Black History Month traces its origins to an annual weeklong observance started in 1926 by historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson, a Virginia native. And since then, the February celebration of Black history makers and events has been intertwined with commemorating successful business icons like fellow Virginia-born greats Maggie Walker and Booker T. Washington.
With this in mind, Virginia Business presents our 2023 Virginia Black Business Leaders Awards, recognizing a reader-nominated group of some of the state’s most accomplished Black executives. On this inaugural list are 17 leaders, chosen from 108 nominated executives in finance, federal contracting, higher education, law, technology and other sectors. Our editorial team selected the 17 winners, scoring nominations based on factors including overall professional achievement, community impact and mentoring.
Additionally, Virginia Business’ editors selected four of these 17 award-winning executives for additional recognition as inaugural members of our Virginia Black Business Leaders Hall of Fame, celebrating their outstanding careers and general excellence in business leadership. Our 2023 Hall of Fame members are: Gilbert Bland of the Urban League of Hampton Roads; Victor Branch of Bank of America; Victor O. Cardwell of Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black; and Warren Thompson of Thompson Hospitality Corp.
In this feature, you’ll read about our winners’ influences, what they’ve learned in the professional world and how they continue to pay that knowledge forward to others.
Congratulations to all the winners of our 2023 Virginia Black Business Leaders Awards!
Click on the names to read more about our winners.
As Gentry Locke Attorneys prepares to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2023, the venerable Roanoke law firm isn’t slowing down — it’s accelerating.
The firm hung out its shingle in 1923 and spent its first 40 years as a regional specialist representing insurance companies before adding corporate and business work in the 1970s and ’80s.
During the past eight years, however, Gentry Locke has added regional offices in Lynchburg and Richmond and opened Gentry Locke Consulting, a Richmond-based subsidiary specializing in lobbying and governmental affairs. The firm has expanded its practice areas to include expertise in emerging fields such as cannabis and renewable energy.
In all, the firm has grown to more than 80 attorneys. That makes Gentry Locke the eighth largest law firm in Virginia — yet still far smaller than behemoths like McGuireWoods, which has more than 1,110 lawyers, or Hunton Andrews Kurth, with its 900 attorneys.
“We remain relatively moderately sized, which is fine by me,” says Monica Monday, Gentry Locke’s managing partner.
Recent growth means the firm is large enough to handle major real estate transactions, Monday says, but also still small enough to be nimble and courageous enough to take on challenging cases.
Taking chances
Take, for example, a whistleblower case the firm fought for more than six years, in which a university employee reported fraudulent research at Duke University. Joseph Thomas, a former Duke research analyst, said a colleague had repeatedly submitted fake pulmonary data, drawing millions in federal funding.
Gentry Locke took on Thomas’ whistle-
blower case in 2015, filing a research fraud lawsuit against Duke on behalf of U.S. taxpayers in federal court. The firm took the case knowing the only way it would get paid for its services was by winning.
“It was an enormous effort, and, in many instances, put some pressure on the firm in terms of the resources we had,” Monday says. Over six years, the case involved more than 300 motions, orders and other legal filings. “There were times when it was scary, definitely,” Monday adds with a chuckle. “But we felt we were strong enough and smart enough.”
The case “should scare all [academic] institutions around the country,” attorney Joel Androphy of Houston-based Berg & Androphy told the journal Science at the time.
In 2019, Duke settled the lawsuit, agreeing to repay $112.5 million to the U.S. government; the whistleblower received $33.75 million of the settlement funds for fighting the case on the government’s behalf. The case, Monday points out, was the largest university research fraud case in U.S. history. “That was a real watershed moment for us,” Monday says.
Other notable Gentry Locke cases include settling a widely publicized defamation case against Rolling Stone magazine for a shocking — and quickly discredited — story involving rape accusations at a University of Virginia fraternity house.
More recently, Gentry Locke found itself on the losing side of a large case. Gentry Locke was one of the law firms representing Pegasystems Inc., a tech company that was accused of stealing trade secrets in a lawsuit filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court by McLean-based rival Appian Corp. A jury ordered Pegasystems to pay Appian more than $2 billion in damages, by some accounts the largest such award in Virginia court history.
Gentry Locke and Pegasystems say they will appeal. “We think the verdict and judgment are bad for business in Virginia and a misinterpretation of Virginia law, and we look forward to presenting what we believe to be strong grounds for appeal,” the law firm and tech company said in a joint statement.
Unique leadership
Gentry Locke’s recent growth spurt has occurred under Monday’s leadership. The William & Mary Law School grad is an unusual choice of managing partner, at least by the standards of venerable law firms. For one thing, she’s an appellate lawyer, not a trial attorney or corporate counsel. For another, her career path diverged from the stereotypical. After she got married, moved to Martinsville and had a child, the firm agreed to let her work part time so she could commute from Martinsville, more than an hour’s drive away from Roanoke. In 2013, she returned to full-time work and was named managing partner — very possibly becoming the first female managing partner of a Virginia law firm that large.
Monday says her experience is a good example of Gentry Locke’s supportive, innovative culture. “The firm took a chance on me,” she says. “So, when the opportunity arose to become managing partner, in a way it was a way for me to give back, for the grace and room that I had been given.”
In 2015, Gentry Locke opened its Lynchburg office, the firm’s first notable expansion outside Roanoke since its founding.
Three years later, the firm opened its Government and Regulatory Affairs office in Richmond with two attorneys, including Gregory Habeeb, a former five-term Republican state delegate who represented the Roanoke area. The Christiansburg native saw opportunity in Richmond.
Habeeb recalls meeting with John G. “Chip” Dicks, another former delegate and longtime lobbyist and attorney with a strong practice in renewable energy and real estate law. Building on Gentry Locke’s existing client base in Richmond as well as its many Roanoke clients who needed representation in the state’s capital, Habeeb and Dicks decided to join forces, with Dicks joining the new Richmond office in 2018. “I said, ‘I think we can enter the market not just as a presence but as a leader,’” recalls Habeeb.
In the center
With lower overhead than larger Richmond firms and access to the resources of the Roanoke office, Gentry Locke has found the state capital to be a good market for its services.
The Richmond practice has expanded to 20 attorneys, including former Virginia Secretary of Veterans and Defense Affairs Carlos Hopkins and John Scheib, former chief legal officer for Norfolk Southern Corp. It also opened a subsidiary, Gentry Locke Consulting, to focus on lobbying and strategic communications — partly, Habeeb says, so the firm can stay on the cutting edge of regulations and legal trends.
Gregory Habeeb, a former state delegate, heads up the firm’s Richmond-based Gentry Locke Consulting subsidiary. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown
Despite the accelerated pace, Habeeb and Monday agree that expansion itself is not the firm’s goal. “We are very, very, very much opposed to growth for growth’s sake,” Habeeb says. “It’s not a numbers game for us.”
Serving as a stark reminder of too much growth, Gentry Locke’s Richmond office is in the same building that once housed LeClairRyan, the fast-moving, aggressively expansive law firm that added offices across the world at a startling clip before it collapsed abruptly into bankruptcy in 2019, followed by waves of lawsuits.
Habeeb says he sees LeClairRyan’s ignominious end as a cautionary tale of doing too much too fast. “The lesson from LeClairRyan is not that growth is bad; it’s about managing your growth, knowing your overhead, investing in your people, knowing who you are and working to be a better version of yourself.”
He’s also opposed to growing by merging with other firms for the same reason. “We have had firms in every single city in Virginia approach us for mergers, and we have never done that,” he says, in large part because different firms’ cultures and values can have trouble meshing.
Monday agrees. LeClairRyan’s failure, she notes, is “a reminder that you have to make really smart decisions and you have to be careful with your growth. That’s what we’re thinking all the time. It has to be smart growth. … We’re very, very cautious.”
Gentry Locke places great emphasis on its culture and on career development. By focusing on building a supportive culture, Gentry Locke aims to retain the younger attorneys it sees as key to the firm’s future success. “The culture is valuing the relationships that we have with each other and also valuing the relationships with our clients,” Monday says. “Many times, that means your very best friends are the people you work with. We really enjoy being together.”
A few years back, the firm’s leaders established a development program dubbed Gentry Locke University — or GLU (pronounced “glue”) — to provide leadership training, particularly for young and mid-career attorneys. Unlike some firms, where attorneys compete in-house and “eat what they kill,” at Gentry Locke all partners are formal shareholders in the firm so when any part of the firm flourishes, they all do.
“We see that young lawyers want opportunity, they want training and they want to see that there is a pathway to success,” Monday says. “That’s where we’ve been successful. We value our relationships, and we invest in our people.”
Last year, Lori Stacy found herself leading a unicorn.
The CEO of Norfolk-based Trader Interactive, an online marketplace for boats, recreational vehicles, motorcycles and other niche vehicles, Stacy helped shepherd the company through its June acquisition by Australian auto retailer carsales.com Ltd.
The Australian company paid $624 million for 49% of the business in August 2021, making it the company’s second largest shareholder. Then carsales.com bought the rest of Trader Interactive this summer for $809 million. At the time of the 2021 transaction, Trader Interactive’s valuation was estimated at well above $1 billion — making it, in venture-capital parlance, a unicorn, or a privately held startup with a total market value of $1 billion or more.
While nothing on the surface changed, Trader Interactive’s unicorn status did confer some bonuses — and challenges.
“Any time valuation is public, personally I don’t love that,” Stacy says. For one thing, she says, the attention draws poachers of tech talent, already scarce in Hampton Roads.
But she does allow that the status is great for morale. “Any time there’s success, it brings confidence and that’s great for our employees. They like to win and celebrate those wins,” Stacy says. “And a lot of our customers are excited.”
The influx of cash that valuation brought was nice too, Stacy acknowledges. “It gives us investment opportunities to try new things to support our clients. When you’re struggling to grow, resources are more scarce,” she says. But after CarSales.com’s investment, there was “a lot more room for experimenting. So, it’s a win all around.”
Becoming a unicorn has been the brass ring sought by tech companies ever since Silicon Valley venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term in 2013. At the time, she counted just 39 unicorns, primarily consumer tech companies such as Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms Inc.) and Google LLC. That list has since shot upward. According to Crunchbase, a database of venture capital information, more than 1,100 unicorn companies now exist worldwide, with 612 in the U.S., concentrated largely along California’s coastal tech corridor.
Trader Interactive CEO Lori Stacy has guided the Norfolk-based online marketplace for vehicles through its valuation as a unicorn and its two-stage, $1.4 billion acquisition by Australian auto retailer carsales.com. Photo by Mark Rhodes
Virginia has its own stable of unicorns. According to international venture capital tracking firm Dealroom.co and other sources, at least 10 Virginia companies reached unicorn status in the last few years, though two went through IPOs last year and are now publicly traded. (See chart, Page 25.)
That elite list spans the state, from McLean-based kidney-care company Somatus Inc., valued at $2.5 billion, to Richmond-based fintech firm Mission Lane LLC, valued at $1 billion.
As in Silicon Valley, Virginia’s unicorns often have technology at their core.
“Virginia may not be Silicon Valley, but it is, pardon the phrase, a sort of Fiber Alley,” says David Touve, senior director of the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
Touve points to Northern Virginia’s status as a cybersecurity hub. It’s also been a nexus of internet activity since the 1990s heyday of America Online’s Dulles headquarters, long before Amazon.com Inc. announced it was locating its HQ2 East Coast headquarters in Arlington County.
Virginia offers a lot of advantages for startups to succeed, says Dr. Ikenna Okezie, the Harvard-educated co-founder and CEO of Somatus, an artificial intelligence-driven kidney care startup based in McLean that recently hit a valuation of $2.5 billion. Okezie cites “great neighborhoods, school systems, access to great public and private sector jobs.” Plus, Virginia has a lot of natural beauty and “it’s geographically situated to attract top talent both locally and nationally,” he says.
Like the rest of the world, the commonwealth has seen its portfolio of unicorns grow in the past few years. Touve says that increase may be due to a “historical accident: the combination of greater amounts of private capital being managed by investors” — think inexpensive money during an era of low interest rates — “and the greater scrutiny of going public may have led to companies delaying [or] even avoiding a listing on a major exchange.”
Another possibility is that some of those unicorns … aren’t.
Stanford University professor Ilya A. Strebulaev caused a stir with a 2017 study arguing that unicorns on average are worth about half what they claim to be, largely because a handful of investors get sweetheart deals compared with other investors. In other words, some unicorns might be just $500 million horses with horns glued to their heads. Caveat emptor.
Trading up
Trader Interactive started as a publisher of modest newsprint booklets of ads for vehicles like RVs, motorcycles and boats. Its larger corporate sibling, Autotrader.com Inc., did the same for cars.
