Does any major company still have its headquarters in Colorado? The question comes up because Qwest, the regional telephone monopoly, was recently acquired by Century-Tel, and the corporate headquarters will be in Monroe, La.
This news comes not long after another Denver company, Frontier Airlines, was acquired by Republic Air, and though the brand and the chatty critters will remain, the corporate headquarters will be in Indianapolis.
Coors is now Molson-Coors, or maybe MillerCoors, but it’s not the Adolph Coors Co. of Golden, Colo. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad and the Colorado & Southern Railway, both based in Denver once upon a time, are long gone.
Perhaps location doesn’t matter that much in these days of a “global economy,” but if so, why did Colorado Springs, which can’t even afford to light its streets, come up $56 million for the U.S. Olympic Committee headquarters?
There appear to be two approaches for getting companies. One is bribery in the form of incentives, rebates and subsidies. The other is to grow your own.
How does that work?
One answer comes from a book, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” by the late Jane Jacobs. In her view, local economies grow by a process called “import replacement,” which in time builds a base for much more.
She cited several examples. The one I remember best is the Japanese bicycle industry. Initially, there wasn’t one. Japan exported silk and imported bicycles from distant places like the United States.
As any bicycle owner knows, the machines need frequent maintenance, which involves new parts. But getting parts in a timely manner was nearly impossible.
So local entrepreneurs went to work at “import replacement.” One shop figured out how to make ball bearings. Another mastered spoke-making. Somebody else found a way to forge cranks. After a while, so many parts were made in Japan that it was possible to build entire bicycles from Japanese parts.
Not only did that improve the balance of trade, but the skills and machinery could be applied to building other stuff — from sewing machines to fighter planes. A country with next to nothing in the way of natural resources became an industrial power.
That was far away and in a different country, but the same process of import replacement worked to build one of Colorado’s great fortunes. Charles Boettcher, an emigrant from Germany, had a hardware store in Boulder when the Leadville boom caught his eye in 1879.
He opened a store in the Cloud City and prospered selling picks and shovels, hoists and drills. Blasting powder was a problem, though; the railroads didn’t like to haul the explosive stuff.
So he and a partner founded the Union Powder Works and manufactured powder locally.
As Leadville’s boom faded, Boettcher moved to Denver in 1890. He also got interested in agriculture, especially after a trip to Germany, where he saw sugar being made from beets.
The result was Great Western Sugar Co., which replaced imported cane sugar with local beet sugar. While building the Loveland factory, Boettcher had to import cement from Germany. That inspired the birth of another import replacer, the Ideal Cement Co. Then came meat-packing plants, life insurance bond underwriting — Boettcher built an empire from Denver with “import replacement.”
So there is a way to corporate headquarters — grow your own with import replacement. It might be unfashionable these days, but from what I can tell, it works.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
