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Home > BizTimes Daily > Archives > September 15, 2006
Jazwiec again threatens to move out of state
Published September 15, 2006 - BizTimes Daily
John Jazwiec, company leader of Waukesha-based RedPrairie Corp., today posed a business climate "wish list" that he said is needed to keep creative companies from moving out of Wisconsin.
Jazwiec, who has been threatening to move his company's headquarters out of Wisconsin, spoke on "The Urgency of Improving Wisconsin's Business Climate" at a meeting of the Independent Business Association (IBA) of Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee.
This morning, Jazwiec said that he does not wish to move his company and his family out of the state. However, the state must dramatically change its business climate, he said.
Jazwiec's wish list for Milwaukee and Wisconsin includes the elimination of handouts to companies to encourage them to stay in Wisconsin. Such a practice is reckless spending, he said.
Jazwiec also requested a 50-percent cut in state taxes, a development plan to phase out social entitlement programs and an effort to make Milwaukee a more creative environment.
"We need to focus less on baseball teams that play in empty baseball fields and fake creative places like the Third Ward, which is greased by local politicians and people want to leave in a year," Jazwiec said.
Instead, Jazwiec called for Milwaukee to focus more on the creative culture in the Brady Street area and make efforts to develop technology centers adjacent to the Brady Street neighborhood, including the former Pabst Brewery.
He also called for Wisconsin to make the investment for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to become an elite school and to stop giving so much attention to U.W.-Madison.
"We need to focus less on the smaller towns like Madison and more on our largest tax base, Milwaukee," Jazwiec said. "It is important for our leaders to look at the big picture. The challenge is to view the world not based on the past and what your friends think. People, change is coming, and change ain't looking for friends."
Jazwiec said he is not able to recruit and retain the best people for his company because there are not many incentives to live in Milwaukee or Wisconsin.
"I don't believe this is a case of trying to attract companies as much as changing ourselves," Jazwiec said. "My vision, my dream is that we go from a state that is viewed as parochial and high taxes to the most dynamic state in the country with growth and better political power in Washington."
Jazwiec said he will not consider a move into the City of Milwaukee until the city develops a vision, commits to the plan like the one he outlined this morning and presents his company with an opportunity. That hasn't happened so far, he said.
If Jazwiec does move RedPrairie out of Wisconsin, he said he will be looking to more creative environments, including Silicon Valley in California; the Boston area; Austin and Dallas, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta.
RedPrairie has hired a professional firm to formally look at possible moves for all of the company's 21 locations, not just the headquarters, Jazwiec said.
RedPrairie is owned by Franciscan Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based technology-focused private equity funds group. Jazwiec said he plans to take RedPrairie from a $200 million company today to a $500 million company in the next 18 months and a $1 billion company within the next three years and soon after go public, he said.
"It is not just taxes, it is credibility," Jazwiec said. "If RedPrairie leaves Wisconsin, it will be a mini-version of what happened in the 1980s with Kimberly-Clark. That would be unfortunate."
Jazwiec and other executives of RedPrairie recently held discussions with the Milwaukee Department of City Development about moving the company's headquarters to Milwaukee.
Jazwiec said he supports the New Growth Theory on wealth creation, developed by economist Paul Romer, a professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
"The new driving force in the world is human creativity," Jazwiec said.