Stacy joined Trader Interactive in 1997 as a sales manager in her home state of Florida. Armed with a new bachelor’s degree in English, Stacy had sent her résumé to every publication she could find. One bit — Autotrader. She was initially reluctant to take the job. Sales wasn’t what she’d had in mind. What the company liked most about her résumé wasn’t her writing — it was her background working in retail sales and management for stores like The Body Shop and The Limited.
Still, she signed on to the company, which at the time was owned by Norfolk-based Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, as a sales manager. She excelled. After several promotions, in 2007 Stacy was tapped to lead the non-automotive digital side of the business.
To some, the role might have seemed like a step down. The non-auto segment — cycles, RVs and boats — was minuscule compared with the auto side. And back in 2007, the company’s online sales were a tiny fraction of its print media revenue.
But the company was about to go through a metamorphosis. Landmark began selling off assets, including its flagship property, The Weather Channel, which it reportedly sold for $3.5 billion to NBCUniversal Media LLC and two private equity firms.
Autotrader, now based in Atlanta and a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., became a top player in online car sales; it owns Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader.com, among other properties.
Its non-auto business was spun off as a new company, Dominion Web Solutions. Amid dwindling print ad sales, Stacy worked to push online sales to the forefront. “We could see where the customers were going,” she says.
Yanek Korff co-founded Herndon-based cybersecurity firm Expel in 2016 with two other former employees of Mandiant, a publicly traded cybersecurity firm in Reston. Expel was valued at $1 billion in 2021.
Over the next few years, Dominion Web Solutions methodically expanded its online footprint, segment by segment, dealership by dealership. Eventually it shifted all its sales to the web. By 2010, the various verticals had been brought under one roof. The business expanded into new niches, including heavy equipment and commercial trucks.
In 2017, French investment company Eurazeo bought the business for $680 million. Stacy was named CEO of he renamed Trader Interactive. Under her leadership, the company doubled down on building online marketplaces for niche transportation purchases. Four years later, Eurazeo sold half its stake in the business to Melbourne, Australia-based carsales.com for $624 million, giving the Australian firm a toehold on the North American market and bringing Trader Interactive a $1 billion-plus valuation.
In June, impressed with Trader Interactive’s performance, carsales.com announced it would buy the rest of the Norfolk company, paying an additional $809 million. The deal was scheduled to close in September.
So, what’s next for the company? Stacy is focused on bringing the purchasing process completely online within the Trader Interactive system. Online shoppers will be able to search for features they want, locate vehicles, ask questions, manage paperwork, purchase and arrange delivery — all within an app or web browser. “Our industries are going to look really different a few years from now,” Stacy says. “I’m super excited about that.”
Mission first
One could be forgiven for thinking that after a big acquisition, unicorn leaders might be popping Champagne corks and looking to cash out, but leaders of successful companies like Trader Interactive are typically focused on measures other than market valuations, says U.Va.’s Touve.
“Getting rich is a weak or at least an unfortunate motive for founders,” he adds. “The more important goals are to create a great company that provides a compelling solution to a meaningful problem.”
For one of Virginia’s newest unicorns, the solution — and the problem — were keys to its creation. Electrify America, based in Reston, was born out of a legal case. In 2016, Volkswagen AG, the German auto giant, agreed to pay up to $14.7 billion to settle charges that it had for years cheated on emissions tests on its diesel cars. The settlement with U.S. federal and California state agencies included a provision that Volkswagen would fund infrastructure for electric vehicles.
Since then, Electrify America, the business launched to achieve this, has focused on building networks of high-speed charging stations that will work with any electric vehicle on the market. The company’s goal is to make filling up an electric car as straightforward as gassing up an internal combustion vehicle — just drive up and plug in, paying via a mobile app wallet.
That simple aim has proved complicated, says Matthew Nelson, Electrify America’s director of government affairs. Take for example the challenges associated with developing charging stations that can communicate seamlessly with different electric vehicles’ software, from Chevys to Fords to Teslas, while powering up their batteries in a quarter-hour or so — not to mention interfacing with banks and credit card systems.
“It took years to get this to work,” Nelson says. A testing lab in Reston hammers out many of the technical aspects of working with so many different systems before they are put into service.
With many of those bugs stamped out, Electrify America has opened over 800 stations with more than 2,500 chargers in 46 states, including two coast-to-coast routes, with plans to more than double that by 2026. It’s partnered with automakers including Kia, Hyundai and Ford to offer complimentary charges for some models.
Being based in Northern Virginia gives the company quick access to international airports and well-trained technical talent, Nelson says. It’s also close to Congress and federal agencies, as well as partners such as South Korean charger manufacturer SK Signet, whose American arm is headquartered in the region.
“I love the fact that we build things,” adds Nelson, whose background is in research and development industries that can take years to get to market. “Every week we open three or four stations. They exist. You can visit them.”
In June 2022, German electronics firm Siemens AG paid $450 million for a minority stake in Electrify America, marking Electrify America’s first outside investment. That vote of support placed Electrify America’s market valuation at $2.45 billion.
“We have a startup feel in some ways, but not in other ways,” Nelson says. “We aren’t motivated by the goal of going public. … We are a company built around the idea of solving a problem.”
Keeping score
For Expel Inc., a cybersecurity firm based in Herndon, the problem to solve is less technical and more interpersonal.
Expel co-founder and Chief of Staff Yanek Korff says that when he and his partners launched the business in 2016, “we were more excited about building a … company from a culture perspective than a security perspective. You could say it was about the journey.”
Korff and Expel’s other two co-founders worked at another Northern Virginia cybersecurity startup, Mandiant, which focused on defending systems against attacks by nation-states — “think China and Russia and Iran and North Korea,” Korff says.
About 18 months after Mandiant’s 2013 acquisition by FireEye, a Silicon Valley security firm, for $1 billion, Korff and two Mandiant colleagues, Dave Merkel and Justin Bajko, joined forces on a new venture.
They were inspired by a 2015 tweet by analyst Rick Holland. “I think the MSSP [managed security service provider] market is ripe for disruption,” Holland tweeted, comparing the industry to pre-Uber taxi services: “Customers aren’t happy.”
The three co-founders decided to pursue a company that would offer better service and innovations to cybersecurity clients, allowing customers to outsource technical expertise while maintaining their existing systems.
Getting started wasn’t easy. Access to capital and support was a major hurdle. “In Virginia, there aren’t a lot of companies that do this, that start from scratch and get venture funding and aspire to build a company that’s worth a lot of money someday,” Korff observes.
Drawing on their experiences, they found connections. “We were just barely knowledgeable enough to get things rolling,” Korff says. Working through VC firms, they built a network of informal advisers, including other founders, stretching from Northern Virginia to California.
The new partners encountered plenty of skepticism. During spring 2016, they met with close to 50 potential investors, Korff recalls. Previous startups had promised and failed to deliver strong network security and satisfied customers, but VC firms that had looked hard at the industry saw merit in Expel’s approach. By that summer, Expel had six investors, led by Washington, D.C.-based Paladin Capital Group, a tech investment firm.
Five years, many clients and five funding rounds later, Expel had convinced investors that it consistently was hitting targets for growth and quality. In November 2021, a $140 million investment from Paladin and CapitalG, Alphabet Inc.’s independent growth fund, brought the total invested in Expel to $257 million. Expel announced it had received a $1 billion valuation — making it a unicorn.
Now the company is focused on maintaining a healthy corporate culture in a working world that’s gone through a revolution. Before the pandemic, 70% of Expel’s workforce was based in Herndon, with the rest composed of remote workers from around the country. By this year, those proportions had reversed.
“That’s a different company,” Korff says, one that requires different approaches. On the plus side, it’s easier to recruit remote talent, no matter what coast they may be on. On the negative side, it can be tricky to build teams and camaraderie when members interact only through Zoom calls.
“We figured if we build a good company where people love to work and we know we’re solving a real problem, the outcome will be good,” Korff says. “The mindset wasn’t, ‘We have to hit this score.’ It was more, if we do this, the scoreboard will take care of itself.”
Not long after D’Ivonne Holman became director of development for Northern Virginia family services nonprofit Britepaths in 2018, she signed up to participate in Leadership Fairfax, a leadership development organization focused on local and regional challenges in Fairfax County. Her boss, a Leadership Fairfax alum, encouraged her to apply.
She was accepted into Leadership Fairfax’s class of 2019 and joined a cohort of 50 classmates over the next 10 months for a series of discussions, workshops, field trips and trainings.
Holman acknowledges she had some reservations at first, but she quickly became a fan. Not only did she interact with people from across the county she might never have met otherwise, but she also got the chance to visit professionals at their workplaces and gain insights into health care, law enforcement and the justice system.
“We can’t operate unless we collaborate,” says Beth Rhinehart, president and CEO of the Bristol Virginia/Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors the Executive Leadership Institute. Photo by Earl Niekirk
One memorable road trip brought the class to Richmond and the General Assembly, where they learned about Virginia’s legislative process. Another time, a chance comment during a discussion — “always assume good intent” — shifted the way she looks at leadership, she said.
Would Holman recommend programs like it? “It was great team building, it was great networking, it was very beneficial to me as a leader. … What I got out of it was leaps and bounds beyond what I had anticipated,” said Holman, now development director of the nonprofit Lamb Center, a Fairfax homeless shelter. “It was also more of a time commitment than I anticipated. But it absolutely was worth it.”
Over the past half-century, leadership development programs like Leadership Fairfax have sprung up around the state. Many are managed by local chambers of commerce; others are run through universities; some operate as standalone nonprofits.
Despite variations — some focus on civic leadership, others on business professionals, politicians or nonprofit leaders — the programs share common elements. They bring together class cohorts of business and community leaders to discuss and learn about important issues, with the aim of fostering connections that will last far beyond the time spent in the program.
While many participants join to strengthen their résumés, the programs themselves have loftier goals. They aim to create connections that can reach beyond the boundaries of class, race, gender and politics.
In these divided times, is that even possible?
Smells like twin spirit
It is if you ask the leaders of Bristol, Virginia. Or Bristol, Tennessee — the twin cities with the same names are famously divided down the middle of State Street, with Virginia on one side and Tennessee on the other.
In Bristol, “we have two of everything,” says Beth Rhinehart, president and CEO of Bristol’s Chamber of Commerce. Two state legislatures and two city governments. Two sets of state laws and city ordinances. Two public school systems. And so on.
“No matter what part of the country you go to, there’s always talks about regionalism,” Rhinehart observes. “That means on a very core, basic level that you’re collaborating for something bigger that’s more beneficial than the way you do it already. We have to do that in Bristol. … We can’t operate unless we collaborate.”
To help bridge those divides, the Bristol chamber created the Executive Leadership Institute. Participants, who pay $2,500 tuition, meet for a full day every month from September through May. The institute targets “more seasoned” leaders from the community, Rhinehart adds.
Participants may live in Tennessee but own businesses in Virginia, or vice versa. By building connections and learning how things get done across the region, and by whom, they gain insights into ways they can solve complicated cross-border problems. That includes complex and thorny ones like the Bristol, Virginia, landfill, which has been sending odiferous fumes wafting onto properties in Tennessee.
The city of Bristol, Tennessee, filed suit over the landfill in May, accusing its Virginia sister city of air and health violations. In June, following recommendations by the Department of Environmental Quality and a panel of experts, the city of Bristol, Virginia, announced a settlement, saying it would close the landfill by Sept. 12 and fix the odor emissions, an engineering project estimated to cost at least $15 million. The Virginia city also agreed to pay $250,000 in compensation to Bristol, Tennessee. But as of early July, it was still unclear how Bristol, Virginia, would dispose of its trash in the future.
“It’s not a quick solution but it’s a step toward a solution,” says Rhinehart, herself an alum of the Sorensen Institute, a leadership program based at the University of Virginia. “When you see something successfully demonstrate what can happen with collaboration and working across all different kinds of lines — perceived or real — it’s hard not to be an advocate for it.”
‘Swimming upstream’
The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership launched in 1993, a time of political turmoil in Virginia. George Allen, a pugnacious Republican, won election for governor in a landslide that ended 12 years of Democratic leadership in the commonwealth.
Since then, the institute has pursued a straightforward goal: to connect Virginia’s civic leaders and help them find common ground, no matter how many other things may divide them. Well over 1,000 participants have graduated from the nonpartisan program, including state senators, county supervisors, city council members, local administrators and many more, including current Attorney General Jason Miyares and the directors of other leadership programs.
“There is an element of career development,” says Sorensen’s director, Larry Roberts. “There’s also a desire to understand what civic leadership means. These are people who are frustrated by the tone of politics.”
