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Attends Company News
May 29, 2010
Local economy starting to show signs of life
A return to 40-hour workweeks, industrial construction, and hiring announcements are signals of a rebounding local economy, employers and business experts said. Nineteen months after the nation’s real estate collapse and financial crisis froze capital expenditures and dropped demand for consumer goods, manufacturers are seeing an increase in product orders, employment is edging up and industries are making plans to hire.
“The recession slowed some things down but (business) people are still looking at Pitt County,” said Kelly Andrews, whose work at the Pitt County Development Commission involves recruiting manufacturers and distributorships along with helping researchers bring their discoveries to market. There have been layoffs in certain industries but innovations are encouraging manufacturers to open shop. “Technology may initially mean some companies don’t need as much work force,” Andrews said. But efficiently operated industries will draw business, she said, and industries with increased orders do eventually need more workers.
Looking Ahead
Attends Healthcare, a producer of adult incontinence products, fits that mold. The company, which employs about 300 people in Greenville, plans to hire between 20-25 people annually over the next three to four years, raising its work force to about 400 at the company’s facility on Old Creek Road, said Michael Fagan, Attends president and chief executive officer. When Fagan joined Attends in 2006, the Greenville facility employed 250 people and was “literally running out of money,” he said. The business nearly closed its doors. Fagan and other corporate officers looked at the business, market trends and their competitors and saw untapped potential. “We were really fortunate that we were modernizing and becoming very cost efficient just before this economic downturn in the fall of 2008,” Fagan said. After securing capital to upgrade machinery and implementing cuts in employee salaries and benefits, the company started expanding its market and making money. Managers promoted a mind set of collective improvement in the production process which improved production efficiency and kept costs down, Fagan said. While Attends was stepping up production, world oil prices were rising and the U.S. dollar was weakening, increasing the cost of imports and shutting out Attends’ potential foreign competitors, Fagan said. When the nation’s financial market problems froze credit, the company’s domestic competitors couldn’t secure financing to upgrade equipment and improve production rates, which Attends had already done. The result is that since 2007 the company will have gained $100 million in sales, Fagan said, and is predicting $250 million in sales in the coming year. Between now and 2020, Attends predicts demand for its products will increase by 79 percent because between 8,000 to 10,000 people will be turning 65 every day in the United States.
