Chris Mogridge could tell his family’s Oxford, Mississippi real estate development business was in for tougher times as the financial crises of the late 2000’s deepened.

“I was on the financing side of the business and could tell things were getting harder. No matter how much advertising I would do, sales were starting to slip. And the bank was getting funny with us borrowing money.”

On a Friday afternoon in ‘08, with a backlog of offers awaiting financing, Mogridge’s bank was taken over by the FDIC. On Saturday, a bank in South Carolina bought the assets, but subsequently wouldn’t return a phone call or email.

The writing was on the wall. “I needed to figure out something else if I wanted to stay here and avoid the prospect of getting on a plane for a job Sunday nights and getting home Thursday nights,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I would have done that, but that wasn’t my preference at the time.”

His preference was launching a business, and this past summer Mogridge and wife Karen moved Mercury Wheels, his post-real estate endeavor, from Oxford to the cycling-industry hotbed developing in Ogden. Today Mercury Wheels has 15 U.S. employees and makes a wide range of road and mountain bike wheels.

A connection to cycling provided a quick transition as the real estate market imploded. “That summer I’d had some success racing,” he explained. “I wanted to buy a time-trial frame, and carbon was just getting popular. But the ones I wanted were about $5,000 for a frame-set. I thought to myself, ‘Someone’s making some money here.’ And the light went on.”

Mogridge has since hustled his way to a growing carbon wheel business, not frames, sourcing components like rims, hubs, cassettes, and skewers from Taiwan but assembling here to provide his racing clientele and dealer network highly customized, performance wheel sets. “At first we were just selecting parts from catalogs or wherever, but today we’re working with factories on the design phase; for example we’re working now on a new road disc. We’re designing wheels for specific applications.”

But as growth beckons, so does the need for a qualified workforce. For Mogridge and Mercury, that meant leaving Mississippi.

“There are a couple different reasons we made the move. The first one is networking. There’s a better pool of people to hire in Utah. It was harder for me to get someone to come down to Oxford,” he says.

“In my mind there were really three cycling hubs, or clusters, to consider,” he says. “There’s southern California, Boulder, and Utah. There are too many people in California; I wouldn’t say I’m a small town boy, necessarily, but it’s still too crowded.

“Boulder’s more my style but for us we viewed it as too expensive. We weren’t going to be able to own our own commercial space, which we eventually want. So I’d heard about Ogden and what was going on there but had never been. We’d taken ski vacations in Utah – there are five or six world-class resorts accessible from Salt Lake City. It’s a clean city, and there’s no crime. Plus we’d been to DealerCamp in Deer Valley.”

“Utah was very interested in our business. Ogden, in particular. I think they understand that it takes businesses of all sizes to build a growing industry cluster.”

If there was a close second, it was Boulder. But just as Colorado’s cycling epicenter has been the choice of others, Utah seemed the inevitable destination for Mercury. “Mayor Caldwell and Steve Fishburn of Ogden rolled out the red carpet for us on our two visits. They showed us the town, introduced us to other bike companies who made the move and really made us feel like Ogden was home.”

I asked him if he’d gotten to the point of comparing incentive packages? “No, we’re really too small. But I looked at them compared to what’s available in Mississippi. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good state to run a business – overhead is low – but Ogden’s so competitive. They sat down and said, ‘what do we need to do to get businesses interested in Ogden?’”

All in all it bodes well for region’s lifestyle manufacturing prospects. The mountain West is an emerging lifestyle superpower. Ogden’s growing cycling industry, anchored by ENVE, a carbon composite powerhouse OEM, seems a healthy rival to its more established sibling east of the divide. But as Mogridge noted, the region’s national reputation as a destination for recreation-related light industry is growing. Including more manufacturing.

Reshoring the development and manufacture of new products is on Mogridge’s radar. “We’re working on a project here that would bring more manufacturing to the U.S. The irony is that Asians love American products – they’ll pay a premium for U.S.-made.”

In Utah, or Colorado. In the West.

As a modern manufacturing economy takes shape, a rush is on to identify who’s part of the community and how growth and progress should be measured.

Our lens, our perspective, is the regional, multi-industry manufacturing economy we report on every week. Today we’re providing one tool to track it’s progress. With the help of Deloitte we’re compiling an index that will track the collective stock performance of 28 regional manufacturing companies. It’s a localized if unique version of a what others are doing nationally, like IndustryWeek.