Roberts, who served as legal counsel to Gov. Tim Kaine and chief of staff under
Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, went through Sorensen in 2001. “I did not know about the various regions,” he recalls. “I spent most of my adult life in Northern Virginia. … To be able to visualize the settings and have professional contacts across Virginia was really helpful.”
Sorensen’s flagship Political Leaders program gathers one weekend a month, from March through December. Participants visit regions across Virginia, hearing from local experts. Topics include collaboration, civil discourse and building trust. (Other Sorensen programs, such as Emerging Leaders, are less time intensive.)
Recently, Roberts says, Sorensen has seen an increase in applicants “who want to know how government works,” including health care executives.
“We view it as our mission to help people navigate a divided society, and one where cooperation is not always rewarded,” Roberts says. “We see so much tribalism. People really value a place where they can get other perspectives.
“They’re not checking their political philosophies at the door,” he adds. “But not every issue has to be political. … Are we swimming upstream? Yes, I really do feel we are sometimes. But the vast majority of the public wants to see collaboration.”
Bridging divides
Collaboration is a founding principle of Leadership Metro Richmond.
Founded in 1980, LMR is among the most established leadership development organizations in Virginia. Its creation dates to a time of deep tension in the state capital. Reeling from the civil rights battles of the 1960s and ’70s, which led to legal conflicts over county boundaries and annexation, Richmond and its regional neighbors seemed to be at constant odds with each other.
The city’s chamber of commerce created the program to encourage civic discourse. LMR’s first class of 40 people drew from a wide range of professions, including a city council member, an architect, a corporate lawyer, and several business leaders.
While the issues LMR addresses have shifted as the community has evolved, LMR’s goal has not, says Myra Goodman Smith, LMR’s CEO and president. “It’s still a space for challenging, courageous conversations,” Smith explains.
LMR classes work to resolve “top-level challenges” submitted by community advocates and nonprofit organizations, such as the shortage of mental health facilities for people in crisis. As LMR class members learn about these issues, they are taught methods to help them work together to solve these problems across divides of race, class, culture, education and income.
“People will say that LMR has changed their lives,” Smith adds. “That’s the power of LMR: to have conversations with people who don’t agree with you and won’t agree with you. We don’t do debate — we do dialogue.”
Smith sees LMR’s influence everywhere in the region. LMR’s more than 2,000 alumni include members of Congress and the General Assembly as well as business, civic and nonprofit leaders. “Whenever I open the paper,” Smith says, “I see LMR graduates.”
Concrete results
Much the same can be said of Lead Virginia. Launched in 2004, with the strong support of then-Gov. Mark Warner, the Richmond-based organization works to build leadership across the commonwealth.
In its earliest years, Lead Virginia focused on local leaders. Since then, befitting Warner’s résumé as a CEO-turned-politician, Lead Virginia has shifted toward bringing together business and nonprofit leaders and high-level government administrators.
The program aims to make these leaders familiar with communities and people all over Virginia and, especially, with each other. Traveling to regions across Virginia, participants “build relationships” during the roughly seven-month program through shared tours, meals and experiences, says Susan Horne, Lead Virginia’s president and CEO since 2007.
And that can lead to concrete results, she adds. When she took part in the program in 2006, one of her classmates was the CEO of a large gas company. During a trip to Martinsville, the class saw firsthand the high unemployment rate in that part of the state. Inspired to act, the CEO brought a call center to the area, creating 200 jobs. He never would have known about that need if not for Lead Virginia, Horne says. “He saw it firsthand in our travels.”
Lead Virginia focuses on top-level management — “We are not an emerging leaders program,” Horne explains — and emphasizes the value of seeing and solving problems. “We’re not just telling a chamber of commerce story,” she says. “We want people to understand the good and the not-so-good.”
There are more than 800 Lead Virginia alumni. Horne has seen a positive impact from introducing participants to parts of the state they may have been unfamiliar with, while connecting leaders and teaching them the tools of civic engagement.
“I have a sense that there is a cultural shift happening in Virginia,” Horne says, “an appreciation for working across jurisdiction lines that benefit multiple areas.”
That shift may not always be visible in politics, she acknowledges, but “Virginia is in a better place today than we were before Lead Virginia.”
Local leadership
Like people, communities come in all ages, shapes and sizes. Leadership programs follow suit.
While programs like Lead Virginia focus on statewide issues, smaller programs do much the same on a local level. Take, for example, Smith Mountain Lake Leadership Academy.
Smith Mountain Lake, a fresh-water reservoir in the Roanoke region that was formed when Appalachian Power built the Smith Mountain Dam on the Roanoke River in the early 1960s, is a popular vacation and tourism spot. The 32-square-mile lake spans three counties — Bedford, Franklin and Pittsylvania — and its chamber of commerce has more than 700 business members.
To work across those county lines and the divides that could form between recent arrivals and longtime residents, the regional chamber created a leadership development program in 2020.
Andy Bruns, a former Roanoke regional newspaper publisher for Lee Enterprises Inc., was hired as CEO and president of the chamber soon afterward. He had participated in leadership programs in his former career and says, “Programs like this are extremely valuable for communities. I was so happy when they developed the one here.”
Tuition is $750 and includes monthly half-day sessions for a full year. Participants make site visits — to a local creamery or an alpaca farm, for example — and explore the challenges of a region where million-dollar lakefront properties sprawl alongside aging doublewide trailers.
“Smith Mountain Lake is an extremely wealthy pearl in the middle of a poverty pocket of Western Virginia,” Bruns says. “There’s got to be a way to connect the guys in the $7 million house with people down the road that are food-insecure.”
Classes take on projects to address such issues. “We know we’re not going to fix poverty, though sometimes really good ideas come out of those projects,” Bruns says. “But more importantly, people come to understand that these problems are very complex and take a whole lot of people to solve them.”
He adds, “If we can generate even a handful of people who are better educated about their community and have met the right people in order to engage in the community, we can make a difference.”
David Manley had a good feeling. The site visit was going well.
During their spring 2021 tour of the Progress Park industrial site in Wytheville, the leaders of a manufacturer of nitrile gloves — those blue, disposable pieces of personal protective equipment that have become ubiquitous during the pandemic — seemed intrigued by the prospect of the location serving as the future home of their factory, which would bring with it 2,500 jobs.
During that visit, “their eyes essentially lit up,” recalls Manley, executive director of the Joint Industrial Authority of Wythe County in Southwest Virginia.
With a graded site, a rail hub, utilities and telecom infrastructure ready to go, the location clearly appealed to the glove execs. The county had begun work on the 233-acre parcel in the 1990s. Over the years, with support from the county, the state Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission and others, about 165 of its acres had been graded and infrastructure put in place.
But would it be enough?
Room for improvement
If you build it, they will come — that has long been the driving philosophy of site development, the work done by economic development agencies and authorities to identify and prepare industrial sites for future businesses.
But lately in Virginia that mantra has shifted. Business leaders have become increasingly concerned that if they don’t build it, businesses will go elsewhere.
Since 2016, Virginia missed out on more than 42,000 jobs and $75 billion in capital expenditures because companies were unable to find acceptable ready-to-build locations in the commonwealth, according to a September 2021 analysis by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s economic development arm.
“Until recently, [Virginia] just didn’t invest in sites,” says Chris Lloyd, chairman of the national Site Selectors Guild and a senior vice president with McGuireWoods Consulting. The current site shortage, he says, “has been 30 years in the making.” Photo by Rick DeBerry
Those losses have come despite Virginia’s business-friendly reputation and high marks on metrics such as governmental support for business, not to mention its world-class seaport, well-educated workforce and desirable mid-Atlantic location.
“Virginia has been pretty heavily underperforming on the bigger projects,” says Stephen Moret, who was VEDP’s president and CEO from 2017 through the end of 2021 and played a key role in Wythe County landing the Blue Star NBR LLC nitrile glove factory last year. “And the vast majority of the time the biggest factor has been the lack of a well-prepared site.”
One recent example: a $5.6 billion Ford Motor Co. factory with 5,600 jobs. Ford decided against building in Virginia — largely, Moret says, because Virginia didn’t have a site ready to go within the company’s timeline. In September 2021, Ford announced it would open the plant near Memphis, Tennessee.
The issue, Moret and others in Virginia economic development say, is a historic lack of funding for site development in the commonwealth. That has left Virginia lagging other states in the current era of high-speed business decision-making, a point emphasized by Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, while on the campaign trail.
“Until recently, [Virginia] just didn’t invest in sites,” says Chris Lloyd, a senior vice president and director of infrastructure and economic development at McGuireWoods Consulting LLC who serves as chairman for the national Site Selectors Guild. The situation, he adds, “has been 30 years in the making.”
Shovel-ready shortage
Virginia has a few structural disadvantages when it comes to landing coveted large-scale industrial projects like multibillion-dollar chip factories, Lloyd says. One is Virginia’s unique governmental structure in which cities and counties, by law, are independently governed. This can create a disincentive for, say, a county government to partner on a development project in a neighboring city for which it would not see any direct tax benefit. Another impediment is the way Virginia’s utilities regulation can discourage investment in projects that do not have a clear, foreseeable outcome.
But those hurdles can be overcome, Lloyd says. A little-noticed aspect of the state law governing economic development authorities — the Virginia Regional Industrial Facilities Act — allows them essentially to set up revenue-sharing agreements, for example.
More significant has been Virginia’s historic lack of urgency around the issue, say Lloyd and others. Virginia has luxuriated in a healthy tax base and heavy federal spending in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, and in the past few decades, the work of luring large factories seemed less than critical.
But in recent years that attitude has changed as, one after another, companies planning large industrial projects have surveyed Virginia and found it lacking.
In the past five years, Virginia has ranked ninth out of 11 states in the South — ahead of only West Virginia and Maryland — in the number of manufacturing jobs from “greenfield” construction projects (those built on previously undeveloped land), VEDP found in a recent internal analysis.
Since 2015, of the 81 new industrial projects in the Southeast United States that required 250 acres or more, Virginia has won exactly zero, according to VEDP. Those projects generated more than $22 billion in capital expenditures and an estimated 38,000 jobs; North Carolina won seven of them, totaling more than $1.4 billion in investments and creating 5,600 jobs.
The situation is largely because of Virginia’s shortage of shovel-ready, large-scale industrial sites, say development experts. Between 2018 and 2021, large projects requiring 250 acres or more comprised 15% of companies’ site-search requests in Virginia, but 51% of total jobs and 78% of potential capital expenditures, VEDP found.
Even though it was half-developed just a few years ago, Virginia Beach’s Corporate Landing Business Park is now fully under development.Photo by Mark Rhodes
Economic development officials are looking to land such large projects because “that’s what really moves the dime,” says Shenandoah Valley Partnership Executive Director Jay Langston. “That is where we’re spending a lot of effort. There are a lot of companies now that are looking for the larger acreage.”
One problem: When Langston’s team looked at 46 sites in its region that might meet that criterion, just two were shovel-ready, with sites prepared and equipped with infrastructure like power and water lines. The rest required years of work.
The issue goes far beyond the Shenandoah Valley, adds Langston, who in 2015 was a lead author on a statewide report drawing attention to Virginia’s looming site shortage. “This is something that we are going to have to work at for probably the next 10 to 20 years, probably beyond my tenure in economic development.”
Megasite investment
The shortage began decades ago. As existing development sites found tenants, Virginia lagged in spending on establishing and preparing new sites.
“We all of a sudden found ourselves behind the eight ball,” says Joe Hines, senior principal and director of economic development at Richmond-based engineering firm Timmons Group Inc. “All the smart money had bought up the good dirt.”
Hines, who has worked extensively in site development and analysis, has conducted research indicating that competing states have been spending consistently to develop sites in the past decade, with North Carolina spending up to $100 million and Georgia up to $75 million annually. Virginia, meanwhile, has spent far less, and far less consistently per year, on site development, Hines says.
It takes up to 10 years to ready a site for shovel-ready occupancy, Hines says, which means Virginia will continue to lose projects — including enormous ones, such as the two semiconductor manufacturers currently shopping for homes for their $20 billion, 3,000-plus-employee factories.
And these projects are moving fast. Hines recently took a close look at 11 large development projects in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama totaling $8.5 billion in capital expenditures and 14,725 jobs.
He found that nine of those projects took less than five months from initial contact to a publicly announced deal. The largest of them, a joint venture Mazda-Toyota factory now slated to open near Huntsville, Alabama, comprises $1.6 billion in capital expenditure and 4,000 jobs. That project moved from first contact to final deal in five months.
State officials have taken notice. In January, at the end of his term, Gov. Ralph Northam announced $7 million in state grants to support development of sites larger than 100 acres across Virginia.
