvania, he’s found that both hats are roughly the same size and shape.
And a perfect fit.
“It’s worked out well,” says McCracken, a soft-spoken business leader whose thin, tightly wound ponytail defies the conventional image of a chamber executive. “We have similar goals for the area, the region, for our members, and we share similar needs.”
Two years ago, the Shenango Valley Chamber took a bold step by considering a shared executive director between the two local – but still independent – organizations.
Eric Brown, president of the Shenango Valley chamber and chief financial officer of Gilbert’s Risk Solutions, Sharon, says that McCracken has helped in coordinating cooperation among chambers across the region.
“He’s done a great job on the legislative side, the business side,” Brown says. “We’ve gotten together with Penn-Northwest and other joint meetings, and have given business members the chance to network.”
Business, Brown says, isn’t done the same way as 30 years ago, and the regional approach the chambers have adopted is an important step toward enhancing western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio’s competitiveness in the global economy.
“It’s more of a collaboration without a merger thrown in,” Brown says. “We’ve done a good job with our alliance with Lawrence County. We’re working together and sharing resources.”
The Shenango Valley chamber has just more than 400 member businesses, and another 400 belong to Lawrence County, McCracken reports. The trick is to get everyone speaking for the region as a whole, presenting a sense of strength in numbers.
“You need a strong chamber in your community to be your advocate for business,” McCracken emphasizes. All too often, policymakers in Washington or Harrisburg turn a deaf ear to the concerns of small business, and McCracken and other chamber board members want to make sure their message is forcefully delivered to those lawmakers, whether on Capitol Hill or Harrisburg.
Each quarter, U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-3 Pa., hosts a roundtable discussion the chamber sponsors when company executives and business owners can air their concerns, McCracken says. “Company presidents and CEOs are able to present their concerns as to what is keeping them from expanding here, and [Kelly can] take that message back to Washington,” he says.
New laws, especially the Affordable Health Care Act, have raised questions and concerns among small businesses, McCracken elaborates.
“We’re trying to explain to them that, when you pass Obamacare, this is what it does to me,” he says. “Sometimes, these personal stories are the ones they need to hear, that it’s not a good piece of legislation.”
The chamber also holds seminars that update area employers on regulatory and human resource issues, McCracken adds.
“They can learn how the law is changing, that what was acceptable five years ago isn’t acceptable today,” he says. Thus, member companies don’t have to send their employees out of town for these informational sessions. “We provide a vehicle so they don’t have to send them great distances to learn these things.”
Moreover, under McCracken, the Shenango chamber has become an active participant in preparing young people for careers in manufacturing and industry.
“Part of the chamber’s responsibility is to help develop that pipeline of an available work force,” he says. The skills of the veteran employees preparing to retire need to be replaced by a new generation with the same skill sets.
“In western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, we still have a large manufacturing sector and we’ve not been feeding them with enough employees,” McCracken says.
Part of the challenge is to convince not just students, but parents and educators, about the benefits of a career in manufacturing, McCracken adds.
He cites a recent program, “Educators in the Manufacturing Workplace” (See related story page 53). The initiative – which encompasses five counties – is designed to acquaint teachers with how some of the disciplines they teach translate into real-world applications.
“The goal is to have them better aware of how their field is applied in the workplace,” McCracken says. Then, these teachers can take what they’ve learned back to their students and explain that today’s industry is nothing like the industry of 30 or 40 years ago.
“We want them to be ambassadors to young people, saying that it isn’t their grandfather’s mill,” he says, “that these places are clean, quiet, safe and skilled.”
In addition, jobs in manufacturing today require a much more advanced education. The prospects of landing a job that pays well without some type of post-secondary training is slim. “The math test that they have to take would probably set some people back,” McCracken notes.
A career in industry offers a bright alternative to those not suited for college, McCracken says. “The completion rate for those starting out on a four-year degree is less than 25%,” he notes. “Meantime, after a couple of semesters, they’ve racked up huge debt.”
McCracken, a native of New Castle and graduate of Grove City College, is the former owner of WBZY Radio. He’s been with the Lawrence County chamber 15 years and the Shenango Valley chamber two years, and observes that the composition and nature of member companies has changed over time.
“Our companies range from a person with a tool belt and a sign on a pickup truck that’s on the job hammering out a living,” he says, “to the region’s largest employer.”
Instead of the large sprawling companies that dotted the Shenango Valley 30 years ago, new chamber members are likely to be small businesses with fewer than 10 employees, McCracken notes.
“Hometown heroes will grow the area,” he predicts as he cites developments such as the eCenter at LindenPointe, a newly developed high-tech incubator in Hermitage, and startup companies with roots in the Shenango Valley.
“We were honored by the Shenango Valley chamber as startup of the year in 2012,” says Jim Schneider, president of Eyes of Faith Optical in Sharon. The company designs eyeglass frames for clients across the country and donates some of these frames to people in impoverished areas around the globe.
“We donated 15,000 pairs of glasses to Sight Ministries in Texas, which distributed them to people in Kenya and Indonesia,” Schneider reports.
Schneider says that his company – it employs four in Sharon and nine outside sales representatives – is an example of how entrepreneurs are making a go of it in the Shenango Valley. “We’re excited to be a part of the revitalization of Sharon,” he says. “Our operation was contracted out of New Hampshire, but we wanted to bring everything in-house to Sharon.”
The company designs the frames, provides customer support and operates its shipping and receiving from the site in Sharon, Schneider says. The frames are manufactured overseas and distributed from Sharon to eye-care professionals across the United States.
“This is our hometown,” he emphasizes. “We live in West Middlesex and we thought it would be cool to have a company like ours in downtown.”
Prospects for a stronger manufacturing base in the region appear even better since oil and gas exploration in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays has accelerated, McCracken notes. “It’s not a one-year spurt,” he suggests. “These are five-, 10-, 20-year growth projections that everyone is looking at as a result of what needs to feed this industry.”
That means suppliers and manufacturers have expanded their capabilities to include oil and gas services. “They’re seeing long-term growth in western Pennsylvania,” McCracken says. “Pennsylvania is now the No. 2 gas producer in the country. Somebody has to supply that industry.”
The Shenango Valley region, McCracken continues, is in a perfect position to ramp up its manufacturing capabilities to meet this demand, which is key to an overall commercial expansion of the region.
“In western Pennsylvania, the most important sector is manufacturing,” McCracken states. “To grow and redevelop the economy, you have to make something.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story appears in our September 2013 print edition.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our twice-monthly print edition and to our free daily email headlines.