The Rocky Mountain Manufacturing Index views manufacturing through the particular lens we prefer – broad-based and big-shouldered – with 10 or so industry categories included. Manufacturing here isn’t a single-industry sector.

The Index is one part of our sustained effort over the next several months to build tools to follow the development of the new manufacturing economy.

Here’s this week’s Index.

The effort to catalogue the companies and people of manufacturing is ongoing and industry-wide, and for good reason. Today’s manufacturing economy is different than the past, comprised of new sectors, companies and people. Despite efforts to ‘map’ the sector the past several years, efforts are just now gaining traction.

The reality is that building a useful and easy-to-use directory is hard. Not everyone agrees who should be included, and manufacturers must participate to make it more than just a phone book of name and addresses. (That’s hard, too.) To build a truly interactive resource, companies must give up data and use it to actively seek connections. Proving the value of that is difficult, so participation tends to lag.

Several are trying. Manufacturer’s Edge, Colorado’s state affiliate of the national Manufacturing Extension Partnership, is leading a statewide effort to define and connect the market, with an initial focus on southern Colorado.

Another high-profile effort is set to launch as a result of Colorado’s $6.6 million SMART award. SMART is short for Strengthening Manufacturing by Accelerating Research and Technology. We’re told funds have been earmarked for the development of a “project map,” a directory of companies involved in advanced manufacturing who might benefit from participation in the infrastructure and programs contemplated by SMART. CAMA, the Colorado Advanced Manufacturing Alliance and the facilitator of SMART, will lead the effort.

Connecting industry players for mutual benefit is an essential step in advancing the entire manufacturing sector. As connections drive the market forward, we’ll use the Rocky Mountain manufacturing index and other tools to track it.

Last week, with a push from the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, Governor John Hickenlooper proclaimed this workweek ‘Manufacturing Week’ in Colorado, adding a regional flavor to Friday’s national Manufacturing Day.

It’s music to our ears, so we thought we’d join the festivities with a pop quiz celebrating Colorado’s broad, dynamic manufacturing community. Go ahead and test your Colorado manufacturing IQ.

1. Denver’s Ocean Journey uses this global-leading acrylic designer and aquarium builder for its watery enclosures. Name the firm.

2. Air Force pilots and musical stars like Def Leppard beat a path to this Colorado Springs manufacturer of custom audio apparatus.

3. This growing Denver-based apparel company was launched by an entrepreneur who guessed Tiger Woods would lead a new generation of kids into golf – and into a new golf apparel category.

4. Colorado’s the national epicenter of the natural and organic food business, but also fertile ground for the launch of ‘fast and fresh’ restaurant start-ups. Name two not named Chipotle.

5. Colorado food manufacturers – co-packers – changed the face of the natural food industry. Name two of Colorado’s current crop of food innovators.

6. Founded before Columbus discovered America (can you believe it?), this European company opened its first-ever U.S. manufacturing facility in Pueblo last May, impressed by a deep regional connection to steel. (Also a gimme – from this weeks issue.)

7. Manufacturing accounts for 91% of all Colorado exports and over 130,000 jobs. What’s the annual average compensation for manufacturing employees?

a. $33,000

b. $53,000

c. $73,000

d. $93,000

8. This Colorado firm is emulating the texture from what animal to inhibit bacterial growth on surfaces of all kinds?

9. Kids frolic on the oversized, colorful commercial playgrounds in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center and in dozens of locations nationwide, designed and manufactured by this Denver company.

10. This Colorado lifestyle brand builds titanium cycles, one at a time, at its very cool manufacturing facility in Steamboat Springs.

11. More products are manufactured from the following product categories in Colorado than any others. Rank them in order, by dollar volume.

a. Food and beverage and tobacco product manufacturing

b. Computer and electronic product manufacturing

c. Chemical manufacturing

12. This Durango brewery and first-mover extended its brand and launched a new company that manufacturers automated canning equipment for the beverage industry.

13. This Colorado apparel firm sources high-altitude wool in the Rocky Mountains then ‘supercharges’ its natural attributes with tiny increments of synthetic fiber. Name this performance-apparel brand.

14. A Boulder company has has revolutionized bike-fitting with a proprietary system manufactured here in part and used throughout the cycling world. Who’s this progressive maker?