More dramatically, Northam’s proposed state budget included $150 million to support site development. That figure matched VEDP’s 2021 recommendations: $100 million toward developing “megasites” of 250-plus acres and another $50 million divvied up across the state. The partnership highlighted five megasites across Virginia that would require a total of $118 million to be project-ready on short notice, including a 2,100-acre site in Pittsylvania County and the 1,000-acre Mid-Atlantic Advanced Manufacturing Center in Greensville County.
In all, the partnership said in its unpublished report, this new state expenditure could result in up to 58,000 new jobs and $179 million in state revenue per year.
In an amendment to the 2023-24 biennial budget, Youngkin proposed spending an extra $29 million for site development, plus establishing a $20 million baseline for annual site investment.
On the ground level
While budget talks go on in Richmond, economic development officials are fielding contacts from prospects and wooing potential investors. But they’re fighting to keep pace.
In Virginia Beach, the 35-year-old Corporate Landing Business Park was no more than half developed a few years back. Today, all of it is under construction or under a letter of intent, says Taylor V. Adams, the city’s deputy city manager and director of economic development. A new location, the 155-acre Innovation Park, has all of its 90 developed acres entirely under negotiation or under a letter of intent, Adams adds.
With the upgrades and expansions of developed parcels, “we thought we’d have an inventory,” Adams marvels. “But we found that every time we got a parcel upgraded … we sold it.”
Adams agrees that when opportunity knocks, economic developers have to open the door fast — or lose the sale.
“If your site is shovel-ready, you’ve got a chance,” Adams says. “If it’s not, you’re at the back of the line.”
Back in Wythe County, Manley’s initial optimism was borne out. A few months after that spring 2021 visit, the company — Alexandria-based Blue Star Manufacturing LLC — announced it would build its $714 million factory in the prepared development.
Blue Star NBR’s first manufacturing facility broke ground in January. The first gloves are expected to roll off the line by early 2023.
The romance of Wythe County and Blue Star had been a whirlwind courtship. But it was one that had been decades in the making. By the time Manley showed the site to Blue Star last spring, the deal needed only a relatively small nudge from state coffers in the form of $8 million to upgrade water and wastewater facilities.
The lesson? Be ready, Manley says. “Site readiness is no longer an option. It’s imperative if you want to compete.”
Like a lot of bosses in spring and summer 2020, Phebe Novakovic confronted challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. It threatened lives and economies. Managers weren’t sure when some customers would be able to pay their bills. Employees were anxious; clients were understandably skittish. With travel shutting down, in-person sales demonstrations were curtailed.
But unlike most bosses, Novakovic — pronounced “no-vah-KO-vic” — runs the world’s third-largest defense contractor, Reston-based General Dynamics Corp. A Fortune 100 manufacturer of business jets, warships, submarines, tanks and communications systems, it employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide. Simply shutting down General Dynamics’ operations was not an option: The U.S. government, the company’s largest customer, designated General Dynamics’ defense and aerospace manufacturing operations as critical infrastructure
So Novakovic did what colleagues say she always does: She talked to leaders of business units, managers, board members and trusted medical advisers. She learned. And she laid out a clear series of steps to get through the crisis, trusting her division heads to do their jobs.
Among the actions implemented, Novakovic decided to pay more than $1 billion in cash advances to General Dynamics suppliers in order to ensure that the company’s supply chain remained strong and wasn’t disrupted by the pandemic.
Additionally, General Dynamics conducted a companywide inventory for personal protective gear, ensuring proper protective wear reached the appropriate divisions and employees, as well as making surplus goods such as latex gloves available to the federal government and agencies such as the New York Police Department.
“Like any crisis, COVID is like an audit of your organization,” says former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the retired U.S. Marine Corps general who served on General Dynamics’ board from 2013 to 2017 and rejoined in 2019 after leaving the Trump administration. “Do you have the shock absorbers in place? Have you spent enough time teaching your young folks how to lead when a shock like this is hitting the economy?”
Novakovic demonstrated exactly that, Mattis says. “Just the idea of setting the standards — what would close, what was kept open — shows you someone who is integrating just a mass of detail,” he adds. “Any crisis is a race between time and knowledge. She could not delay decisions until all the information was available, because in a crisis all the information is never available. And she was able to make the right calls and do it when people were literally dying.”
This year, in the midst of a worldwide catastrophe, when other companies were posting significant losses, General Dynamics posted second-quarter and third-quarter revenues of $9.3 billion and $9.4 billion — not too much below the $9.6 billion and $9.8 billion it posted for the same periods in 2019.
In 2001, Novakovic was in Bosnia taking part in high-level defense talks. At the time, she served as the special assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Rudy de Leon (far left), who is now a General Dynamics board member. With them on the trip was future Secretary of Defense James Mattis (second from right), who also now serves on the company’s board.
Last year, General Dynamics won the largest Navy contract ever awarded, a $22.2 billion multiyear order to build nine nuclear-powered, fast-attack Virginia-class submarines, with a $2 billion option to build a 10th submarine. And this October, the company’s information technology division landed a $4.4 billion IT contract from the Department of Defense. A week later, in early November, General Dynamics received a $9.4 billion contract modification to build and test the Navy’s first two Columbia-class intercontinental ballistic missile submarines.
Results like those are why Virginia Business has named Novakovic its 2020 Business Person of the Year. The blunt-talking CEO has steered the defense, manufacturing, business aviation and IT services behemoth to consistent profit since 2013. And she’s done it through a straightforward philosophy: Be honest. Be direct. And know what you’re talking about.
Power player
Considering she is often ranked one of the world’s most powerful women (Forbes ranks her as more powerful than Queen Elizabeth II), Novakovic keeps a remarkably low profile. Other than quarterly earnings calls and occasional appearances at business conferences, Novakovic avoids the spotlight and rarely gives interviews to the press
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That suits her role; defense companies work mostly with government agencies rather than the public. It also suits her personal preferences.
She agreed to speak to Virginia Business, she says, as a way to honor the roughly 10,900 General Dynamics employees in Virginia. “Particularly this year, I think it’s important sometimes to be a little more public, to thank all the people who make this company what it is.”
In conversation, Novakovic, a 62-year-old mother of three grown children and grandmother of three, is direct and no-nonsense, with a wide and precisely deployed vocabulary.
Novakovic’s father emigrated from Serbia to the United States at age 17 after World War II. He met her mother, who had grown up in the U.S., at Syracuse University. After they married, he joined the U.S. Air Force’s intelligence service.
As a child growing up in Europe during the Cold War, Novakovic saw the dangers confronting the United States and felt the pride of being a U.S. citizen. She calls herself a fierce, unapologetic patriot. The family returned to the U.S. when she was a teen.
She graduated from Smith College as a liberal arts major. At the prestigious New England private women’s college (alumnae range from Sylvia Plath and Gloria Steinem to Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush), Novakovic studied history and learned to love literature. She’s read “War and Peace” a dozen times.
At Smith, she says, she learned to think and to understand human nature — assets in the defense industry. “A leader who fails to think is a leader who fails to lead,” Novakovic adds. “The ability to take complex facts and mold them into a coherent set of information to make judgments and our best guesses on the way forward — that is an important skill.”
After earning her bachelor’s degree, Novakovic worked for a small military contractor and in 1983 joined the CIA. Like most former “spooks,” she doesn’t discuss her spy years, saying only that her career as a CIA operative was “an effort to serve my nation as best I could.”
During her time in the CIA, she met her first husband, Michael Vickers, an ex-Green Beret who helped run a program to arm Afghan mujahedeen in their war to drive out the Soviet Union. Vickers and Novakovic married in 1985; a year later the couple enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where both earned MBAs.
Novakovic’s Wharton degree proved no guarantee for success. She mailed out 50 résumés and didn’t receive a single job offer. One manager said she was overqualified; another said she lacked relevant experience. In 1992 Novakovic landed a job at the federal Office of Management and Budget, quickly rising to deputy associate director for national security. She was responsible for overseeing and submitting the president’s budget for defense and intelligence agencies.
“It was a superb place to learn at the highest level the processes of government [and] the interstices of the defense budget,” she recalls.
Five years later, Novakovic went to work at the Pentagon as a top assistant to deputy defense secretaries John Hamre and Rudy de Leon. When she decided to move to the private sector, she took a close look at the top defense companies. She chose General Dynamics partly because its CEO, Serbian-American lawyer Nicholas Chabraja, had been a successful Chicago trial attorney rather than starting as a company program manager.
“Because I have a bit of an iconoclastic background myself, I thought maybe there would be a place for me” at General Dynamics, she says. “And my intuition was correct.” She joined the company in 2001 as vice president for strategic planning.
Steady ascent
General Dynamics traces its founding to 1899, developing submarines for the U.S. Navy. After World War II, a series of mergers added aircraft manufacturing to its offerings, leading to the company’s current name. By the 1980s, General Dynamics was building F-16 fighter jets, Cessna aircraft and Abrams tanks. In the early to mid-1990s, when the defense industry contracted at the end of the Cold War, the company sold off divisions, including aircraft, space and data systems. But under Chabraja, General Dynamics began to rebuild in the late 1990s, expanding in Europe and buying high-end jet company Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.
Chabraja became a mentor to Novakovic and gave her increasingly prominent jobs. In 2005, she was promoted to senior vice president.
A former CIA operative who later became a top-level aide in the Department of Defense, Novakovic joined General Dynamics in 2001.
When Chabraja retired in 2009, however, the CEO job went to a board member and former chief of Navy operations, Jay Johnson. Novakovic was promoted to executive vice president for the company’s marine systems group, which designs, builds and repairs ships and submarines and has shipyards in Norfolk; Groton, Connecticut; San Diego; and Bath, Maine.
While Novakovic led acquisitions that expanded the ship-repair business, Johnson’s leadership of General Dynamics was hitting choppy waters. A post-Iraq War drawdown shrank the defense budget. Meanwhile, Johnson bet big on information technology, paying almost $1 billion for a health care IT provider and millions more on smaller businesses.
In May 2012, Novakovic became General Dynamics’ president and chief operating officer. A month later, the company announced Johnson would be stepping down by the end of 2012 and named Novakovic as his replacement. In January 2013, weeks after Novakovic took over as CEO, the company reported that sales in its information systems business had fallen $1.2 billion in the previous year and, shockingly, that General Dynamics was taking a $2 billion writedown on a series of acquisitions in information systems and technology. It marked the first time in decades the company had posted an annual loss — $332 million.
Guiding philosophy
As CEO, one of Novakovic’s first moves was to establish a set of simple, consistent corporate rules. She called them an ethos because “ethos is a more profound word than ethics — it means your fundamental moral character.”
She explained the principles to her team: honesty, transparency, trust and alignment, the last of which Novakovic calls “code for teamwork.” And those who didn’t follow the ethos? “I fired them.”
Novakovic makes it clear she does not think much of employees who are dishonest or try to hide problems.
“The only way to get instantaneously fired, at least in my realm, is to lie,” she explains, “because you have destroyed the fundamental thread which binds our moral code together.”
Novakovic spent her first five years as CEO managing costs and rebuilding the culture. “She fundamentally made sure the place was running right operationally,” says Wesley G. Bush, chairman and former CEO of Northrop Grumman Corp., the Falls Church-based Fortune 100 aerospace and defense contractor. “It’s easy in a CEO role to get caught up in transactional activities, chasing the next big thing. [Instead], she focused on operations.”
General Dynamics’ units operate largely independently, with little duplication of roles between its far-flung divisions and its low-key headquarters campus in Reston, where the company relocated in September 2019 from its previous headquarters in a Falls Church high-rise.
Leaders are given wide latitude to make decisions and move quickly without prior approval.
Mattis compares Novakovic’s approach to George Washington’s openness to good ideas. “Phebe would listen with a willingness to be persuaded, if it’s a strongly reasoned position,” the general says. “She would listen and help sharpen the discussion. … And then she would lead.”
In return, General Dynamics unit leaders are expected to report regularly to headquarters using a consistent format, and to immediately signal if they detect problems. “When we make a mistake, we tell each other … so we can work to fix it,” Novakovic says.
Novakovic keeps a laser focus on cash over flashy projects or ones that boost revenue without increasing profit, says Jim Crown, a third-generation General Dynamics board member and lead director.
Access to cash offers stability and flexibility, Novakovic notes: “At the end of the day, if you’re a very large corporation or a very small business, cash is what perpetuates the enterprise.” Cash also lets the company reward shareholders through dividends and stock repurchases. Since 2007, General Dynamics has bought back more than $17 billion in stock, including $1.33 billion in 2018.
Board members praise Novakovic’s focused, finance- and data-driven approach. Opportunities that don’t prove themselves are passed by.
