Firms finding homes in the Valley

Arlen Boardman
02/23/2003

During the last year, at least two Wisconsin-based businesses made a relatively rare decision.

They pulled up stakes from elsewhere and moved - lock, stock and barrel - to the Fox Cities.

The decisions were triggered by different things: Steve Kuper's airline consulting business was grounded by the events of 9-11; while for Jim Geerts, it was a case of wanting to get more involved in a business venture than just being a silent investor.
Whatever their motivations, the businessmen brought enterprises to the area, moves that joined with existing corporate expansions and other growth that the local business environment enjoys.

Kuper, who lost his lucrative United Airlines employee training contract immediately after the terrorists' attacks, operated his consulting business in his Milwaukee home. He sold his office and home in October 2002 - deciding to return to the Fox Cities to rebuild his young shattered company.

Geerts, founder and former owner of what was Jack's Pizza in Little Chute, never left his Fox Cities home, but after nine years as only a retired business investor, he decided to get closer to the action. This time, he chose the coffee business when he bought controlling interest of Victor Allen's Coffee, a successful Madison roaster/retailer.

He and his partners have moved the headquarters to Little Chute and soon will move production to a roasting plant they're building in the industrial park.

James Schlies, vice president of economic development at the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said these types of moves - a total move versus opening a branch - are getting rarer in the labor-strapped state, but they certainly are welcome.

"It's not only a matter of the recession and the state economy in business decisions whether to move around, but, I think, it's also in part because of the tight labor market we started seeing three or four years ago," he said.

For Kuper and Geerts, that's not an issue.

Kuper and partner Mary Beth Kemen of Suamico, have an office receptionist, while Victor Allen's 130 employees are spread across the country.

Geerts has key employees in Scott Dercks, chief operating officer, in Little Chute and Victor Allen's founder Victor Mondry, president, in Madison. He will need little more than a handful of employees to run the planned automated roasting plant.

The chamber gets a few dozen inquiries a year from businesses about putting operations here, but Schlies said they're mostly for expansions, not total relocations. I getting businesses to change location is difficult, so the business advocacy organization has focused on, first, winning expansions from existing companies; second encouraging startups; and third, recruiting expansions from business not now located here.

Schlies said working with existing businesses starts with one major advantage: "You don't have to sell the area (and its merits) to that business," he said. "You have to sell the area to a (non-local) business."

He said the odds are very poor that the recruitment will be successful, especially when weighed against selling a local company on expanding in the Fox Cities.

Geerts and Kuper, 46, didn't need any selling; they had spent many years in the Fox Cities before embarking on these current ventures.

Geerts, 58, was one of the well-known entrepreneurial success stories with his Little Chute-based Jack's Pizza, now owned by Kraft. Dercks, 28, had been in business with his brother as owners of Java Express for four years before Dercks joined Geerts.

Kuper, a 1974 Xavier High School graduate, spent seven years here in the 1980's as an associate pastor at the First Assembly of God Church in Appleton.