byline: Robert Powell, III

Virginia has always prided itself as a good place for business. After all, the Virginia colony was started in 1607 as a business enterprise, not a refuge for religious dissenters.

Many companies that have taken root here have become major international enterprises. Our list of the 50 largest publicly traded companies based in the commonwealth, for example, includes 41 with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

The group is a diverse lot, ranging from defense contractors such as Falls Church-based General Dynamics to Bristol-based coal mining company Alpha Natural Resources to Toano-based flooring retailer Lumber Liquidators.

Behind the rankings and the numbers are sometimes dramatic events. Dulles-based Orbital ATK is forging ahead after a failed rocket launch at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility  last October. Sterling-based Neustar is fighting to keep its longtime national contract for managing phone number portability, which represents half its revenue. 

Waynesboro-based wireless phone service Ntelos has refocused its business on the western half of Virginia and West Virginia after abandoning its territories in Hampton Roads and Richmond.

Soon to join the list of largest public companies is Richmond-based Performance Food Group, No. 2 on the list of largest private companies in the commonwealth. The food distributor announced plans in September to hold an initial public offering to raise $100 million.

The state’s largest privately owned company is candy maker Mars Inc., based in McLean.

With the help of Equilar Inc., Virginia Business follows compensation trends among the commonwealth’s largest companies. In the latest report, based on the most recent proxies, the top earning executive was a woman, Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics.

Virginia also is home to seven companies on Black Enterprise magazine’s list of 100 biggest African-American businesses. They are Thompson Hospitality, SENTEL Corp., SoBran Inc., Capstone Corp., Metters Industries Inc., Advanced Systems Development Inc. and InScope International.

Largest Companies

Virginia’s public colleges and universities — often counted the commonwealth’s greatest assets — enrolled nearly 400,000 students last fall, a slight decline from fall 2013.

The number of full-time students stayed steady at most of the commonwealth’s four-year institutions but showed a drop at Norfolk State and Virginia State universities, both of which are historically black colleges.

Last year saw the changing of the guard at Virginia Tech, the commonwealth’s largest public university in terms of full-time students with more than 28,500 enrolled in the fall. (Liberty University in Lynchburg, a private school, had the highest number students among all colleges with a full-time enrollment more than 38,000.)

Steger was succeeded in June by Timothy Sands, who previously was executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at Purdue University in Indiana.
The University of Virginia meanwhile was convulsed by the death of freshman Hannah Graham and the publication of a story in Rolling Stone depicting a gang rape at a U.Va. fraternity party in 2012.

The man charged with first degree murder and abduction with intent to defile in Graham’s case, Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., also has been charged with the 2005 rape and attempted murder of a woman in Fairfax County.

The Rolling Stone rape account ignited a firestorm of protest and led to the suspension of fraternity activities on campus before criticism of the errors in the story forced the magazine to back away from the article and issue an apology.

Northern Virginia Community College remains by far the commonwealth’s largest community college with more than 51,000 students, of whom nearly 33,000 attend part time.

50 Most Influential Virginians, including Power Couples and People on the Move

Last year saw little change at the top of the list of Virginia’s biggest banks in terms of deposits. A number of shifts, however, took place among community banks.

At the beginning of 2014, Richmond-based Union Bankshares completed the merger of Stellar One and Union First Market banks following Union’s acquisition of Charlottesville-based Stellar One Corp.

The $445 million deal created Virginia’s largest community bank with $7 billion in assets and $5.7 billion in deposits.

In February 2014, West Virginia-based United Bankshares completed its acquisition of  Arlington-based Virginia Commerce Bancorp in a deal valued at $490.6 million. Virginia Commerce, the holding company for Virginia Commerce Bank, had $2.8 billion in assets. 

Early this year, Hampton Roads-based TowneBank acquired Richmond-based Franklin Financial Corp., the parent company of Franklin Federal Savings Bank, in a $275 million deal.

TowneBank was founded in 1999 while Franklin Federal opened its doors more than 80 years ago, in 1933. Nonetheless, the companies said they shared a common corporate culture and approach to customer service.

With the Franklin acquisition, total assets for the combined companies stood at more than $6 billion and deposits totaled more than $4 billion.

In addition, several banks in Virginia are acquiring branches being shed by Charlotte-based Bank of America.

Strasburg-based First Bank is buying six branches in the Shenandoah Valley, boosting its total number of offices to 16 and increasing its deposits by $308 million to $827 million.

Likewise, Raleigh, N.C.-based HomeTrust Bank acquired 10 Bank of America locations in Virginia and North Carolina in June, six of which are in the Roanoke Valley. First Community Bancshares in Bluefield, the holding company for First Community Bank, also bought six branches, including one in Blacksburg,

Bank of America has reduced its number of branches from more than 6,000 nationwide five years ago to fewer than 5,000 today as customers switch to online and mobile banking, according to Charlottesville-based SNL Financial.