Recently General Dynamics has started moving into new territory. In 2018, Novakovic led the company’s largest acquisition to date, $9.7 billion for Falls Church-based government IT services conglomerate CSRA Inc., which vaulted General Dynamics into a market leader in that sector. The acquisition paid off this year, when the General Services Administration announced in October that General Dynamics Information Technology Inc. would be awarded the $4.4 billion, 10-year Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract that had previously belonged to CSRA.
In October 2014, Novakovic spoke at the unveiling of the new Gulfstream G500 and G600 twin-engine jets manufactured by Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics.
Like opportunities, challenges are everywhere. Cybersecurity is a major issue. Novakovic said last year that her company fights off 13 billion cyber break-in attempts every month. Meanwhile, shifting presidential priorities and budgets can rattle the business landscape: The U.S. government provides approximately two-thirds of General Dynamics’ income. The company spends more than $10 million a year on lobbying, according to Open Secrets.
Overseas sales, even to allies, also can be complicated. In 2018, the Canadian government and Saudi Arabia got into a diplomatic dispute over human rights. At the time, a Canadian division of General Dynamics was working on a $13 billion contract with the Canadian government to supply light armored vehicles to the Saudis. The Saudis froze their payments to Canada for the vehicles, causing General Dynamics to miss out on $1.5 billion in 2019 revenue. Novakovic held firm with Canada, pointing out that scrapping the contract would force Canada to pay $750 million in penalties and purchase any vehicles that had been built. In April 2020, Canada announced it had settled the dispute, allowing the payments from the Saudis to flow once again. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged that his nation’s contractual obligations with General Dynamics were a major factor.
More recently, in June, 4,300 unionized employees at General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine went on strike over issues including seniority, benefits and the use of subcontractor labor, delaying work on seven Navy destroyers. After seven weeks, the strike ended on mutually agreeable terms via federal mediation.
Through it all, for the third quarter of this pandemic year General Dynamics reported earnings of $834 million on $9.43 billion in revenue, just 3.4% less than third quarter revenues in 2019. And the resulting diluted earnings of $2.90 per share beat analysts’ predictions.
As Mattis says of Novakovic: “She’s a leader. And I’m still learning from her.”
Phebe N. Novakovic
Title: Chairman and CEO Age: 62 Family: Husband, David Morrison (former lobbyist for The Boeing Co.); three children, three grandchildren Education: Bachelor’s degree, Smith College; MBA, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania 2019 pay: $18.3 million ($1.6 million salary plus stock and options) Board memberships: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern University, Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation, National Military Family Association, Association of the United States Army, Ford’s Theatre
A few years ago, Nadine Marsh-Carter and the staff of the small adoption agency she runs decided that to better represent the children they worked with, they needed board leadership that better reflected their clients.
Founded 120 years ago, the Children’s Home Society of Virginia began with a focus on finding families to adopt “healthy white babies” born out of wedlock, Marsh-Carter says bluntly. But as the world changed, so did the Children’s Home Society. It began seeking homes for Black babies, older children and children with disabilities and diseases such as HIV. It has located homes for 15,000 children since its founding.
But for much of its history, the society’s leadership did not resemble its young clients — board members were almost exclusively white, recalls Marsh-Carter, the daughter of retired state Sen. Henry Marsh III, a pioneering civil-rights advocate and Richmond’s first Black mayor. “Our service delivery has evolved,” Marsh-Carter says, “but our board wasn’t as diverse.”
After a recruitment push, the agency’s board now includes 40% people of color, up from about 10%, she says.
Similar efforts have expanded throughout the agency and its staff of 17 people. Working with consultants, the organization created procedures — such as expanding job-recruitment processes; holding regular discussions on topics such as race and justice; and establishing an anonymous suggestions box — to be sure employees and board members feel welcome and share values of diversity, inclusion and equity.
The results, Marsh-Carter says: Better outcomes for the families the agency serves, a more cohesive workplace and a renewed sense of purpose as advocates for children who often face profound adversity.
“People here have different backgrounds and experiences and they have to work together,” Marsh-Carter says. Common goals, shared understanding of each other’s experiences and deeper insights into their clients is “a win-win-win.”
These days, Marsh-Carter’s nonprofit has a lot of company. Since the worldwide outrage and widespread protests that followed the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, corporate attention to issues of diversity and inclusion has skyrocketed.
Diversity becomes a priority
“Our team has been really overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of requests for support,” says Jonathan Zur, president and CEO of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, a nonprofit that consults with companies and nonprofits — including the Children’s Home Society of Virginia — and facilitates discussions on issues of diversity and inclusion.
Initially, clients want to know how to respond to the outpouring of emotion around such a complex and difficult topic, Zur says. Common responses include listening sessions, employee counseling and statements of support.
Job postings for diversity officers surged by 50% in June, according to careers site Glassdoor. Meanwhile, online searches for the term “chief diversity officer” spiked to an all-time high in June, according to Google Trends — with Virginia and Washington, D.C., at the top of the rankings by region for searches of the term.
However, the focus on diversity may be a recent change of heart for many companies. During the early months of the pandemic, between March and early June, postings for job titles such as “chief diversity officer,”“diversity and inclusion recruiter” and “D&I program manager” dropped nearly 60%, Glassdoor found. By comparison, postings for overall human resources jobs fell 49% in the same period; job openings in general sank 28%.
As Nicole Sanchez, CEO of Berkeley, California-based Vaya Consulting, which focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion issues, told The Washington Post this July: “How am I supposed to believe that the thing you said was dispensable just weeks ago is suddenly the most important thing you’re doing?”
Hall
“Public comments are not enough,” says Janice Branch Hall, director of diversity and inclusion at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. “People need material action.”
A wealth of research supports the idea that it’s good business to build and nurture a diverse, equitable and inclusive organization.
In 2018, McKinsey & Co. analyzed the financial results of more than 1,000 businesses and found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic or cultural diversity were 33% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.
Researchers say this makes sense. A business with decision-makers who understand and reflect diverse customers, clients, competitors and colleagues will have an advantage over those without.
Leading by example makes a big difference, McKinsey found: Companies with the most ethnically and culturally diverse boards were 43% more likely to record higher profit.
Culture by design
Demographic experts say welcoming a diverse and inclusive workforce is key to attracting top talent. Millennials — now the largest generational cohort — overwhelmingly prefer to work with people who are different from themselves and score leaders who value diversity and inclusion more highly than those who do not, according to a 2018 Deloitte study.
With all that to support the business case, why have so many corporations recently begun scrambling for support on issues of race and inclusion? Workforce experts again point to the data.
White males hold 85% of executive positions, according to the human resources consulting company company Mercer, yet comprise only about 31% of the nation’s population. Only four CEOs in the Fortune 500 are Black — 0.8% of top executives.
Women are similarly underrepresented in positions of authority. And McKinsey’s researchers note that when women do gain executive positions, they are often in staff roles rather than top-level ones. Women of color, the McKinsey report found, “may suffer a double burden of bias that keeps them from the uppermost levels of corporate leadership.”
In most organizations, according to Mercer, McKinsey and other researchers, the lower down the ladder you look, the more you find people of color.
Experts in workforce diversity and inclusion say the disconnect between the business case, the rhetoric and reality demonstrates how tricky it can be to untangle the interlacing of race, power, culture and inclusion in the workforce. Doing so takes time, attention and focus.
“These are complex, messy issues that are generations in the making,” says Zur.
Businesses that want to break through these roadblocks need to work to build a workplace that invites, welcomes and engages people from many different backgrounds and perspectives. That’s not always easy.
“Culture happens by default or it happens by design, and our default operating code is largely white,” says Tiffany Jana, founder and CEO of Richmond-based TMI Consulting Inc., a diversity and inclusion management consultancy firm.
By recruiting and hiring without intentionally looking outside that default, workplaces often miss qualified candidates. Norms such as preferring candidates from “reputable institutions,” who graduated from the same schools or who offer “a good fit,” rather than making judgments on potential and ability, usually result in workplaces that resemble their managers, Jana says.
To offset this, hiring managers can strengthen and expand their networks. For example, Jana — who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns — points out that almost every industry and profession has demographically specific organizations associated with it. “Offer to sponsor a conference,” they suggest. “Build relationships.”
“Culture happens by default or it happens by design,” says Tiffany Jana, CEO of TMI Consulting. Photo by Rashad Hawkins
Another tip: Make sure photos on websites and recruiting materials reflect the organization you want to build. Few people are willing to be the first person like them to join a company, says Jana, who was on Inc. magazine’s 2018 list of the nation’s top leadership speakers.
Once people are on board, experts say, workplaces need to put in place practices that welcome participation and input from all members.
Hiring people without planning for, encouraging and celebrating their active participation is counterproductive and demoralizing, Jana says: “If you can’t say specifically how groups are going to improve your organization, you’re going to ignore them or ill-use their talent and perspective.”
At the same time, managers should be careful not to rely on members of underrepresented groups as spokespeople. Inequity “is a collective problem and needs a collective solution,” says Hall of Virginia Tech. People with “social and political capital” need to be part of discussions rather than asking members of minority groups to solve these problems, she adds.
‘Actions speak louder’
One method to address the complex situation is building intentional networks like Richmond-based Dominion Energy Inc.’s employee resource groups, or ERGs, launched in 2013.
The utility currently has eight ERGs, each of which is focused on an ethnic, cultural or social identity such as African Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities and LGBTQ people. Each group has an executive sponsor but is created and managed by employees.
When Faby Helme took a full-time job with Dominion four years ago after graduating from college, she joined all eight groups.
Helme
“I loved learning about not only the company but about the different groups,” says Helme, whose parents are from Guatemala and Bolivia. Besides, “it was a really good opportunity to network.”
In time, Helme, an emergency preparedness specialist, cut her participation back to a few ERGs and joined the Hispanic group’s board. “It just brings me so much joy to be able to bring myself and my culture to the workplace,” she says.
About 15% of Dominion’s 19,000 employees are in an ERG. The groups often serve as sounding boards for topics such as recruiting, community engagement and professional development, says Darius Johnson, Dominion’s vice president for employee engagement and development.
Johnson
“Part of what will help us — not just Dominion, but as people — is to interact with each other, to learn from each other, to interact together … to deal with challenges and understand blind spots,” Johnson says.
Dominion has chalked up a strong record for diversity and inclusion efforts, repeatedly making Forbes’ list of Best Employers for Diversity and the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
In June, Dominion was one of the first major Virginia corporations to speak in support of racial protesters. It donated $5 million to support social justice and racial equality causes and to assist minority-owned small businesses in 20 states. Dominion followed that up with a July commitment to donate $35 million over the next six years in support of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and scholarships for minority students.
“At Dominion Energy, we have a saying that‘Actions Speak Louder,’” Dominion Chairman, President and CEO Thomas F. Farrell II said in a statement. “We share the anger of our communities at the unjustified deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. … We are investing in recovery and reconciliation, and in the vital work of overcoming years of debilitating actions, attitudes and abuses of authority that have traumatized our country.”
At the same time, however, Dominion’s hard-charging approach — sometimes, critics charge, at the expense of low-income and minority communities — has earned it a reputation for insensitivity.
Dominion’s aborted $8 billion-plus Atlantic Coast Pipeline project included a plan to build a compressor station in Union Hill, a historically Black area of Buckingham County founded by freed slaves following the Civil War. Community members battled the project, upset about the potential for air pollution. In January, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals revoked the station’s permit, saying that Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board did not adequately consider how the station would disproportionately affect the minority community. Dominion and Duke Energy canceled plans to build the pipeline in July, citing concerns over unrelated federal court rulings likely to prove problematic to the project.
Conflicting messages such as those can complicate companies’ efforts to advance fairness, diversity and equity.
Nonetheless, diversity experts say, implementing a diversity strategy is not only good business, it’s the right thing to do.
“We are very intentional about our financial plans and business strategy, but we leave our culture to chance,” says Jana.
That, they add, is a mistake — particularly now, when the world’s attention is focused on race, justice and equity. “This is definitely a sea change. The only way to do it is to do it. There isn’t a shortcut.”
Town houses and apartments, storefronts and restaurants, grassy medians, pocket parks, sidewalks everywhere. Doesn’t this look a lot like a downtown?
Picking up his mail in slippers and shorts on a brisk January day, Tandy Harris pauses to consider the question. “It does,” he agrees. “It’s got all the bells and whistles.”
That’s one reason the human resources executive for a digital marketing firm decided four years ago to buy a four-bedroom town home in West Broad Village, a “new urban” housing and retail development in suburban Henrico County’s Short Pump area.
Harris likes having no yard to mow and rake. He can walk to a locally owned burger joint, a cozy British-style pub, a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. He can get a haircut or visit a dentist, all without getting into a car. Since he commutes to New York City half the month, he likes how close his home is to an Amtrak station.