Of course most of these great companies were featured in CompanyWeek the past twelve months. Read more and raise you Colorado manufacturing IQ.

And celebrate American manufacturing this week: patronize a Colorado maker or manufacturer.

Answers: 1. Reynolds Polymer; 2. Westone Laboratories; 3. Garb; d; 4. Garbanzo, Larkburger; 5. The Kitchen Coop, Fresca Foods; 6. pewag; 7. C; 8. Sharklet Technologies; 9. Playtime; 10. Moots; 11. b, a, c; 12. Ska Brewing; 13. Voormi; 14. Retul.

Later this month in Colorado Springs, over 1000 high-school age kids and 500 or so community college students will visit the Southern Colorado Manufacturing Expo & Conference to view demonstrations and interact with industry, suppliers and service. It’s what manufacturer’s have been asking for – and need: visibility to a next-generation workforce.

How many of these kids will end up choosing manufacturing as a career? More than in recent history, I’d guess. We seem to be coming around to the notion that the career track we’ve established for young people needs to change, that not all high-school graduates need be shoehorned into a four-year college program.

The alternative – more families choosing vocational schooling – would be welcome in the manufacturing sector. But reform is also on the minds of the professional sector: the data say that employers believe higher education is doing a so-so job of preparing college graduates for the needs of today’s employers.

The ‘skills-gap’ that bedevils manufacturing is acute. We know why there’s a gap: manufacturing was offshored, for cheap labor, mainly; with jobs left a commitment to train a new generation of makers; business leaders assumed the U.S. would continue to lead in innovation without making stuff; and the subsequent push to maintain our innovation acumen and staff the service-economy-on-steroids has overhyped a need to send every kid to Harvard in search of a professional degree.

So manufacturing’s lost its cultural mojo. A factory job used to carry with it social status. Not today.

How to get it back? How can we convince families that it’s OK to consider manufacturing careers as an option to a four-year degree? Secondly, if the sector can recapture the imagination of a new workforce, do we know how to train them?

Both are big undertakings.

Consider job training. It’s conventional wisdom that the apprenticeships and job-shadowing methods developed by Germany and others are effective not only in preparing students for manufacturing careers but create a sustainable pipeline for talent once established.

But will European-style apprenticeships ever become a mainstream educational model in the U.S? I have my doubts. They represent a radical departure from today’s socially favored career pathways. And a collective disdain for many things ‘Euro’ is a barrier to vocational training. These things aren’t changed easily; higher-ed is change-averse.

Apprenticeships will instead be part of a comprehensive plan if not the centerpiece. It will fall on industry to lead the way. We can inform higher-ed how to develop curricula, we can provide community colleges more resources and we can facilitate ongoing communication to identify the skills needed in the future. We can convince the business community that what was lost as we offshored our ‘maker’ capacity can’t be easily fixed without a robust domestic manufacturing sector.

But to regain a powerful cultural connection to manufacturing, to once again celebrate vocational work, manufacturers must first capture the imagination of a new labor pool.

An important step is highlighting the maker economy that appeal to young people – like beer, food, and high-tech manufacturing – alongside the anchors of the industry who cut, bend, fabricate and weld.

It probably starts with ‘blocking and tackling’: celebrating the companies who’ve sustained and are again emerging as a strategic players in the U.S. economy.

Fifteen hundred or so K-12 and community college students will be onhand in two weeks, in Colorado Springs, to get a firsthand look, to see what manufacturing has to offer. Industry must show up. Represent.

You asked for it. You got it.

CompanyWeek is a year old this week. Last September we set out to do something different, to report on the manufacturing economy through the people and companies that comprise it. We profiled nearly 150 businesses and what a sector it is. Looking back, the companies are the story.

We’ve been inspired by Springs Fabrication’s role in the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan; Sparkfun’s commitment to educating a new generation of science and tech-minded kids; of Brian Burney’s connection to place, to Oliver Manufacturing’s La Junta homebase; by the ingenuity of entrepreneurs like Matt Vincent of Ska Brewing/Fabricating and the flat-out inventiveness of Dave and Jenny Hall of Glideware.

