One for the Home Team
Plastic Graphics makes the ubiquitous magnetic-strip cards used to log everything from long-distance telephone calls to frequent-flier miles. The firm, located in the Pico-Union district, employs 200, expects a huge upswing in revenue to $52 million by 2000 and is one of the few high-tech manufacturers based in the inner city. But by last year, the firm’s president, Antonio Accornero, was so frustrated with the hassles and high cost of doing business in Los Angeles that he seriously considered relocating. Enter the Los Angeles Business Team, which worked to keep the firm from leaving. Accornero was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.
I bought this company in 1987, when it was located in San Diego and did about $700,000 a year, primarily making identification badges for employees. I purchased the firm because I believed the market for plastic cards was going to explode, and it did. I did not even realize to what extent our business would grow.
We moved to L.A. in 1989, and since then, we’ve had to move to bigger facilities twice. We make roughly a million cards a day for companies like United Airlines, Sprint, MCI and Price/Costco. New technology is going to allow us to produce cards soon with microchips embedded in them. When we start making them, we will probably grow to 300 skilled and unskilled employees.
I knew we would need to move to a larger production space again, and I was really discouraged about the cost of doing business in Los Angeles. I had gone through a couple of construction projects involving various city departments before, and it was a really, really painful process. I didn’t even want to try it again, and the tax credits we get for doing business in this area were ready to expire.
So I contacted the city of North Las Vegas’ business development center and talked to some people there. Before I knew it, they were finding us a new location and getting us attractive rates on power. We were really all set to move and figured we would probably take about half our employees with us.
But I live in L.A., and I kept thinking that life would be much easier if we could stay here. So I made an attempt to try and get ahold of someone in the mayor’s Business Development Office to talk to them about the situation.
They came out and met with me the day after my phone call. I was surprised, believe me. They were extremely responsive, and they quickly sold me on the idea of how much easier it would be to move one mile instead of 300 or 400 miles away.
The business team set up meetings so that everybody was at the table together. They were really good at coordinating the details with the city departments so we could buy a new facility very close by--a 70,000-square-foot warehouse on Washington Boulevard that was last occupied by Yes Jeans.
They also helped get our tax credits reinstated, negotiated a favorable contract for us with the Department of Water and Power, offered to provide job training and helped secure a $10-million bond for renovating the new facility, which will be ready in September.
Altogether, we ended up in a win-win situation, and they were really, really good to us.
Generally, it looked like they cared, not only about the city losing the jobs but also about keeping an industry in place.
What I’ve learned is that I shouldn’t have wasted my time doing this and that in Vegas. If I went to the city first, I would have been in the new building a year ago. Business owners sometimes get very skeptical of all these government agencies, and maybe we shouldn’t. Thanks to the L.A. Business Team and the mayor’s office, we decided to stay in L.A.
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AT A GLANCE
Company: Plastic Graphics
Owner: Antonio Accornero
Nature of Business: Manufactures plastic transaction cards
Location: 1710 Cordova St., Los Angeles
Founded: 1979
Employees: 200
Annual revenue: $19 million
* MORE SMALL-BUSINESS COVERAGE: D4,5