Not too long ago, you’d need to be in a city to have a lifestyle like this. No longer. Increasingly, pseudo-downtowns like the one where Harris lives are popping up in suburbs all across Virginia — particularly near major hubs like Washington, D.C., Hampton Roads and Richmond.
This is no coincidence. It’s happening for the same reasons Virginia’s downtowns suddenly are packed with millennials, why it’s easy to find good Thai food, and why the past two elections turned the once-red commonwealth distinctly purple: the unstoppable tide of demographics.
For businesses ranging from giant real-estate and retail developments to local merchants, knowing who and where their customers are in this changed Virginia could spell the difference between winning and losing.
Virginia is “in the middle of a long-term realignment,” says Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. “It is going to have big ramifications.”
A human resources executive, Tandy Harris lives in the downtown-like West Broad Village community in Henrico County’s bustling Short Pump area. Photo by Shandell Taylor
Shifting center of gravity
Since the last U.S. Census in 2010, Virginia’s population has grown an estimated 6.7%, to
8.5 million, according to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. Two-thirds of that growth has taken place in Northern Virginia.
While Northern Virginia has boomed, the population in much of the state has stagnated or shrunk. Outside the top three metro areas, Virginia’s population has grown just 1.3% since 2010, the center reports, with 51 of Virginia’s 95 counties losing residents.
The burgeoning suburbs wrapping around Washington, D.C., tend to be younger — 27% of residents in Northern Virginia are younger than 20 years old, according to the Virginia Department of Health. Compare that with Southwest Virginia, where the rate is 18%.
These communities also are less white — as of 2018, 49.4% of Northern Virginia residents identified as members of a racial minority, up from 36.4% in 2010, according to the Northern Virginia Regional Commission. Additionally, Northern Virginians are more likely to have been born in another country — the four counties and five cities of Northern Virginia boast 27% of the state’s foreign-born population.
Such shifts in Virginia’s population have had clear effects on politics, says Fabrizio Fasulo, director and chief economist at the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.
With a larger, younger and more racially and ethnically diverse population than the rest of the state — all qualities strongly affiliated with Democratic voters — Northern Virginia tends to vote blue. The region also contains a higher rate of people with college educations, who over the last quarter-century also have leaned increasingly toward Democrats.
This explains why Democrats have wrested complete control of the General Assembly from Republicans for the first time since 1993, Fasulo says.
And not just that. Economists and social scientists like Fasulo say this evolution signals what could be a complete reshaping of what we used to think about the suburbs — what they are, who lives there and what that means for the rest of the state.
Suburbs: the new cities
Fabrizio Fasulo, director of VCU’s Center of Urban and Regional Analysis, says that Virginia’s changing suburban demographics are one reason why Democrats last fall won control of the General Assembly for the first time since 1993. Photo by Shandell Taylor
Many of our suburbs are no longer the stereotypical places where conservative-leaning white people water tidy patches of green grass behind white picket fences.
Today nearly 60% of African Americans live in suburbs, Fasulo points out; almost one-third of the country’s suburban population is composed of African Americans, Asians and Hispanics.
During the next decade, vibrant city centers like Washington, D.C., Richmond and Norfolk will continue to be hubs of economic activity, says Santiago Pinto, senior policy economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
At the same time, however, “you will be seeing a new wave of suburbanization, with the added impact of a different composition and more minorities,” Pinto says.
Increasingly, the suburbs also are becoming home to younger homeowners. While for the past decade millennials and their Generation Z siblings have moved to city centers, transforming downtowns in the process, cities in Virginia have been seeing signs of this trend slowing down or even declining during the past few years, according to recent research from the Weldon Cooper Center.
Statistics like these suggest to Virginia Realtors Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant that some proportion of younger adults have moved to the suburbs. Suburban school systems tend to perform better than their urban and rural counterparts, making them a strong attractor for young parents.
But many of those younger residents still want the sense of a downtown, Sturtevant adds. They’re not as enamored of the housing developments that exemplified much of the 20th century, with expansive front yards and sidewalk-free roads leading to megamalls. They want a different sort of suburb, with a variety of housing options, a sense of community, with easy access to public transportation, and parks and retail within walking distance.
Developers and retailers are responding, Sturtevant says. “In the suburbs now, there are more choices, more affordability, more options of all kinds.”
Take the Mosaic District, a $500 million built-from-scratch retail and housing development on 32 acres in Fairfax County. Launched by developer Edens in 2013, the Mosaic aims to recapture the sense of living in a thriving, close-knit community, complete with a local fishmonger, 1-acre park and art-house cinema.
“When people come together routinely … they start to see the same people and to be exposed to the same groups,” Edens CEO Julie W. McLean explained to Leaders Magazine last year. “This creates familiarity and causes them to start to feel like they are a part of the community. That is when we truly see prosperity follow, and that prosperity is economic, social, cultural and soulful.”
Or take a look at the reimagining of another area of Northern Virginia: Tysons, formerly Tysons Corner, in Fairfax County. It’s in the midst of transforming itself from a quintessential office-park-style suburb bookended by giant, roofed-in shopping malls into a walkable, live-shop-and-work community.
Through the 1980s, Tysons was a raging financial success. One 50-year resident called it “the blob that ate Northern Virginia.” It made up the 13th-largest concentration of office space in the nation and contained 100,000 jobs and 17,000 residents. But with few or no sidewalks, it was almost impossible to walk there. It also suffered some of the nation’s worst traffic jams.
By the mid-2000s, Tysons was losing ground to developments in Arlington County offering higher density and more walkability — a downtown feel. After a lengthy review, Fairfax County decided to move forward with a rehaul.
Centered around a $2.9 billion expansion of Metrorail’s Silver Line, this new vision of Tysons’ 2,400 acres adds parks, pedestrian-friendly side streets, bike lanes and mixed housing. By 2040, county planners say, the amount of office space in Tysons will nearly double from 2010, to 45 million square feet, while residential space will almost quintuple, to 50 million square feet.
County officials want Tysons to be a city, says Clemente Development Co. Inc. founder and CEO C. Daniel Clemente. However, “if you want to change Tysons from what it was — an office park and malls — into a city,” he says, then “you have to have a place where people can live and where they can walk to work.”
Clemente’s planned $1.3 billion, 3 million-square-foot development of mixed-use residential, commercial and leisure spaces, The View at Tysons, was approved by the Fairfax County Planning Commission late last year. Its proposed centerpiece, the 600-foot-tall Iconic Tower, is slated to include a cultural center and black-box theater.
Clemente is pushing the county to waive its cash-proffer requirements in return for building The Evolution, a multifamily apartment community, on land his company owns near the Spring Hill Metro Station. All 1,400 units would be priced for workforce housing. “You can’t have people driving in to work in Tysons from Loudoun [County],” Clemente argues. “That would defeat the point.”
The housing question
In many ways, Loudoun exemplifies how demographic shifts are forcing changes in how counties and businesses manage the changing suburbs.
At the northernmost tip of Virginia, Loudoun County for years saw itself bifurcated into two regions: a suburban-style section with modest single-family homes like those in neighboring Fairfax County and a rural one to the west with mansions set among rolling meadows and farms.
In recent years, however, the population of Loudoun has ballooned — from 310,000 in 2010 to about 406,000 in 2018 — and changed, growing younger and more ethnically diverse. Meanwhile, housing stocks have not kept pace. That has resulted in a shortfall of affordable housing, according to a 2018 study by the Loudoun County Economic Development Advisory Commission.
The $1.3 billion mixed-use development The View at Tysons will include residential, office and leisure spaces — as well as the tallest building in Virginia. Rendering courtesy Clemente Development Co. Inc.
As in most of Northern Virginia, housing in Loudoun costs significantly more than the nation as a whole. In Loudoun, a full-time worker would have to earn at least $32 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to a 2019 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That might be much lower than national record holder San Francisco’s $60-an-hour requirement but it’s notably higher than the Virginia average of $23 an hour.
That means many employees of the county’s businesses have to commute long distances, the advisory commission noted. This results in businesses having difficulty hiring and retaining workers.
In response, this January the county enacted a housing plan that would permit 40,950 additional homes by 2040, mostly in suburban sections to the east and planned urban areas around new Metrorail stops. The plan took 3 ½ years to complete, largely due to conflicting ideas and debates about priorities.
“For the first time, there are a lot of other voices in the area,” says Phyllis J. Randall, chair-at-large of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors and the first African American woman elected to lead a Virginia county board of supervisors. “We are more diverse now — not just ethnically but also diversity of age, of experience, of income.”
Mixed-use suburban development will be key, Randall says. She points to Kincora, a development from Tritec Real Estate Inc. and Norton Scott LLC on 424 acres at the corner of state Routes 7 and 28. Among the development’s planned amenities is a children’s science center. Kincora’s first large multifamily construction, the 333-unit Jameson, is expected to open this year, joining already-built condos and a 96-unit affordable-housing apartment building.
Open questions
These trends are shaping the state, from voting patterns to development plans. But exactly how much remains a mystery — for now. Not until the 2020 Census is complete, experts say, will the full contours be visible of who is living where.
Ever since the 2010 Census, researchers, economists and regional planners have been extrapolating from it and other data to guide their analyses. When this year’s census figures are tallied, they will see how close to the mark their projections have been.
“A lot of people have a lot of expectations riding on this [census],” says the Richmond Fed’s Pinto. “We will want to confirm with hard numbers these trends we have seen.”
But already it is clear that, from legalizing hemp farming to expanding Medicaid to enacting gun-control legislation, these new suburban residents have set in motion changes in the commonwealth that will have effects far beyond their walkable new-urbanist enclaves.
From large-scale developers who need to attract buyers, to retailers aiming to set up storefronts near their customers, how businesses adjust to these new suburbs will make — or break — many of them, experts say.
“You can either lean into a certain kind of climate and make it your friend — or you can fight it,” says CNU’s Bitecofer. “It’s my experience that leaning in is a better strategy.”
On a sunny, crisp fall morning in late October, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam stood at a lectern in the atrium of Danville’s Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, announcing to the assembled reporters and dignitaries that van manufacturer Morgan Olson LLC would be taking over a local factory about to be abandoned by Swedish furniture maker Ikea.
Instead of losing 300 jobs, the rural region would see a net gain of more than 400 new positions, along with a $58 million investment. A key factor in the Michigan-based company’s decision to locate in Virginia, Northam said, was the commonwealth’s new custom recruitment and workforce-training initiative, the Virginia Talent Accelerator Program.
While the cameras focused on the governor and the company’s leaders, the man who had made the day possible waited quietly behind the scenes. But everyone in front of the cameras knew that almost every aspect of this success, including the job program, was the work of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and its CEO and president, Stephen Moret.
Moret — the man who resuscitated the state’s business-recruitment arm, reinvented the way Virginia works with businesses and landed what might be the largest economic development project in U.S. history, Amazon’s second headquarters — steers clear of the spotlight. He works hard to keep it trained on others.
It is because of his innovative — and highly effective — captaining of VEDP that Virginia Business has named Moret its 2019 Business Person of the Year.
Balding, bespectacled and soft-spoken, Moret seems an unlikely economic spark plug. He doesn’t even play golf. But those who know him say he’s a relentless worker and inspiring collaborator.
“Stephen is one of the most accomplished and brightest economic development agency leaders I have worked with in the industry,” says Mark Arend, editor of industry journal Site Selection.
A book made it possible.
#1 Be proactive
An All-American trumpeter in his high school marching band, Moret won a full music scholarship to LSU.
Moret, 47, was born in rural Mississippi, the great-grandson of former sharecroppers. His parents divorced when he was about 6; he rarely saw his father after that.
His mother, Phyliss Moret, was a pharmacist at the same small-town drugstore where she had worked her first job as a soda jerk. A few years later, she landed a job running the state’s trade organization for pharmacists, and she moved with young Stephen and his little brother to a larger town near Jackson, the state capital.
By middle school, Stephen had taken up the trumpet. It was the first activity he’d discovered where he saw clear results from hard work, he says — the more he practiced, the more he heard himself improve.
His mother was pleased. “In small-town Mississippi, kids are into music or sports,” Phyliss Moret says. “I am not so excited about sports.”
His mother scraped together funds for trumpet lessons. Family finances were tight; she couldn’t afford her son’s teen infatuation with Ralph Lauren shirts.
“We were not poor,” Stephen Moret says, “but we were definitely lower-middle-class.”
Affable and driven, Moret aimed to excel. “It wasn’t enough for him to be in band,” his mom says. “He wanted to be All-American.”
