Perspectives from Local Government: Healthy Competition

By Keith Klein (City of Dayton)

Competition is a way of life, and healthy competition helps businesses grow. Manufacturers are fighting hard to keep their existing customers and find new ones. Communities across the Dayton area are competing, too. They are competing to attract and retain successful manufacturers because of the jobs they create for local residents.

Welcome to the world of economic development. Many people have heard the term “economic development” but not everyone knows what it means, or why it might be important for their business. In fact, most communities have at least one economic development professional who is tasked with helping local companies create jobs.

It's a matter of integrity

by Heather Martin (Innovative Interchange, Inc.)

Do you owe someone a return phone call? An email? A letter? What’s stopping you from closing the loop?

Maybe you think you can’t respond at all until you have complete information. Maybe you’re putting off making the phone call or sending the “Thanks, but no thanks” letter because you don’t want to deliver the rejection.

Whatever your reason, consider not only how difficult it is when someone leaves you hanging, consider the effect your delay has on your integrity. If you’ve said you’re going to make a decision by March 31, everyone waiting for that decision should hear from you by March 31. Even if it’s to say, “I’m not going to be making the decision until April 7.”

When your words and actions don’t match—even if you intended to do what you said you were going to do—it’s difficult for people to trust you. It’s OK for plans and intentions to change. It’s not the change that affects trust level—it’s when people are left in the dark about it.

For more discussion about this, check out, “Returning calls is a matter of integrity.”

Ka-ching! John Patterson joins Hall of Fame

by Steve Staub (Staub Manufacturing Solutions)

John Henry Patterson – founder of National Cash Register (NCR) was born just outside of Dayton in 1844. He was well educated, attending both Miami University and Dartmouth, and spent most of his young adult life working in a variety of jobs: in his fathers grist and saw mills, as a soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War, and as a toll collector on the Miami & Erie Canal. By 1883, he was running a general store with his brothers. The store did a good business, but it never showed a profit.

Meanwhile a local Dayton bar owner named James Ritty had invented the cash register to stop theft of his sales by the employees. The product was called “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier”, the Patterson brothers purchased a register and it turned their store around! Patterson was so impressed with the machine that he purchased the whole company in 1884 and renamed it National Cash Register.

I’ve Been Thinking... DRMA Update

by Angelia Erbaugh (DRMA President)

Tidbits of information and rambling thoughts from your DRMA president . . . 

Here are some more examples of why folks belong to DRMA, to be part of the Voice of Manufacturing in the Dayton Region.

In just the last few weeks: 

• Jerry Gehret (Knox Machinery) and I met with Paul Bradley, Senator Portman’s district representative, to get an understanding of our industry in the region. 
• Mickey Click (Auto Valve), John Roellig, and I held a planning meeting the director of the STEM Center to incorporate our bots program into their math curriculum which will result in more teachers getting students involved in our program – and more interest in engineering and manufacturing careers.

What is a “Target Market”?

By Debbie Wanamaker (B2B Marketing Consultants, LLC)

Target Market:

1) Those companies that:

• Are most likely to buy from you
• Ultimately end up generating the highest overall profitability per customer
• You actually enjoy serving

2) Those prospects to which you should direct your marketing and sales efforts

Why would you want a Target Market? Because it will make you more profitable! Without identified target markets it’s just a numbers game – make enough sales calls, you’ll get some customers.

Every company will have their own unique target market based on their own unique capabilities. Finding your target market is identifying, using demographics and psychographics, those companies that are MOST LIKELY to buy from you.

How to Save Dayton - Part 3

By David McDonald (Author, "Saving America's Cities")

The Residential Issue

For virtually every city (Other than Dayton because of the exceptionally high office building vacancy rate.) the most important aspect of resurrecting one’s self is to create a perception and a reality that people are moving, in large numbers back into a city’s core to live – not visit, but live. To revive a decaying city, you must start with the core – otherwise you will fail. If you spread your resources too thinly between the core and multiple suffering subdivisions, you will fail. Focus on the core, fix it if you can and begin working outward in neat concentric circles. 

Retailers, restaurants, grocery stores, and most entertainment absolutely do not “pioneer”. By that I mean they will not pick a location – hooping people will show up later. They absolutely will not locate in a city where the trend is for people to be moving out – as is the case in Dayton today – in spades! On the other hand, it is well known that the occupancy rate for housing in the core is at around 95%. A very healthy number – except the truth is there are not all that many people living in the core to begin with.

How to Save Dayton - Part 2

By David McDonald (Author, "Saving America's Cities")

Here are the first two, of three, initiatives that must be in place to turn Dayton around – not save it but turn it around.

The Leader

Elected officials, think tank consultants, economic development groups, and concerned citizen groups cannot save cities – they are not trained to do it, and in fact none of these groups are credited with globally or significantly saving a stagnant or decaying city in five decades. We need a leader, and we are way past the time in history where that leader can be a lone individual – it must be a group. The leadership group cannot come from the ranks of elected officials. To save decaying cities, you must do big things. Elected officials rarely do big things. The world is complicated and split. If elected officials do big things they could lose elections, so they rarely do big things. Therefore leadership must come from the private sector.

