SIUSLAW NEWS ❚ WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2017
Workforce
541•999•6078
OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK
FACEBOOK.COM/PETERSENAUTODETAIL
OREGON COAST’S SUPERSTORE
DIVERSIFIED MARINE & EQUIPMENT SALES
WHERE YOU ALWAYS GET A WHALE OF A DEAL!
For all your Boat & Trailer Needs
Sales and Consignments Wanted
ATV’s, Rv’s, Boats, Cars & Trucks
Metal Buildings/Wooden Sheds
★★ AUTOMOTIVE DETAILING ★★
Complete Interior & Exterior Detailing
Hand Wash • Auto • RV • Boat • ATV • Air Brushing • Pin Striping
Headlight/ Wheel Restoration and polishing.
We offer Full line U-Haul and Storage Containers.
541-997-4505
diversifi edmarineandequipmentsales.com
PASS q PORT
ART
FLORENCE
| OREGON
To help you
navigate
all the Florence
art community
has to off er
Pick Up
YOURS
Today!
Passports are available at the following locations:
Florence Area Chamber of Commerce
Th e Siuslaw News
FRAA - Florence Regional Arts Alliance
Backstreet Gallery
Vardanian Gallery
Th e River Gallery
Rodger Bennett Photography
Purple Pelican
Siuslaw Public Library
Florence Events Center
Florence City Hall
BeauxArts Fine Art Materials & Gallery
from 8A
its biggest clients coming from places
like Dubai and the United Arab
Emirates. The company is owned by
married couple Klaus and Maria
Witte.
“Top Hydraulics could be called a
manufacturer,” co-owner Klaus said.
“We actually are remanufacturing,
meaning rebuilding and repairing,
hydraulic parts for fancy cars.”
Fancy cars, in this case, means
convertibles.
Modern convertibles have auto-
matic tops that, when a button is
pushed, automatically opens and clos-
es. But after 10 years, the parts can
wear down and the convertible top
stops working.
Owners can take the car into a
manufacturer to fix, but that can cost
around $7,000.
Top Hydraulics offers another
solution.
Owners find Top Hydraulics
through the internet, send in the bro-
ken parts and Witte’s team rebuilds
them and then ships them back. The
cost?
“We charge $550 to rebuild them,
so it’s a no-brainer,” Klaus said.
It’s a complicated process. Top
Hydraulics works on more than 30
brands of cars, with each brand hav-
ing around 30 convertible models.
With the millions of used convertibles
on the road, that’s a lot of broken car
tops.
“We’re just hitting the tip of the
iceberg,” Klaus said. “All of these
fancy hydraulic parts started being
used in the late 1990s, and now we’re
really getting hit with a wave of these
parts failing.”
The Wittes experiences in Florence
have been extraordinarily positive,
they said.
The business started in 2010 out of
their garage, but last year they decid-
ed to expand.
They built their new manufactur-
ing hub in Florence’s long-dormant
Pacific View Business Park, which
itself is seeing a renaissance with the
recent sale of lots to businesses like
Siuslaw Broadband and Component
Central Inc., another online business.
The community rallied around the
Wittes when they decided to have the
building completed in 2017.
“The awesome part is the attentive-
ness,” Klaus said. “To see the excite-
ment in everyone I interfaced with in
the city about getting our business
into the park, and the enthusiasm and
hopefulness. We contacted the city in
September about the lots around here.
We were able to break ground in
November and this had this facility
ready to move in by late March. It was
just amazing that it could have all fall-
en into place like that.”
And it’s not just the community
and governmental support that the
Wittes appreciate, particularly when it
comes to being an internet-based
business.
“We have an incredible post office
here, along with the UPS and Fed-Ex
carriers. As somebody whose busi-
ness is shipping and receiving things,
that kind of attention and care we get
from the local carriers is not some-
thing you would get in Eugene,”
Klaus said.
And then there’s fiber optics, a
cable connection that can deliver
internet speeds 20 times faster than
broadband. Siuslaw Broadband,
doing business as Hyak, is rolling out
fiber to Florence businesses, which is
unique for a small community.