By high school, Moret proved himself a dedicated and skillful trumpeter, named among 104 students nationwide to march in the annual
Growing up in Mississippi, Moret played pee-wee football.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City as part of the McDonald’s All-American High School Band. He loved spending time with friends, many of them his comrades from the school marching band. Meanwhile, he’d become interested in engineering and occupied by robotics competitions.
But with so many distractions, his usually stellar grades slipped. And in his junior year of high school, he was at risk of failing two classes.
At that decisive moment, someone — Moret thinks possibly an uncle — gave him a copy of a recently published business book: “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen R. Covey’s now-classic blueprint for professional and personal success.
Moret devoured it. Over that spring and summer, he studied Covey’s book as a roadmap. It offered tools for living a successful life. With it, Moret laid out his goals and plans.
He earned straight A’s his senior year.
“That book kind of changed my life,” he says today.
#2 Begin with the end in mind
Moret taking his oath of office as LSU student body president.
With the blip on his GPA, MIT and Rice University were no longer options. Moret’s trumpet teacher suggested Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Moret knew nothing about LSU — he recalls asking what the letters stood for.
Moret won a full music scholarship at LSU, a position on the Tigers marching band and a small stipend. He double-majored in music performance and mechanical engineering.
The marching band demanded an enormous commitment. Eventually Moret asked to withdraw from his music major and the band. Remarkably, the university allowed it — and let him keep his full scholarship. (His 4.0 GPA presumably helped.) Moret speaks often of this with gratitude.
Unencumbered by the marching band, he threw himself into student politics and fraternity life, which are intertwined at LSU. Elected student body president (his campaign motto: “Cooperation, Service and Integrity”), he led a plan to revise the student government’s constitution to fix recurring electoral problems. He also served as one of two student representatives on a state government reform commission.
The experience was life-changing. “I had gotten this bug to help transform the state government of Louisiana,” Moret says.
#3 Put first things first
Stephen and Heather Moret have four children, now ages 5 to early teens.
After college graduation, Moret spent a few unsatisfying years as an engineer. After one of his mentors,
William Jenkins, was named LSU chancellor, Moret persuaded Jenkins to create a job for him as his assistant. Moret, Jenkins says, was “a godsend” in the role.
In 1999, Moret was accepted to the master’s program at Harvard Business School. In his application, he wrote that he dreamed of becoming state economic developmentdirector for Louisiana.
Moret stood out at the business school, where he was elected co-president of the student body. Stephen Waguespack, now president and CEO of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, remembers meeting Moret then: “He’s just one of those guys — you just know he’s going to be successful.”
At a Cambridge potluck in 2000, Moret met Heather McMillen. She was pursuing a doctorate in education at Harvard, which he found intimidating. (She earned her doctorate in 2009.)
The two fell into a long conversation about public policy. They started dating. “I had never met anybody who was so passionate about a state,” Heather says now.She and her roommates nicknamed him “Louisiana Man.”
They married in 2002. After graduating from Harvard, Moret took a job near Washington, D.C., with the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, while Heather took a fellowship at the Brookings Institution. The couple kept a hand in politics; Stephen was policy director for Republican Bobby Jindal’s first campaign for governor of Louisiana. After Jindal lost a close election in 2004, the Morets decided to move to Louisiana, where Stephen landed a job running the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce.
#4 Think win-win
While enrolled at Harvard Business School, Moret tried skydiving.
In Baton Rouge, Moret gained his first true management experience. He also built partnerships and “turned a rather sleepy chamber of commerce into one of the most dynamic economic-development organizations in the state,” says John Spain, executive vice president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.
Moret concluded that Louisiana’s reputation for corruption — what the Baton Rouge Advocate called “Louisiana’s long-tarnished image as a corrupt backwater” — wasn’t just an ethical problem. Businesses stayed away because of it, studies showed.
His wife suggests Moret took the state’s reputation personally: “Authenticity and credibility are very important to him.”
Spain agrees: “It was extraordinarily personal. People would say, ‘How can you do business in a place like Louisiana?’ He was offended.”
In 2007, Moret put together a coalition, including chambers of commerce and other business groups, to push for an overhaul of Louisiana’s ethics laws. Its suite of reforms came within a hair’s breadth of passing in the state legislature.
#5 Seek first to understand, then to be understood
In his second try for the governorship, Jindal again turned to Moret as an adviser. When Jindal took office in 2008, he hired Moret as
Moret became Louisiana’s director of economic development under Bobby Jindal, who became the nation’s youngest governor in 2008. AP photo by Tim Mueller
Louisiana’s secretary of economic development, a state Cabinet position overseeing a $41 million annual budget. It was barely two years after Hurricane Katrina. The Great Recession was exploding.
While Jindal was still campaigning, Moret had traveled to Georgia to study an innovative program that trained workers to meet the needs of companies. He returned with the inspiration that became Louisiana’s FastStart, a system to quickly train workers in skills needed by specific businesses or sectors at no cost. (He also recruited one of Georgia’s top people to run it.)
FastStart offered clear benefits for companies to work with Louisiana and became the underpinning for a string of economic wins. By 2010, just two years after Moret’s trip to Georgia, FastStart was named the country’s best state workforce program by Business Facilities magazine, bumping Georgia from the top spot.
A suite of ethics reforms modeled on those Moret had pushed a year earlier passed during a special session held in Jindal’s first year in office. In one year, Louisiana shot from 46th to fifth in the annual state government integrity rankings from the Chicago-based Better Government Association.
Moret became known as Jindal’s “Swiss Army-knife Cabinet secretary” for his versatility, says Waguespack, then Jindal’s chief of staff.
Political fights were constant. Jindal had signed off on tax cuts in the face of the recession. “There were dog fights for the few crumbs that there were,” Jenkins says.
Over his two terms, Jindal slashed funds for higher education by 55%, the largest such reductions in the nation; like other states’ colleges at this time, the institutions recouped their losses by raising tuition. “Horrible times,” says Jenkins, then LSU’s president.
“Painful,” Moret calls those cuts now. “I can’t think of a better word.”
One fierce critic was Robert Mann, a former columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and former spokesman for Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
Jindal “balanced the budget on the backs of higher ed and poor people,” says Mann, now a professor of communications at LSU.
Despite the difficulties, Louisiana’s economic image improved. CNBC and Site Selection magazine both lauded the state’s strong showing — $100 billion in overall development over the eight years of Jindal’s tenure, by Waguespack’s tally; Moret cites $62 billion in private industry expansion.
#6 Synergize!
Moret worked with Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to land Amazon.com Inc.’s coveted second headquarters. Photo courtesy Governor of Virginia
By the end of the Jindal administration, Moret was being name-checked as a potential new president for LSU. Mann wrote columns charging that Jindal was pushing for Moret to be LSU president. Others argued that Moret’s lack of a doctorate made him unsuitable.
Whatever the reason, the job offer never came. Moret says he can’t say whether he would have taken it. (Former LSU head Jenkins says Moret would have.) Instead, he was hired as head of LSU’s fundraising foundation.
“He was competing with people who had decades of experience,” says Clarence Cazalot, a former Marathon Oil Corp. CEO who helped hire Moret for the foundation job.“But his passion for LSU and his incredible intellect made him stand out.”
Soon after Moret accepted the position at LSU, he made a surprise phone call to Mann, the former newspaper columnist who had been his most outspoken critic during the Jindal administration.
“We had a really nice conversation,” Mann recalls. “He said, ‘I’m in a new role here and we’re on the same team now.’ He and I found a number of ways to work together. He could not have been more supportive. … He turned out to be not just competent, but very capable. I wish we still had him.”
Moret put together a plan for a $1.5 billion LSU fundraising campaign, the largest in state history. He also completed work on a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania.
Then Virginia came calling.
In 2016, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership’s reputation was in shambles. A series of bad deals had given the state government’s economic development arm a black eye. The General Assembly ordered a full review from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
A search began for new leadership.
At the urging of a mutual acquaintance, Barry DuVal, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and a former state secretaryof commerce and trade, reached out to Moret about the VEDP job.
Moret was interested. He had lived in Arlington while working for McKinsey. A few years earlier, his mother had moved to Richmond to be an assistant dean at Virginia Commonwealth University’s pharmacy school.
After his experience as a gubernatorial Cabinet member, Moret found VEDP’s independent structure refreshing. And he knew Virginia had a long record of economic success. Moret decided he wanted the job.
Delegate Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, who oversaw the JLARC study on VEDP, opposed the idea of hiring a new CEO for the organization before JLARC’s review was made public. Then-Commerce and Trade Secretary Todd Haymore, a member of the partnership’s board, argued otherwise.
As a compromise, in late 2016 Haymore arranged for Moret to review the almost-finished draft of the JLARC report. Moret was escorted to the fourth floor of the Patrick Henry Building in Richmond and shut in a conference room with the draft report, no cameras allowed.
Moret spent hours alone in the conference room, taking notes. The JLARC analysis was brutal, citing failures at all levels of VEDP and calling for dozens of changes, some dramatic. (“In my 22 years, I’ve never seen an agency with this level of dysfunction,” JLARC’s head would say of VEDP upon the report’s release.)
When he emerged, Moret recalls, “I said … ‘This is going to be a good bit of work, but it makes sense.’”
He took the job.
Moret hit the ground running. He created a detailed road map to swiftly enact the changes recommended by JLARC (“The only way to position VEDP for a bright future [was] to implement substantially everything in the report,” he says) and to improve the state’s national rankings.
He met with development directors and business groups across the state. He convinced the General Assembly to reinstate VEDP’s marketing budget — it had previously been zero. He unwound some of the state’s unsuccessful incentive deals. Using VEDP’s standing board positions, he strengthened its working relationship with the Virginia Port Authority and Virginia’s higher education system, especially the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and the community college system.
“He put the ‘P’ back in partnership,” DuVal says.
Relentless travel was one tool; Moret often is on the road two or three weeks out of most months, hopscotching the state, the country and the globe to talk up Virginia and meet with business and political leaders. In one recent week, he was in a different state every day.
Data was another tool employed by Moret.
Moret “overwhelms you with details. I’ll tell him, ‘Stephen, come on! I can’t read four inches of printouts!’” says John “Dubby” Wynne, former president and CEO of Norfolk-based Landmark Communications and a member of the VEDP board.
As Delegate Jones recollects, “At first I said, ‘You’re giving me way too much information. You’re killing me with paper!’” In time, Jones got the point: “He understood that trust had to be rebuilt between VEDP and the General Assembly.”
Moret had been on the job for all of eight months when, shortly after Labor Day 2017, Amazon.com Inc. put out the word that it was seeking proposals from states for incentives to attract the company’s $5 billion, 50,000-worker second headquarters.
Even to win Amazon, Moret knew Virginia’s tightfisted General Assembly would never approve the huge economic giveaways that many other states would be offering. Virginia would have to compete on other terms.
Drawing on his experiences in Louisiana, his wide reading in economic theory and the Virginia economic-development plan his team had just completed, Moret came to believe the commonwealth’s best chance with Amazon lay in showing the e-tail behemoth that the Old Dominion had the best resources for building a strong tech workforce.
“Talent, talent, talent,” says Moret, who crisscrossed the state to build partnerships in support of the endeavor. Eventually, he presented a detailed proposal to the General Assembly’s powerful Major Employment & Investment Projects Approval Commission for the commonwealth to spend more than $1 billion strengthening high-tech education across Virginia, including building the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus in Northern Virginia. The commission signed off.
Moret’s insights proved correct. In early 2019 — 14 months after its announcement — Amazon took the deal, agreeing to invest $2.5 billion to locate its HQ2 headquarters and 25,000 jobs in Arlington.
Moret often deflects credit for Virginia landing Amazon, pointing out that more than 500 people worked on the bid.
“It was a great team effort,” agrees Haymore, “… but Stephen was the quarterback.”
#7 Sharpen the saw
What will Moret do as an encore to Amazon HQ2? Some colleagues think he could hold a national or international position one day. Photo by April Greer Photography
What does the future hold? Moret ticks off his VEDP to-do list, which includes pushing Virginia to the top of more national business rankings, shepherding the nascent Talent Accelerator training program and strengthening rural development.
Others see a bigger future in store for him. “I would be stunned if five years from now he hasn’t done something greater than Amazon. Because that’s him. That’s who he is,” says Victor Hoskins, president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. “Secretary of commerce? The U.N.? World Bank? I’m not kidding; this guy is that kind of caliber.”
Those who work with Moret encourage him to back off from his Herculean work habits. He and his wife have four children, ages 5 to early teens. Stephen’s mother has now retired in Richmond, and Heather Moret’s parents have just moved to the area.
“We don’t want him to burn out,” says Haymore, now a managing director at Hunton Andrews Kurth. “He needs to work on the life-balance aspect.”
Phyliss Moret agrees: “I tell him all the time, ‘Remember the seventh habit!’”
