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Fort Myers recently scored an economic development victory, including 100 new jobs — and it didn't even take any subsidies.
The win comes from Ace Hardware Corp., which recently announced it will open a customer care center/call center in Fort Myers, in property inside Page Field owned by the Lee County Port Authority. When fully staffed, the 10,000-square-foot, fully renovated office space will house about 110 Ace employees.
The new space, says Klaus Buellesbach, director of the Ace Care Center, stems from the company running out of call center room in its suburban Chicago headquarters. There, in Oak Brook, Ill., Ace, the world's largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative, has 100 employees in two buildings and three floors. “It's not an ideal situation when you are trying to run an efficient customer center,” Buellesbach tells Coffee Talk.
Ace, through a Dallas-based site selection firm, had several parameters for a new spot. It had to be a place with competitive wages, multiple sites to look at, and most importantly, not have more than 3% of its workforce already in call center jobs. The 3% threshold, says Buellesbach, is when a location becomes too saturated in call center jobs and employee retention can be problematic.
Fort Myers has about 1.3% of its workforce in call center positions, according to data Buellesbach cites. “We wanted a size that was not too big, but not too small,” he says.
Buellesbach and other Ace executives looked at more than 900 possibilities for sites in total, then narrowed it down to a final four. The process took about a year. With the location in place, the company has already begun to interview for supervisor positions. Estero-based McGarvey Construction Co. is overseeing the build-out, scheduled to be completed by the end of August.
While Lee County Port Authority and area economic development officials helped Ace secure the site and offered job-training assistance, no economic development funds were used to woo the company. “That wasn't one of our considerations,” Buellesbach says.
That's an anomaly in the economic development game in Florida, where officials often refer to money-for-jobs subsidies as imperative, if somewhat controversial. One reason Ace balked on incentives, says Buellesbach, is some of the call center jobs wouldn't meet annual wage requirements to earn performance-based subsidies.
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