We’re awestruck by Colorado’s natural and organic food business. By Fresca Foods, who transformed an industry 18 years ago with a manufacturing innovation and today is led by stars like Todd Dutkin and Liz Myzlik; by Richard Lappen’s new gig Natural Food Works. By Boulder Soup Works to Rudi’s Organic Bakery to Hope Food’s missile tubes to 34 Degrees to New York transplant pure elizabeth, whose intrepid namesake Elizabeth Stein packed up this year to move to the ‘50-yard line’ of the industry.

It’s impossible not to respect the stalwarts of the trade and business acumen of Noel Ginsburg of Intertech Plastics, of Bill Newland at Hercules Industries, Marcia Coulson at Eldon James, Doug Rhoda at Wolf Robotics and Scott Sullivan at Grand Junction’s global star Reynolds Polymer. Many, if not all, are working to make sure their coattails are long for those who want to follow.

The beautiful slice of the region’s manufacturing economy is the passion of entrepreneurs like Trent Johnson at Greeley Hat Works, Chrissy Rogers of Spinelli’s and Julie Nirvelli of White Girl Salsa. Of Brian Dunn at Great Divide, Karen Hoskin of Montanya Distillers and Mike Koenig of Studio Shed. And small business doesn’t corner the market. Tom Cycyota started our meeting with a moving, half-hour story about an Allosource organ donor. Cycycota leads one Colorado’s most successful and unique manufacturers with the passion of a much smaller company.

Compared to the youthfulness of craft beer and natural foods, manufacturing is dotted with powerful family legacies, of compelling generational stories like RK Mechanical and Denver’s Polidori Sausage, that Ana Polidori, great-grandmother of current vice president Melodie Polidori Harris, opened in 1925. CEO Donn Schaible takes great care in maintaining Eagle Claw’s connection to Lee McGill and the Wright & McGill Co. Colorado legacy.

Bob Walker’s father Max began building mowing machines in the 1970’s. Today, Walker Manufacturing is a source of pride not only for the Walker family but for northern Colorado. Pride is the operative sentiment as Paul Harter leads a tour of Aqua-Hot in Frederick, who’s clearly gratified by continuing Hap Enander’s business legacy but immensely proud of the new company he’s building.

Builders share space in the economy with manufacturers – they both make things – and the ‘built environment’ is intrigued with the new manufacturing economy. One of our objectives over the next year is to profile the buildings and spaces of GE Johnson and others that will house a next-generation of makers and manufacturers – maker spaces that in the coming years should increasingly co-locate among retail, residential and service – modern ‘clusters’ that comprise a 2st century economy.

Visionary public-sector leaders get the value of maker businesses. They’ll take a lead from Denver’s OED, from Ogden’s city leaders, who envision a cycling manufacturing hub and Utah’s legislature, who created the position of Director of Outdoor Recreation to manage the state’s outdoor brand to the benefit of lifestyle manufacturers. This in contrast to the wretched public stewardship on display in Colorado Springs, where an ugly mayor/city council dustup selfishly hamstrings business; and Castle Rock, my hometown, where city government squanders the community’s hard-earned family-oriented brand in favor of the economic development attributes of Dodge City, circa 1880.

But the doers far exceed the obstructionists in the Rocky Mountain region. Powerful, sustaining business rationale are driving U.S. manufacturing back onshore and domestic manufacturers and supply-chain partners together again. Within five years, a more connected manufacturing economy, redefined as a modern and lucrative sector, will be shaping regional economic activity like never before.

– –

As our crusade enters its second year, with new markets like Utah among the opportunities, I’d like to thank Robinson, Webb, and Rothe for a runway and Kalkwarf and Popeil for a push; Severson and Myzlik for genuine enthusiasm and encouragement; Bugnitz for a true north; Maraschin and Goertz because they paid attention from the western slope; Neppl, Newland, and Lee because they didn’t say no; and Bingham for saying simply, yes.

CompanyWeek is Eric Peterson and Chris Meehan, Becky Hurley and Mike Dano, Tamara O’Dell, Valarie Johnson and occasionally, Jeff Rundles. It’s Carrie Nicholson, Jessica Thomas and Doug Hunley. It’s Michael DeJager. It’s Jonathan Castner’s visuals, along with those of Cat Mayer, Judson Pryanovitch, and Scott DW. Smith, Michelle Goodall and Sara Hertwig. It’s also AJ’s daily burden. CompanyWeek is their work.

On to the next 150!