How to Save Dayton - Part 1

By David McDonald (Author, "Saving America's Cities")

I am going to try and put the highlights of my plan into a few paragraphs. This is near impossible to do correctly because a large part of what is necessary to be done is based on my observations over four decades of literally hundreds of cities and municipalities who have done it wrong. You can’t put that in a few paragraphs. If you do not fully understand everything that doesn’t work, you might then think you would have more avenues for success than you really have. Having said that, here goes:

Here are the absolute facts:

The office building vacancy rate in the City of Dayton is worse than Detroit for three years running. Even Detroit has stabilized, but Dayton is still digging a hole. I am now led to believe that there are several large tenants who are still paying rent on space they have already vacated. When those leases expire next year, that space will start showing as vacant - running the city’s vacancy rate up to near 50%.

Tenth Annual TechFest - February 18th-19th

Affiliate Societies Council (ASC) Celebrates Engineers Week with The Tenth Annual TechFest!

TechFest is Free Family Fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). TechFest 2012 (the Tenth Annual) will be Saturday, February 18, 2012 (10:00 AM – 6:00 PM) and Sunday, February 19, 2012 (11:00 AM – 5:00 PM) at Sinclair Community College. No admission fee, free parking, and advance registration is not required.

The purpose of TechFest is to motivate youth in grades K-12 to study math and science in their regular academic setting (Public, Parochial, Charter, Private, or Home School). TechFest 2011 had over 70 hands-on exhibits and demonstrations for youth to have person based interactive experiences with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and related disciplines, topics and fields.

Halftime in America?

by Steve Staub (Staub Manufacturing Solutions)

Were you one of the 111 million people watching the Super Bowl Sunday night? Did you see that commercial starring Clint Eastwood that everyone is talking about? Last year Chrysler ran ads about “Detroit is back” with singer Eminem. This year Chrysler brought in “Dirty Harry” to give America a pep talk!

I personally felt the commercial was awesome! The spirit that Chrysler displayed in that two minute advertisement is the same spirit that we want to convey with MadeInDaytonBLOG.com… get ready, we're coming on strong!

Entrepreneurs Pub Night, continuing the tradition of the Barn Gang

by Scott Reeve (Engineers Club President)

When you settle into a conversation with Harry Couch, technical consultant for polymer, composite and process engineering, you catch a glimpse of what it must have been like to talk shop with the likes of Orville Wright, Charles Kettering and Colonel Edward Deeds. Couch is a core member of the group that started Entrepreneurs Pub Night at the Engineers Club of Dayton. In the tradition of the original Barn Gang, Couch and others want to create an environment that will act as a springboard for small businesses and individuals looking to turn an idea into a technology or next-generation product. 

Couch has more than 40 years of experience in materials engineering and has held key positions with Inland Division, GM, GM Delco and Delphi. Retirement he says positioned him to find ways he could give back to the community. He spent the next 14 years as an independent contractor for the National Composite Center. Today he is science officer for Third Millennium Metals. Though Couch has seen a lot of changes in Dayton over the years he believes in Dayton’s future. “At the last Entrepreneurs Pub Night I sat with a couple who had just re-located their business to Tech Town in Dayton,” he says. “I listened to them talk about how bright the future is here in Dayton. And they are right. There’s a spark here in Dayton that other places don’t have.”

The Scoop on Dayton Cone Manufacturer

by Steve Staub (Staub Manufacturing Solutions)

*This article is part of continuing series highlighting historical items that were invented or manufactured right here in the Dayton, Ohio region.

In 1912, with financial help from Nelson Talbott, a fellow Daytonian, Walter McLaren bought the patent to automate the making of ice cream cones. The process had actually been invented in 1910 by a gentleman in Portland, Oregon. He had developed a machine with moving molds that would automatically pour batter into the molds and trim the cones.

Ensuing patent wars were resolved when McLaren Products (Dayton, OH and Peoria, Il), Atlantic Cone Co. (Springfield MA), Consolidated Wafer and Turnbull Cone & Machine (Chattanooga, TN) all merged into the McLaren Consolidated Cone Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, making it the largest manufacturer of ice cream cones in the world! In 1930 the company moved into a six story building that was the site of Dayton Motor Co. (aka. Stoddard Dayton & Maxwell Motor Car Co.) Today that building is home to Gosiger Inc.

Two months and growing!

by Steve Staub (Staub Manufacturing Solutions)

It’s hard to believe, but MadeInDaytonBLOG.com is now two months old. When Gary Weldon and I launched this blog on 12/01/11 we expected it to catch on… but frankly not as quickly as it did!

Currently we are getting hundreds of hits per day! That is really exciting for us as it shows the great amount of interest in the manufacturing industry in our region. We have some local VIP's and several elected officials following the blog. We cover manufacturing from metalworking to composites, RFID, and nanotechnology, from brand new technologies being developed at WPAFB & UDRI to our proud heritage of innovation.