Workers at the Hunter Douglas manufacturing facility in Pinellas Park are toiling hard to keep up with the steady demand for the company's window treatments. Low mortgage rates, strong new housing construction and the country's obsession with home decorating are stretching the capacity at the Gateway Center plant.
Hunter Douglas is not adding employees. But the 250 workers there have their hands full.
"We don't lose people and we're not adding because we always look for efficiencies," says Hunter Douglas human resource director John Boyle. "Business is very good."
Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right. Are we entering the Goldilocks cycle of the economy?
After a slow-to-rebound downturn and the lingering impact of Sept. 11, 2001, the nation's small- to mid-sized businesses say they expect the 2004 economy will be much better. They say their companies' sales and profits will be up. Most see their fixed investment expenditures rising next year or at least remaining the same as in 2003.
These are some of the upbeat findings from San Diego's TEC International, a national mentoring and support organization for chief executives, which polled nearly 1,000 of its members nationwide to measure executive confidence in the economy. Results were released Tuesday.
Enthusiastic is the best way to describe the responses from the 87 Florida CEOs who participated in the quarterly TEC survey. Here's just a sample:
Among Florida CEOs, 92 percent expect their firm's sales to increase in the next 12 months. Nationally, 82.9 percent of CEOs anticipate higher sales.
In Florida, 77.9 percent of CEOs expect improved profitability in the next year. Nationally, 73.8 percent see better profits.
A resounding 73.3 percent of Florida CEOs rated President Bush's handling of the economy as "pretty good" or "excellent," while 26.7 percent responded "only fair" or "poor." Nationally, a slightly lower 66.3 percent rated Bush's handling as "pretty good" or "excellent," and 33.7 percent chose "only fair" or "poor."
Area TEC member Mark Lettelleir, president of St. Petersburg's Modern Business Associates Inc., runs a business with 15,000 external employees under contract providing human resource outsourcing to larger companies. His expectations for the economy are lower than that of many executives working elsewhere in the country. But that's only because the Tampa Bay economy was less affected by the nation's slower times. Lettelleir never had to face the full brunt of the economic downturn.
That's an important point. When it comes to adding jobs in the past year, the Tampa Bay market is one of the nation's five fastest-growing areas (along with Atlanta, Riverside, Calif., Northern Virginia and Phoenix). Florida also ranks tops in total new jobs and, by percentage, among the top 10 fastest-growing states in the same period.
"I am hearing good things about the economy," said Kim Green, executive director of Clearwater's BAMA, the Bay Area Manufacturers Association. "But manufacturers are very conservative. They don't expect the good times back by the first quarter of 2004, but maybe by the second or third quarter."
Just in time for the 2004 presidential election.
If there's a brighter light among the glowing TEC survey results, it is the hint of new jobs ahead.
Almost two-thirds - 64.4 percent - of Florida CEOs surveyed said they expect to increase their number of employees in the next 12 months.
Nationwide, 61 percent of CEOs said they plan to add workers next year. That's up significantly from the fourth quarter of 2001, when just 40 percent of executives planned to hire more workers. It's also a sharp improvement since March, when only half the polled CEOs planned to hire in the near future.
"If businesses were productive when times were flat, they are inclined to be hiring now that the economy is picking up," said Chip Webster, statewide president of TEC Florida in Brandon. "If they have been operating at 70 percent capacity, they will have to wait until they top out their production."
Adding employees, a trailing indicator, only happens after the economy has gained some steam, Webster noted.
At an area TEC meeting of CEOs Tuesday, Webster said conversation was almost uniformly positive about the economy. "The temperature is good," he said. "Compare this to a year and a half ago, when people were worried and ducking for cover."
If CEOs are optimistic, they are not giddy. When asked to name the biggest threat to the economy in the coming year, one concern dominated the survey responses: terrorism. More than a third of Florida CEOs chose it as the biggest threat, while the No. 2 concern was the "budget deficit," picked by only 14.1 percent.
Nationally, 30.9 percent of CEOs chose terrorism as their top concern; "weak business investment" was mentioned second by 17.4 percent.
"I hate to credit terrorists with that much power, but they have it," said Webster. "It's the sword of Damocles over everybody's head."
It is also a sword that busy companies are slowly starting to accept as a new cost of doing business.
