Tech Talk

The Post and Courier sat down with seven leaders of the local technology economy last week, representing the city of Charleston's Digitial Corridor Initiative and four fast-growing firms. In an hour-long roundtable discussion, they sounded off on, among other things, the depth of the local talent pool, the Charleston region' s image in the tech world and Google Inc. lurking in the Lowcountry.

Here are some excerpts:

P&C: What's the temperature of the tech industry in Charleston now? Where are we in the game?

Jenkins: From our perspective, and from people I know around town, it's a hot industry from a recruiting and job-growth perspective. We continually are raising our forecasts of how many people we're going to hire and revenue growth. ... And to be honest with you, the growth of our revenue is, if anything, constrained by our ability to hire people and has been over the last six years. ... As we recruit people, one of the big questions is "Where can my spouse work?" They want to know that there are other options in town, and there are a lot more options in town now.

Good: In the '90s people were skipping and going from job to job just to get $10,000 more and then going back to their original job. But now I've seen the job market change completely. The companies want the best and the brightest, they're not going to hire just anyone. And employees are not going to leave their job for just any type of job. They want the best job. They want the job with the most career growth. And this area, just looking around this room alone, has so much potential for that - great, high-impact jobs with great, high-impact companies. The biggest challenge I think we all have is getting people to turn their heads.

Andrade: We are at a point now where it's better than it's ever been, in terms of being able to be employed in the knowledge industry. And it is incumbent of us to expand the talent pool rather than what has gone on and continues to go on, which is cannibalizing from each other.

P&C: To that point, to what extent is there a turf war for good labor in this town? Are people poaching good workers from each other?

]Good[/b]: I think you're going to have that. That might go with the territory, but I don't think it's a bad thing. It is not to our advantage to be the only game in town, for any of us. People are going to relocate to come to Charleston, but what if something happens, what is my spouse going to do? If that's the only problem, I'll take it, versus not being able to get the candidates here and attract the right talent, the best talent.

Leen: I don't really believe that we see that. When Benefitfocus was founded, people said, "Oh, are you going to be competing with Blackbaud?" or "How are you going to compete for talent?" And I said, "We don't." ... If you're not a right fit for us, but you are a talented technology person, we're going to want you in the area.

Jenkins: It's similar to the car dealerships, how they cluster together. ... If you said to me, Shawn, would you prefer to be one of three software companies in town or one of 30? I'd rather be one of 30 because we can compete on our own merits. ... It's like Austin, Texas, which got a reputation for being a high-tech community. People would get out of college and think, "Well, I should at least look at Austin." ... I think the more of us corporately that become successful, that builds up the brand of Charleston.

Good: People that come here for golf or to see Spoleto look at the town and say, "What a great town, but what can I do here?" We have to change that perception. ... People immediately do not think of Charleston as a place where there is a high level of professional, technical positions, but we are. That's exactly what we are.

Seshagiri: When we came here, we thought the only people who would be here would be the defense industry and information technology contractors. ...We will always compete for workers, but there is a precompetition stage where we can collaborate and enlarge the pool for everybody.

P&C: Do you view the perception problem as one of the biggest challenges to growing the industry here or are there some other factors?

Mayne: We are able to get a tremendous amount of talent because we train everyone within. Retention is our biggest problem. In relocating the corporate office, a couple of senior-level positions declined after checking out Charleston. They did not like Charleston, and that's rare. The one reason was education of the children. They went on the Internet and had a look at the statistics for the whole state of South Carolina.

Andrade: If you haven't looked at Charleston lately, it has stealthily sort of crept up. The challenge is how do we get the message out that you don't have to worry about unemployment. ... At the end of the day, though it's tying academia with the opportunities. ... There's no reason we can't link with Clemson, USC and Georgia Tech and take a more regional approach to talent.

Jenkins: Bringing (employees) in, you've got to overcome the perception of "Is there work there?" We'd like to find them already sitting here. It's cheaper. It's faster. Our problem, and I've said this all along, is we're not manufacturing enough people to go into the knowledge industry - our public school system and our higher education. ... We invest a lot of money in higher education. The problem is, our recruiters have numbers to hit. We need 100 people this year, and they can't go into the 11th grade and pull 100 people. They can't even go into the graduating class of the College of Charleston and pull 100 people out. So they've got to go somewhere else.

Sugg: Once you've been introduced to Charleston, it's an easy place to warm up to, so there's a lot to market as far as the community is concerned. ... But when a national job-seeker goes out to fulfill that endeavor - whatever that is - they default to big hubs. Our recruiting team spends a considerable amount of time redirecting attention and that's one of our biggest burdens. ... We'd rather have 30 to 50 tech companies in Charleston because at that point we can stand as an employment alliance in Charleston and have a lot more to offer.

P&C: When I talk to family and friends around the country, they think I live on a golf course or in Charlotte, do you see that and is that a problem when you look for candidates nationally?

Sugg: We typically have to go and leverage our corporate brand, our community brand and then the IT community brand as well, which has been a knock-out factor as far as candidates considering employment in Charleston. There's not a perception that there are opportunities available. ... There's a lot of work for us to do.