Financial

Health care remains a major issue in Virginia. A proposed expansion of health coverage to uninsured Virginians through the use of Medicaid dollars last year resulted in a months-long budget standoff.  The impasse was resolved (with no expansion) when the resignation of a Democratic state senator tipped the balance of power in that body.

The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association has supported Medicaid expansion. The group says cuts in federal payments to Virginia health-care providers are expected to hit $448 million this year. Seventeen of 38 rural Virginia hospitals had negative operating margins in 2013, according to data collected by Richmond-based Virginia Health Information.

Virginia’s top hospitals in terms of net patient revenue continue to be VCU Health System, Inova Fairfax Hospital and the University of Virginia Medical Center, according to 2013 data from Virginia Health Information. Each of the three hospitals had more than $1 billion in net patient revenue, with VCU edging ahead of Inova, the previous leader, in 2013. 

New to the list is Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center in Chesterfield County, which opened in 2005. The median net patient revenue for the 25 hospitals on the list is roughly $400 million. 

Anthem remains by far the leading health insurer in Virginia in terms of premiums collected in the commonwealth.  The company insures about 3 million people in Virginia.

Anthem announced in February that it had suffered a massive security breach involving the records of 80 million people throughout the country, including past and present customers, and employees.

Woodbine Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Alexandria, a 307-bed facility, remains the top nursing facility in Virginia in net patient revenue, with nearly $31 million in 2013.

Health

CPAs and lawyers help clients with tax, regulatory and legal issues, so they have a good grasp of how changes in these areas might affect the economy.

The Virginia Society of Certified Public Accounts polls its membership annually to get their take on the state and national economy. 

Nearly 36 percent of the respondents in the latest poll, published in November, said they were somewhat pessimistic about the national economy versus nearly 29 percent who said they were somewhat optimistic. Another 7 percent were very pessimistic while about 2 percent were very optimistic.

About 27 percent of poll participants took a “balanced” view of the economy — neither optimistic or pessimistic.

More than a third of the respondents, 34.2 percent, believed a full recovery is more than four years away.

The CPAs’ view of the Virginia economy was more positive with 33 percent somewhat optimistic and about 6 percent very optimistic. Twenty-three percent were somewhat pessimistic and 5.4 percent were very pessimistic.

Eighty-five percent of those polled said partisanship at the federal and state level was preventing government from addressing urgent needs that have an impact on business. Seventy-four percent said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is hurting the U.S. economy, and nearly 52 percent said it should be reformed.

The following pages list the largest law and accounting firms in Virginia. McGuireWoods remains the leader among law firms with more than 300 Virginia lawyers, while PwC is the biggest accounting firm with more than 500 CPAs in the state.

This section also provides a listing of spending by lobbyists. The Virginia Public Access Project provides a list of entertainment and gifts that lobbyists reported providing to legislative and executive officials. Lobbyists now report these expenses twice a year, in June and December. Before 2014, lobbyists disclosed these expenses once a year.

Professional services

Tourism remains big business in Virginia. Preliminary estimates released in an August report by the U.S. Travel Association said spending by U.S. residents traveling in Virginia in 2013 rose to $21.5 billion, an increase of 1.4 percent from 2012.

This spending directly supported 213,000 jobs in Virginia in 2013, making it the fifth-largest employer in the state, the report said. Tourism jobs, in fact, represent 7 percent of Virginia’s total private employment.

These employees earned nearly $4.9 billion in payroll income during 2013, representing a 3.6 percent increase from 2012.

Domestic-travel spending also generated more than $2.8 billion in tax revenue during 2013 for federal, state and local governments, an increase of 3.6 percent from 2012.

Forty-one of Virginia’s 134 counties and independent cities saw more than $100 million in domestic-travel spending in 2013. The most spending occurred in Arlington County, $2.8 billion, followed by Fairfax County, $2.7 billion, and Loudoun County, $1.5 billion.

High-profile historical attractions around the state include Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Arlington National Cemetery and the State Capitol. Also drawing visitors are theme parks like Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens, and natural attractions such as the Blue Ridge Mountains and Virginia’s lakes and beaches.

The following pages offer some insights into various elements of Virginia’s tourism industry, including lists of its largest conference hotels, commercial airports, and largest breweries.

One facility expected to join the list of major meeting venues is The Main, a $126 million Hilton hotel and conference center that is currently under construction at the corner of Granby and Main streets in Norfolk.

Virginia’s largest airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, saw emplanements decline 2.27 percent in 2013 while passenger volume at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, the second-largest facility, rose nearly 4 percent. The biggest jump in passenger volume, however, occurred at the commonwealth’s smallest airport, Shenandoah Valley Regional, which saw its boardings grow nearly 30 percent in 2013.

Tourism