The company that closed the tire plant in Salem in March answers to a headquarters in Tokyo, 6,800 miles away. The company closing the cable plant in Chatham answers to a conglomerate in Connecticut. The company that cut 850 jobs in Danville answers to Ohio. The company that laid off hundreds in Dublin answers to Gothenburg, Sweden.
We report these stories as job losses, and they are. But look at what else they have in common. Not one of those decisions was made by anyone who has to live with it. That is what a headquarters is: not a building, not a logo on a tower, but the room where a town grows the people who run it. Leaders make places, leaders come from headquarters, and Virginia keeps selling its headquarters.
Take Roanoke: we have spent four decades watching these rooms close, one at a time. In 1992, First Union of Charlotte agreed to buy Dominion Bankshares. The bank’s executives supported causes across the valley, from a battered women’s shelter to Center in the Square, and the bank’s chairman was a fixture of civic life. The deal displaced roughly 850 workers in the Roanoke Valley. In 2018, Advance Auto Parts, founded in Roanoke in 1932, designated Raleigh as its headquarters. The region’s only Fortune 500 was gone, just like that. And the railroad has been leaving the longest. The Norfolk and Western merged with the Southern Railway in 1982, and the headquarters went to Norfolk. It closed its downtown Roanoke office in 2015 and sent 500 white-collar jobs away. Then, Norfolk Southern moved its headquarters to Atlanta in 2021.
Every one of those announcements came with a version of the same sentence: “day-to-day operations will not change.” Mostly true. Day-to-day was never the loss, though. The loss was everyone above day-to-day.
You can put a number on those people. Three economists, David Card, Kevin Hallock and Enrico Moretti, did it in the Journal of Public Economics: a single publicly traded headquarters is worth roughly $3 million to $10 million a year to its city’s nonprofits. The part worth reading twice is where the money comes from. Not the corporate foundation. The senior people who live in a town because the headquarters is there. The giving follows the leaders, and when the headquarters leaves, it follows them out.
In plain terms, a branch has a manager with a budget. A headquarters has owners and executives with personal checkbooks, board seats and the governor’s cell number. And headquarters do something branches never do: they create and grow leaders. The controller becomes the college trustee. The general counsel chairs the housing authority. The operations VP runs for council. A branch town exports that talent at exactly the moment it matures, because every job above a certain rung is somewhere else. The loss is slow and then it is plain: every cause in town chasing the same over-asked people.
Martinsville shows what comes after, and this outlet has told that story well: a city that was once an industrial powerhouse producing state leaders. Tultex was a hometown company, not an out-of-state raider. When it filed for bankruptcy in December 1999, it eliminated 2,600 jobs and sent the city’s unemployment rate to 19.3% almost overnight. The state’s rate at the time: 2.7%. DuPont had closed the year before. VF cut 2,300 more jobs in 2001. The region lost more than 9,000 jobs in under a decade. It also lost something no WARN notice counts: the executives, the donors, the people who once sent leaders to Richmond instead of petitions. It does not matter whether the headquarters class leaves by acquisition or by bankruptcy. Either way the bench empties, and a bench takes a generation to rebuild.
That was a quarter century ago, and the emptying has not stopped. In the past 12 months alone, from this outlet’s pages, here are five different Southwest and Southside operations shut down or pushed to the brink by owners and investors based somewhere else, from Smyth County to Roanoke to Pittsylvania. In March, Roanoke’s Rockydale Quarries agreed to sell to a Nashville buyer. In May, Dominion Energy announced a merger with a utility run from Florida. In 2024, Danville’s American National Bank, founded in 1909, became part of Richmond’s Atlantic Union. Even the in-state deals drain the regions.
The wider numbers say this is structural, not cyclical. Since 1999, Virginia has lost more than ten Fortune 500 headquarters to out-of-state mergers and moves, starting at the very top: Mobil of Fairfax, once a top-ten Fortune company, left for Texas in the Exxon merger. Reynolds Metals went to Pittsburgh, CSX to Jacksonville. Richmond alone lost four Fortune 500 headquarters in six years around 2000, and the Dominion merger would make it five. The 24 Fortune 500 headquarters Virginia holds today all sit in the urban crescent, 11 in Fairfax County alone. West and south of Richmond: zero. In fact, in the 30 years Fortune has ranked every industry together, exactly two companies west of Richmond have ever made the list, and both are gone. One was Advance. The other was Alpha Natural Resources, the Bristol coal company whose successor now runs from the Tennessee side of State Street. My firm built a dataset covering 30 years of Virginia business sales; it is public at data.harbor.capital. The vast majority of Virginia companies that sell go to out-of-state buyers. In the Roanoke region, the share is 91%. In Southwest Virginia, 89%. In Southside, 84%. The ownership of this economy is leaving faster than the jobs are.
So what do we do? Three things, and none requires an act of Congress. First, owners: succession is a decision you make five years before the sale, not the week the letter of intent arrives. Too many Virginia sellers never hear a serious Virginia offer, because they took the first check they were offered in a quick process. Second, economic developers and legislators: we ring bells for recruitment and track announced jobs. A retained headquarters is worth more to a community than a recruited branch, and nothing in our incentive system is structured for that. Track retention. Fund succession planning the way we fund site prep. Third, build the buyers. Community banks, employee ownership, family capital, permanent funds. The money exists in this state; it just is not organized around keeping things. Full disclosure: I started Harbor to solve for the third, so I am talking my book. But the data is public, so check me on it.
The bank, the railroad, the sweatshirt maker, the parts chain: those were not just employers. They were the rooms where these towns raised the people who ran them, and we let them close believing the jobs were the point. The jobs were never the whole point. The leaders were. If Virginia wants to be great, it needs leaders, and leaders come from headquarters, which means keeping the businesses that hold them.
Somewhere in Virginia right now, an owner is deciding what happens to the next one. Whether that story ends in a headline or a headquarters depends on whether anyone builds a serious Virginia offer, from a buyer who has to live with the decisions. Virginia businesses in Virginia hands is not a slogan. It is a decision, and we still have time to make it.
Andrew Dunlap is the founder and CEO of Harbor, a Roanoke-based permanent capital firm that acquires and permanently holds Virginia operating businesses. Harbor publishes its Virginia M&A research at data.harbor.capital.