In Covey’s book, the seventh habit — “sharpen the saw” — emphasizes the importance of spiritual growth and a healthy personal life.
After years of her husband’s seven-day work weeks and frequent travel, Heather Moret supports that idea.
But, she says, she knows that drive is part of who he is.
“He would prefer to be here with us, but he’s not: ‘It may be midnight and I may be exhausted, but I promised this, and I am going to be sure I get it done.’”
Millennials. You know the type. Oversensitive, phone-obsessed, selfie-snapping, “Friends”-binge-watching, kombucha-guzzling, influencer-obsessed complainers.
If that sort of thing drives you crazy, here’s your trigger warning: Millennials are taking over the workforce. Get used to it.
According to the Pew Research Center, millennials include everyone born between 1981 and 1996, which, at 73 million, surpassed the aging baby boomers this year as our largest living generation.
No matter how you count them, millennials and those following them will dominate the workforce starting in the 2020s.
Boomers are retiring — within a decade they’ll make up less than 10% of the workforce. Generation X, born between 1965 and 1981, number about 66 million — not insignificant, but not as large — and will also be beginning to reach retirement age by the end of the 2020s.
The next decades will belong to the millennials and their younger Gen Z siblings, who are expected to eclipse the millennials in size and are just now entering the career labor pool.
Employers and localities who want to replace their aging workforces will need to embrace that fact.
“This is probably the biggest workforce challenge we face as a commonwealth,” says Stephen Moret, president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s main economic recruitment arm. “We need to be competitive and appealing to young professionals if we are going to continue to be a top state for business.”
Creating culture
Across Virginia, economic development officials and companies are laser-focused on attracting millennials. If a community isn’t a millennial magnet like Denver or San Francisco, it’s going to need to work harder to appeal to in-demand younger workers.
“When you have a low unemployment rate like we do now, it’s hard to attract companies unless you have a talent pipeline,” explains Jared Chalk, interim economic development director for Norfolk. “Talent is what everybody’s going for these days, whether it’s attracting millennials or retaining our military.”
In the case of Norfolk, this means encouraging a millennial-friendly atmosphere with breweries, bike lanes and other amenities, Chalk says.
“People look at bike lanes as a transportation solution, and it is, but it’s also creating the sort of place millennials want to come,” adds Chalk, who is 37.
Indeed, the city of Norfolk and nonprofit tourism booster VisitNorfolk are in the early stages of creating a campaign to market the city as a college town — “Campus Norfolk” or “Campus 757”— because university-dominated cities such as Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Richmond draw millennials, Chalk says. (There are five higher education institutions in Norfolk, including Norfolk State and Old Dominion universities.)
In nearby Isle of Wight County, where the median age of the county’s 37,000 residents is about 45, recruiting millennials is also “a top priority,” says Jessica Jones-Healey, president and CEO of the county Chamber of Commerce.
“Succession is a huge topic here,” says Jones-Healey, who is 33. “If we don’t have a succession plan, businesses will close.”
The county Chamber of Commerce has begun hosting co-working spaces for the many freelance workers in the county and last year launched a business networking group for millennials. The town of Smithfield in Isle of Wight now throws three big festivals a year, Jones-Healey says, including one celebrating bacon and bourbon. “It’s all about creating a culture,” she explains.
In Southside Virginia, Danville officials have arrived at a different conclusion. Rather than attempt to lure millennials to the former textile-manufacturing hub in Southwest Virginia, the city of about 41,000 people is working on training programs for middle school and high school students that will prepare them for jobs sought by regional employers. By leveraging high-tech training offered by the Gene Haas Center for Integrated Machining, a partnership between the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research and Danville Community College, teens can start learning skills such as machining, IT security and precision welding.
“We are very acutely aware that the most important incentive we can offer … is a sustainable source of trained workers,” says Linwood Wright, a former Danville mayor and consultant to the city’s economic-development division.
Danville has lost major sectors of its economy, including textile manufacturing and tobacco processing, in recent decades. “We could sit here and cry in our beer,” Wright says, “or do something about it.”
‘A war for talent’
That litany of millennial stereotypes at the start of this article? Amanda Green has heard them all.
“Everybody has an opinion on millennials and who they are and what they want,” says Green, 29, youth program coordinator for the Hampton Roads Workforce Council. “But they never ask us.”
“We destroyed the economy, apparently,” scoffs Jack Weisbrod, 26, a sales associate at Dominion Payroll in Richmond.
Employers and economic development professionals will have to move past stereotypes and insults to understand what drives millennial workers, workplace experts say.
“The future is going to be a war for talent. Companies are going to be fighting for these people,” says John M. Martin, CEO of Richmond-based Southeastern Institute of Research, a management consultancy, and managing partner at Institute for Tomorrow, a think tank focused on demographic trends.
McLean-based Capital One Financial Corp. is ready for that challenge, says Judy Pahren, senior vice president for human resources at the Fortune 100 credit-card and banking giant. “Our No. 1 principle is to attract really talented people,” Pahren says. “We know our success is dependent on talent.” Recruiting younger workers like millennials, she adds, “is key to that strategy.”
Pahren declines to say how many workers the company recruits each year but observes that, with almost 50,000 employees, Capital One views retaining young technology-savvy workers as vital. And “not just for their skills and abilities,” she adds. “They’re also our future leaders.”
To bring them in, Capital One emphasizes the values these younger workers find important — for example, flexibility and a sense that their work can have real impact.
Rather than using its sizable credit business to attract potential employees, Capital One is positioning itself as a technology company. Recruitment videos present workers as cool, savvy young people of various hues and interests — no neckties, no mention of bankers’ hours or even retirement benefits. “Let’s do something great together,” a narrator says.
Raised amid recession
While baby boomers “came from a lifetime of rising incomes, expecting an improving world,” millennials learned from the 2008 recession to expect that their futures will depend on their own abilities to adapt and change careers, says Robert T. Sumichrast, dean of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.
Millennials are laden with debt from the skyrocketing cost of college — in the first quarter of 2019, the average college debt held by millennials was $34,500, according to Experian — and their incomes are still stunted by the recovering economy. (In Virginia, median income for millennials was $41,400 in 2018, compared with $60,000 for Gen Xers and $64,700 for boomers, according to a Business Insider study.)
While homebuying among millennials rose to about a third of all purchasers in 2017 and 2018, a higher proportion of millennials rent, compared with Generation X and baby boomers. Millennial home ownership still remains 5 percentage points below Gen Xers and 8 percentage points lower than baby boomers at the same ages, according to a National Association of Realtors’ 2019 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends study and a 2018 report by the Urban Institute.
Raised by doting helicopter parents and monitored by world-spanning social media for much of their lives, millennials are simultaneously confident of their own value, comfortable in diverse groups of people and anxious that they won’t fulfill their promise.
This has led to a shift in what people think is important.
While boomers lived to work, explains SIR’s Martin, “millennials see work as a way to live.” Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, “millennials want a life of purpose,” Martin says.
The search for meaning That’s reflected in the workforce at human resources firm Dominion Payroll, which could easily be mistaken for a Silicon Valley-style startup.
It’s headquartered in Richmond’s trendy Scott’s Addition neighborhood, which in the past half-decade has gentrified from a region of run-down warehouses into one of artisanal coffee shops, microbreweries, co-working spaces and tattoo parlors. (Almost half of millennials have tattoos, compared with 36% of Generation X and 13% of baby boomers, according to a 2015 Harris Poll.)
A clutch of company-owned bikes are parked in Dominion Payroll’s lobby, available to any employee who wants one. Workspaces include desks, glass-walled conference rooms and scattered chairs, without a single cubicle or solid office wall in sight. Employees move about, laptops in hand, working wherever they like.
It’s so … millennial.
Caroline Kobasa, 26, recalls arriving for her interview: “I knew the minute I walked in that I wanted to work here.”
It wasn’t just the polished concrete floors or the pingpong table in the meeting area, adds Kobasa, who left a high-pressure insurance position in Connecticut to move to Richmond. “It was that from the first minute you heard about the core values, the expectations from the bosses and the team were that we are here for a bigger purpose.”
Dominion Payroll co-founder and CEO Dave Gallagher has one of the company’s few offices — but even that space, modest by boss standards, is glass-walled like a terrarium. His office guest chairs look like they’re made out of skis. A guitar case leans against a standing desk.
“We want people to work here who are passionate about what they do, just like we are,” Gallagher says. “If they’re 70 years old or if they’re a millennial, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the way they see the work.”
(Millennials make up 65% of Dominion Payroll’s workforce, says the company’s director of community engagement.)
Dominion Payroll emphasizes community support and volunteerism, including for the nonprofit Gallagher and his wife, Grace, founded in honor of their daughter, Cameron, who five years ago collapsed after a half-marathon and died at age 16 of an undiagnosed heart condition.
Volunteering is also meaningful to Richmond-based Fortune 500 company CarMax’s large millennial workforce. “Giving back is very important to our associates and we support their passions and efforts by investing in the organizations they choose to support through our volunteer programs,” says Leslie Parpart, director of community relations. Last year, more than 1,100 CarMax associates participated in volunteer activities, including building a new playground at the nonprofit Peter Paul Development Center in Richmond.
Flexible and less formal
Unlike millennial-magnet businesses peddling software or ride-share apps, Dominion Payroll has turned a profit every year since its founding in 2002, Gallagher says. (“We are accountants,” he notes.) The firm’s been on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies for 10 years straight, growing to 200-some employees working in offices in Richmond; Nashville, Tennessee; Tampa, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Dallas.
Dominion Payroll’s community engagement director, Kevin Wilson, 37, points to Business Roundtable’s recent call for corporations to widen their priorities from simply increasing shareholder value to include other goals such as investing in employees and the environment.
“That feels like a positive outcome for the world, to face what might be existential threats to the world,” Wilson adds. “The death rattle of Milton Friedman makes me very happy.”
If a higher purpose is millennials’ top value, flexible workplaces come a close second.
The workplace is “a lot less formal than it used to be,” observes Lisa DeNoia, co-owner of Virginia Beach co-working space 1701. DeNoia also co-owns Port & Starboard, a Virginia Beach technology consulting company, and Fathom Coffee. She was named 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year by Inside Business journal.
Millennial flexibility can provide real value for employers, DeNoia points out. “Millennials are just not that into the corner office. They’re happy with a water bottle, a laptop and headphones.”
Shared desks for people who like to work different hours can save costs. And having millennial employees who prefer multitasking means multiple projects can be moving at the same time.
On the other hand, a lot of younger workers lack the office experience of older generations, says John M. Garrett, a 28-year-old vice president of commercial lending at TowneBank in Norfolk.
Garrett mentors fellow Virginia Military Institute graduates, advising them to adopt the communication styles of their older bosses — more phone calls and notes, no texts on weekends or at night.
Garrett has heard the criticisms of millennials. “In the grand scheme of things, I think every generation goes through this period of stereotypes,” he says. “I hear people say we’re too obsessed with social media, that we’re selfish, not working hard.
“It’s certainly not the majority. Most of us are passionate — about the environment, about making a mark on the world, about leaving the world better than we found it.”
How you feel about that perspective probably depends on when you were born.
And what about employers who would rather not deal with these millennials and their nontraditional work preferences?
“Good luck,” says SIR’s Martin. “That is no longer a sustainable model. And that’s the bottom line.”
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![“Until recently, [Virginia] just didn’t invest in sites,” says Chris Lloyd, chairman of the national Site Selectors Guild and a senior vice president with McGuireWoods Consulting. The current site shortage, he says, “has been 30 years in the making.” Photo by Rick DeBerry Photo by Rick DeBerry](https://virginiabusiness.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/1/2022/02/DSC_0013-copy.jpg)
“When you have a low unemployment rate like we do now, it’s hard to attract companies unless you have a talent pipeline,” explains Jared Chalk, interim economic development director for Norfolk. “Talent is what everybody’s going for these days, whether it’s attracting millennials or retaining our military.”
That’s reflected in the workforce at human resources firm Dominion Payroll, which could easily be mistaken for a Silicon Valley-style startup.
Volunteering is also meaningful to Richmond-based Fortune 500 company CarMax’s large millennial workforce. “Giving back is very important to our associates and we support their passions and efforts by investing in the organizations they choose to support through our volunteer programs,” says Leslie Parpart, director of community relations. Last year, more than 1,100 CarMax associates participated in volunteer activities, including building a new playground at the nonprofit Peter Paul Development Center in Richmond.
The workplace is “a lot less formal than it used to be,” observes Lisa DeNoia, co-owner of Virginia Beach co-working space 1701. DeNoia also co-owns Port & Starboard, a Virginia Beach technology consulting company, and Fathom Coffee. She was named 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year by Inside Business journal.