Mayne: On the flip side, we get a tremendous amount of resumes from all around the country, but not because we're in Charleston, because we're a small, niche company. But we would rather hire locally. In fact, we hired our entire corporate staff locally.

Leen: We are great at telling the story and it's a great story to hear: Charleston technology. But we're having to tell that story - the U.S. isn't reading that in publications.

Andrade: There's the people on the greens and the people on the beach, and we've got to get beyond that. ... How can people leverage their brand in a collective way? ... If we go to 18 companies and say, "We want to start this brand," all of a sudden folks in Alpharetta and Atlanta who want to get out will say, "Let's go see what's going on."

P&C: Back to the issue of getting the story out - do you think that government officials here do enough to help you with that? Everyone ... talks about manufacturing, but is there enough sensitivity to technology?

Jenkins: No! We're rugged individualists here. We're not crying over that or saying, "We cannot make it, because somebody won't help us." But the fact of the matter is that the spend, the speech, the knowledge, the frame of reference in our local community and the state is tourism first, then blue-collar manufacturing second. ... When we built this building, we had to basically threaten to leave the state of South Carolina to get them to change the law. They actually rewrote the legislation to create incentives for an existing company to grow. And if you look at our salary base and the value that brings to the economy, it's huge. It's out of all proportion to moving some plant here. So no, our frame of reference is not about growing knowledge-base, though we've been talking about it for a long time. In my personal opinion, it won't be until a couple of us get really big, publicly traded. ... It's the chicken and the egg.

Andrade: (Mayor) Joe Riley gets it, but it has meant being right there in front of him every third day.

P&C: Is there anything in the local economy - the past few years and coming up - that has or will really improve the talent pool here? Google, for example, will that make a big difference in getting the story of Charleston out?(Google is considering Goose Creek for an unspecified expansion

Seshagiri: Well, I can see losing the people we just hired to Google when they come in here. ... For Charleston, I'd rather see dozens of Benefitfocuses and Blackbauds, rather than one Google. But on the other hand, they will help us on the other side, saying (Charleston) is a technology player.

Leen: In the heads of technology people and students, names like Google and Apple and IBM are still at the top of their lists. So in my mind, that's where we're competing. ... We've got to be best-of-breed because that's where the mind-set is of the top technology people coming out of school.

Good: And this is where it starts. One of the major reasons that our college recruiting program is so successful is that we've been doing it for four or five years. We have brand recognition in these schools now. ... People think Google off the top of their mind because that's what they know. ... We have to show them we're here and we have to keep saying it. ... This can never stop and eventually it's at a tipping point - it's viral.

P&C: Is quality of life a big trump card for us, as far as attracting people?[

Jenkins: Yeah, that what we have. We ran ads last winter in Ohio and they showed golf and beach and boats and they kind of ended with, "Would you like to be in a high-tech career in the $2 trillion health care industry with one of the fastest-growing firms in the entire country?" And we got a lot of activity out of those ads. You know you look at your spouse and say, "Why the hell are we sitting here with our boots on? Let's go down there." ... But other big companies coming doesn't worry me one bit. In fact, I welcome it because I would rather work at Benefitfocus than I would Google. ...We interview a lot of people from Microsoft ... because it's so big how are you going to get noticed? And even Google now is huge. ... To think that you can be at a data center in Goose Creek at Google and have as good an experience that you would here at Benefitfocus is not the case. We're transforming health care ... and we'll have 1,000 people in a couple of years. ... The Lowcountry Graduate Center is fantastic; the law school I think is fantastic, the Medical University - anything that is publicly recognized as "there are smart people in Charleston" is good for us.

Andrade: What's interesting is that everyone around this table is hiring.

Jenkins: And they're hiring big, and they're offering the kinds of jobs you want.

About the Companies

Advanced Information Services Inc Background: Information technology firm based in Peoria, Ill. Is working on a $12.5 million software engineering contract with the Space and Naval Warfare System Center Charleston.

Benefitfocus Background: Fast-growing maker of software for the health care industry. Squeezed for space, it relocated to a spacious new corporate headquarters on Daniel Island last fall.

Blackbaud Inc. Background: Makes software for nonprofit groups. Is the region's largest tech employer, with more than 1,000 workers. Moved to Charleston from New York in 1989 with 15 people.

JSJ Pharmaceuticals Inc. Background: Recently relocated its headquarters from Pennsylvania to Charleston to be closer to the Medical University of South Carolina's dermatology program. Sells about 15 skin-care product lines.

Charleston Digital Corridor Background: City-run initiative geared at attracting and nurturing local tech businesses. Web site is charlestondigitalcorridor.com.

Editors Note: Charleston's knowledge economy is experiencing robust growth. As the leader in developing Charleston's knowledge economy, the Charleston Digital Corridor convened this valuable conversation with industry leaders. Moving forward, the Digital Corridor,with the help of several companies in Charleston, will develop a plan of execution to address many of the issues raised in this conversation. If you wish to participate with the development of this plan, contact ernest@charlestondigitalcorridor.com