Currently, only 25 percent of the
nation has fiber, according to
BroadbandNow.
“It’s key to us,” Maria said.
It’s small businesses like Top
Hydraulics that could be the future of
the region, those interviewed believe
— small manufacturers, graphic
designers, telecommuters and bou-
tique shops that sell face to face while
shipping their goods out can thrive in
an isolated area like the Siuslaw
region.
It could be the third stool that could
provide year-round jobs.
And the innovation and infrastruc-
ture that the Wittes see in the region
will be vital in the coming years.
In a 2016 report by the World
Economic Forum, the challenges fac-
ing the entirety of the world’s work-
force is brought into stark view. The
verdict? Life as we know it will soon
find itself fundamentally different.
“We are today at the beginning of a
Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the
report stated. “Developments in pre-
viously disjointed fields such as artifi-
cial intelligence and machine learn-
ing, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D
printing and genetics and biotechnol-
ogy are all building on and applying
one another.”
Because of those changes, 7.1 mil-
lion jobs could be lost to disruptive
labor market changes by 2020.
The World Economic Forum quot-
ed an estimate that said, “65 percent
of children entering primary school
today will ultimately end up working
in completely new job types that don’t
exist yet.”
The report stresses that the mem-
bers of the workforce need to be
dynamic in what they learn. Skilled
workers should not be experts in just
one portion of their field, but of the
entire field so they can apply their
knowledge to ever-changing trends.
Interpersonal skills will also be highly
valued. As technology changes rapid-
ly, skilled workers will have to work
closely and clearly with each other to
navigate the future.
Top Hydraulics seems perfectly set
up for this.
While the Wittes have the capacity
to have 100 employees, they’re taking
it slow. Their hiring process is exact.
They’re not just looking for skilled
workers, but workers who fit within
the mold of the company. The deci-
sion to be hired isn’t made by the
owners alone, but by the entire com-
pany.
“The type of employees that we
now have are somewhat experi-
enced,” Klaus said. “Some less, some
more experienced mechanics. We’re
looking for experienced machinists,
but that’s a tall order because there’s
only a few of those people around in
this area. We’re constantly looking for
mechanics that have some experience
and enthusiasm for fixing things.”
The people Top Hydraulics hires
are either highly skilled or extremely
receptive to learning new skills. And,
with the Wittes meticulous hiring
process, the workers get along. These
are exactly the types of dynamics the
World Economic Summit suggested.
But finding the perfect employee
can be difficult.
“It’s a retirement community, so
you have a mostly older population,”
Maria said. “You have people with
those skills that, during the recession,
went elsewhere. It has been a chal-
lenge of finding the right combination
of the exact right skill set and the team
family kind of connection that we’re
looking for.”
Maria said that they’re not seeing
everyone in town, but applicants have
been coming in “dribs and drabs.”
They’ve advertised in the newspa-
per for workers.
“We’re constantly in contact with
work source and elsewhere,” Maria
said.
But again, she stresses, they’re par-
ticular.
Where will they find their extra
employees?
“They are not all currently in
Florence, to answer that question,”
Klaus said.
But as of right now, attracting those
skilled workers, particularly if they’re
younger, is still a tall order.
“Because it’s worth it”
A recent article in Forbes reported
that 22 percent of skilled manufactur-
ing workers, or 2.7 million employ-
ees, are retiring over the next decade.
The problem is, there aren’t enough
new skilled workers to replace them.
Unfortunately, the industry is project-
ed to fall short of the workers it needs
to replace them. Young graduates are
focusing more on the humanities
instead of STEM (science, technolo-
gy, engineering and mathematics).
Forbes also stated that there’s an
under-appreciation of the U.S. manu-
facturing business as a whole, even
though jobs can average $77,500 a
year in some markets.
As the market for skilled workers
becomes tighter, communities will
have to look for amenities to attract
those younger skilled workers that are
coming into the marketplace.
The Wittes are confident that
younger workers will be attracted to
the region because of its natural beau-
ty, and current trends for millennials
show that they are wanting to move
from urban areas to more rural, pris-
tine areas like the coast. But that does-
n’t mean that beautiful hiking trails
and the beach will fully capture the
attention of workers when they come
here.
