Reducing Risks Associated with Global Trade Disruptions

When people speak of supply chain resiliency, they are loosely addressing the 25 to 40 specific touch points from the manufacturing shipping dock in an Asian country all the way to the receiving dock of an American retailer’s distribution center.  Using the Pareto Rule, for all intents and purposes, ocean travel is where the risks occur, and reshoring eliminates that risk entirely.

Reshoring Gives American Consumers the Choices They Want

Companies make much fewer consumer goods in the America these days. How do we meet the desire to actually buy American-made products? Everyone says, “Yes, I want to buy American,” but since there are no American-made options on the shelf, they buy the offshore brand and then move on with their lives. There are gobs of surveys that indicate pro-American sentiment for American-made goods.

Focus on Readily Available Raw Materials

Today's class will focus on product sets that can and should be produced in the Carolinas and Georgia in large part because of the ready availability of the raw materials needed to support the manufacturing process. Even a couple of raw material options that may not be highly available in the HermitCrab territory are still easy to come by in the greater Southeast region.

Navigating Grants, Loans, and Financial Incentives

HermitCrab needs a customer to get started. Home Depot can fund the entire end-to-end reshoring of a currently offshore product for less than .01% of their SG&A expense, and this is the kind of project that will garner shareholder support and enthusiasm. Money is where the “rubber meets the road” - nothing happens without cash flow - this is just a rounding error expense for most large enterprises.

Reshoring Allows Universities to Provide Significant Expertise

Today, we discuss how Universities provide services to support reshoring products back to the United States. Let’s face it – when corporations decided to offshore manufacturing, they did not plan to bring it back. There’s no muscle memory for reshoring, we will need the help of the academic community to round out the skills gaps to make sure the reshoring occurs smoothly.

The Essential Products Best Suited for Reshoring

HermitCrab argues government funding of favored industries is misguided and wasteful. If we intend to regain our manufacturing base, we need a multi-pronged approach that includes long-term incentives, a tariff policy to supports green-shoot manufacturing, and a national conversation about why spending an extra dollar on a rake or shovel at a hardware store is good for America.

How Reshoring Can Revive Small Towns & Communities

Mill towns are a thing of the past, but serve to remind us that changes are always on the horizon, either better (new forms of power allowed larger factories to rise away from the water) or worse (offshoring to our adversaries). The net effect is that small towns suffered, shriveled, and shuttered. Only a manufacturing renaissance can bring some of these towns back to life. We need to start now.

The Benefits of Converting an Empty Shell Versus New Site Development

Ross Perot was a businessman from Texas that ran for President in 1992. A hot topic at the time was the pending NAFTA deal. Perot argued against it, and said this in the 1992 Presidential Debate:

We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: “there will be a giant sucking sound going south…you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals”

Sound familiar? Perot was 100% correct