SC Secretary of Commerce Bob Faith

Successful real estate developer Bob Faith helped his Charleston friend Congressman Mark Sanford get elected governor a few years ago. They were about the same age and each earned an MBA at a national school: Faith at Harvard and Sanford at UVA (Darden). The two men had children in the same school in Charleston, and they agreed close enough on matters political and economic to move forward as a team.

Bob Faith was arguably the ideal candidate to take over at Commerce, but he didn’t know it until Sanford, then governor–elect, told him. Sanford called Faith’s office four times the day after the election to ask him to take the job. Faith accepted, but he insisted on continuing Charlie Way’s pay scale of one dollar a year as the SC Secretary of Commerce.

Bob Faith is interviewed by Qingdao television crews in the Haier Company headquarters. Haier Company, with an annual revenue of $7 billion, has an assembly plant in Camden. What Faith did not continue at Commerce was the agency’s 19–division structure.

He redesigned the organization chart to read just four departments. Another departure was to put even more emphasis on home–grown business expansion. That is, chasing smoke stacks could pull in a Mack Truck plant in Fairfield, but Mack could leave, and did. On the other hand, the local start–ups that become successes tend to stay as they grow into bigger successes, attracting other members in the same fields or industries. This is called clustering.

Chasing smokestacks, however, does impress and please the big law firms and entrenched real estate interests and high–end construction companies. All three rank among the usual suspects in political campaign fund raising. And chasing smokestacks can, in fact, attract more smokestacks.

A boon to the Upstate, for instance, was BMW, and among the early well–paid players were the familiar names in law, real estate, and construction.

Once up and running, BMW evolved as a centerpiece for SC’s automobile cluster, an area concentration of shared–industry pools of suppliers, labor, and, SC can hope, more assembly plants.

What is a cluster, and where did Faith get the concept? He studied business and economics under Dr. Michael E. Porter at the Harvard Business School. Porter published The Competitive Advantage of Nations in 1990. Porter was talking about nations, as the book title made clear, but such thinking and implementation was shown to work on a state level, too.

About the same time Porter was getting out The Competitive Advantage of Nations , Faith was leaving the classroom with his degree for the real estate development business, bringing with him Porter’s principles in economic development.

Faith’s first stop was in Tulsa, OK, where he ran the local office of Trammell Crow Company, a big–time real estate firm based in Dallas. He became the youngest development partner is the company’s history. Crow started his firm in Dallas with his wife’s inheritance shortly after WWII.

Staying with Crow, Faith also commanded the Charlotte office. In 1991, he co–founded Starwood Capital Partners, the firm which recently bought Tattinger Champagne and the Crillon Hotel in Paris, two parts of a much larger single package purchase. The prestige and the patrons at the Crillon hover somewhere above those at the Ritz.

In 1993, at age 30, he founded Greystar Real Estate Partners, a development, investment, and property management company. He is still CEO at Greystar while he also runs Commerce. Altogether since 1991, Faith has overseen the successful completion of over $2 billion of investments.

Faith has been in charge at Commerce for three years, and he remains upbeat. One of his department’s early success stories came out of China, where he and Governor Sanford engaged the locals in 30 meetings over ten days, bringing back to SC two deals worth more than $100 million. While there, they also helped Newberry’s Palmetto Partners International score a $14 million contract with three Chinese soybean–processing companies to import the beans from Newberry.

After the Chinese Rail Ministry met with Governor Sanford and Secretary Faith, Harsco Track Technologies and their partner ImageMap signed a Memorandum of Record with the Rail Ministry for China to import $87 million in rail equipment.

Continuing on another positive note, Faith says the average wage in SC’s rural areas is more than the national average for rural areas.

Appearing to bottom out, the textile industry in SC is beginning to stabilize as more innovation kicks in. Milliken, not a fan of Chinese textile interests, leads in innovation and stays based in Spartanburg, where his operation literally churns out patents.

The future looks good, and SC looks good here and in the three Commerce foreign offices: Munich, Tokyo, and Shanghai. But here is where the SC Department of Commerce points to SC’s quality of life, the state’s underappreciated selling point.

Photo courtesy SC Secretary of Commerce