“There needs to be something here
they enjoy doing,” Khufu said.
“Something that brings them together
so they interact with each other.
There’s gotta be something more for
kids to do here in town. They have
energy, but nowhere to put it. No
place to really hang out.”
Because of this, Khufu and many
others interviewed for this series see a
lot of the young workforce leave the
area all together.
“They usually make enough
money to move to Eugene or
Portland, because they’re just bored
out of their freakin’ minds here,”
Khufu said.
Easton agreed. “We’re not offering
the things that are needed by the
younger generation,” she said. “My
son is in the same boat. He’s 25 and
working at the casino. He’d like to
stay here too, but there’s just not a lot
to offer.”
The problem is, building business-
es that attract younger people is a
tricky proposition for investors.
For example, an entrepreneur
wants to build a video game bar
9 A
geared toward millennials, a style of
business that’s currently popular in
cities like Eugene and Portland. But in
a retirement community, it’s fraught
with risk.
“We don’t have enough people to
frequent that bar to keep it in there,”
Jensen said. “The market’s not there,
the investors know that, and nobody’s
going to throw money at it.
Everybody is going to see it as a
potential fail.”
But on the flipside, if establish-
ments like that don’t exist, then a
younger workforce won’t be attracted
to the community, particularly in the
winter months when outdoor recre-
ational activities are limited.
It ends up being a chicken-and-the-
egg problem, said Jensen who
believes there are three ways to tackle
this problem.
The first would be an investor
making a bet that the Florence econo-
my will grow, build these type of
youth-oriented businesses and take a
possible financial hit until the work-
force arrives; The second way would
have existing businesses expand their
amenities to serve this younger popu-
lation; The third way would entail
having the entire community, along
with outside investors, coming
together and creating and implement-
ing a vision that would cater to this
group all at once.
“You have to have a whole bunch
of people somewhere, somehow say-
ing, ‘We’ll go there as soon as we
have this service,” Jensen said. “And
then all the business developers say-
ing, “‘Okay, we’re all going to open
on this day.’”
But to be able to convince
investors to do that, the region has to
go through a fundamental shift in how
it views itself.
“As a chamber president, I’m all
about building business and
progress,” Jensen said. “There’s a lot
of people who come here to retire.
They don’t want any of that. ‘We’re a
retirement community, we have to
keep it quiet.’ But, do we want to
(keep it quiet)? That’s the real ques-
tion.”
To keep the community viable in
the future, the culture of the commu-
nity has to become more inclusive,
Jensen believes. This doesn’t have to
be a zero-sum game.
“Progress is inspiring,” Jensen
said. “Seeing things move forward
and get better, it’s evolution. As a
species, that’s what we’re designed to
do. By not doing that, you’re dead.
So, then it’s not sustainable. We need
to get the groups together and start
changing the direction of this commu-
nity. We will still be able to keep our
little town charm. But then we can
grow in another area. We can all coex-
ist very nicely. Everybody can have
their place. It’s all about balance.”
It’s that inspiration of progress that
keeps business owners like Khufu
excited about the possibilities for the
region. He envisions a place that
would allow him to not only keep a
staff on full-time, but grow.
“I would really like to expand,” he
said.
Khufu’s restaurant overlooks the
river, and it’s a constant solace to him,
even in the leaner times.
“Every day I come in here and look
out there and my troubles just disap-
pear when I look out the window,” he
said. “For a moment, my troubles are
gone. And it’s very blissful. I’m will-
ing to struggle to keep this.
“Because it’s worth it.”
Dementia Educational Group
Know the 10 Signs - Early Detection Matters !
Wednesday December 27th at 6pm
Learn the 10-signs of Dementia-related
behaviors and what to do if you recognize
them!
Congratulations
Joanno Forsborg
on your retirement!
Thank you for being a part of our OPB family for 19 years.
You have left a legacy that will be with us forever!
Join us for our Caregiver Series
The Last Wednesday of Each Month
At 6pm
Call to book your spot now! 541-997-6111