Behind the Deal: Camco Bet on Northern Kentucky Long Before It Needed the Space

When Camco Chemical bought a distribution center across the street from its Northern Kentucky manufacturing operation in 2015, the company got something else in the deal: roughly 15 acres of adjacent land.

Camco didn't need it, and that was partly the point.

“We liked the optionality. We liked having that future flexibility kind of in our pocket,” Camco CEO Adrian Hothem told Location Decision.

More than a decade later, the third-generation, family-owned contract manufacturer is building a 130,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution center on roughly 14 of those acres at its existing campus in Independence, Kentucky. It will become the fifth building on a Northern Kentucky operation that Hothem says will encompass more than 900,000 square feet when the project is finished.

The expansion is a useful case study in what an economic development win can look like when nobody is trying to lure a company hundreds of miles from home.

There was no dramatic multistate site search. There are no state incentives attached to this phase of the project, according to Hothem. Instead, the decision grew out of years of real estate planning, an established regional supply chain and a relationship between the company and BE NKY Growth Partnership that allowed both sides to move quickly when Camco was ready.

For economic developers, the project also shows that the most important site-selection decision can happen years before a company announces an expansion.

Camco's roots in Northern Kentucky stretch back more than six decades. The company started in Fort Thomas and moved into the Northern Kentucky Industrial Park in 1980.

Growth came incrementally. Camco added onto buildings, constructed new ones and acquired others as the business expanded.

By around 2010 or 2011, Hothem said, its existing facilities were reaching capacity. A distribution center across the street became available, so Camco leased it with an option to buy, and exercised that option in 2015.

The extra land that came with the acquisition gave Camco room to make the next decision later, something increasingly valuable to manufacturers.

For years, Camco considered its choices.

“Should we build here? Should it be somewhere else in the country? What does it need to look like? What else is going on in our business?” Hothem said.

Projects started and stopped, and conditions changed. Over the past several years, as Camco also worked through a generational ownership transition, the case for another Northern Kentucky investment became stronger.

“It was the right time, and certainly it's the right place,” Hothem said.

The company's existing infrastructure was already there, along with its management team and the other operational pieces of the business.

Economic development announcements often foreground incentive packages. Camco's latest project offers almost the reverse case.

“I'm a big believer that you grow because it's the right business decision, not because there's an incentive on the back end,” Hothem said.

BE NKY still had work to do. Chief Economic Development Officer Kimberly Rossetti said the organization has worked with Camco over time on workforce initiatives, state programs, real estate development and connections with local and state government. For this expansion, BE NKY helped coordinate with the local jurisdiction and other partners surrounding the project.

“They're definitely hometown fans. But like any company, they've got to make the right business case and make sure that it's the right location,” Rossetti said.

Even an incumbent company has to be won again when it is time to grow.

Camco has also become part of BE NKY's case to other companies. Rossetti said the manufacturer meets with prospective businesses considering Northern Kentucky to explain what it has been like to operate and expand there across multiple generations.

Asked what BE NKY brings to the relationship, Hothem starts with speed rather than a financing program.

Sometimes, he said, the hardest part of asking an outside organization for help is getting someone to understand the business: what it does, where it has been, what its constraints are and why a particular issue matters.

With BE NKY, much of that groundwork has already been done.

“I can pick up the phone and I can have a conversation with the BE NKY team, and they already have an understanding of Camco's history, our background, where we've grown in recent years, what our pain points are,” Hothem said.

That means the conversation can start with the problem instead of the introduction.

For a contract manufacturer whose own customers expect quick responses, Hothem sees a familiar operating philosophy.

“So much is about speed and staying nimble. I certainly feel like the BE NKY team very much mimics that same philosophy,” Hothem said.

In practice, that kind of economic development customer service means knowing a company well enough that nobody has to start from zero when a problem arises.

Camco's commitment to the region is also practical. Hothem describes the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky market as possessing a kind of industrial “pedigree” that has compounded over generations.

The presence of major consumer-products companies helped build a chemicals and packaging ecosystem. The Ohio River, rail infrastructure and interstate network provide longstanding freight advantages, and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport has more recently become a major cargo hub. Camco sits in the middle of it.

“We are blessed that we were founded here,” he said.

Hothem argues that the company's trajectory might have looked very different had it started somewhere without that combination of customers, suppliers and transportation infrastructure.

That geography has become more important as supply-chain risk has risen. After years of pandemics, shipping disruptions, geopolitical shocks and other interruptions, Hothem said Camco now pays closer attention to the geographic location of suppliers and the destinations where its products ultimately need to go.

The calculation increasingly weighs whether a supply chain can hold together when something goes wrong, alongside finding the lowest-cost link.

Camco's new distribution capacity fits that strategy. The facility is intended to expand warehousing and fulfillment capabilities while freeing capacity elsewhere in the company's operation, helping it offer customers a more integrated package of manufacturing, packaging, warehousing and logistics services.

If owning the expansion site solved one long-term problem, workforce remains more complicated.

Hothem doesn't pretend hiring is easy.

“Staffing is still very challenging,” he said.

He also doesn't see that as uniquely a Northern Kentucky problem. He points to the region's network of universities and technical colleges, including Gateway Community & Technical College, Northern Kentucky University, Thomas More University and the University of Cincinnati, as an important source of future talent.

BE NKY is trying to extend that pipeline much further down.

Rossetti said the organization has invested in programs ranging from K-8 career exposure through Adopt A Class, to middle-school trades programming and high-school work-based learning. It also put a dedicated workforce development manager on staff to help companies navigate a fragmented workforce ecosystem.

The idea is that a manufacturer shouldn't have to independently figure out which of dozens of training and workforce organizations can solve a particular problem.

For Camco, the issue is increasingly the skills of available workers as well as their number.

As manufacturers invest more heavily in automation and advanced equipment, Hothem said, the jobs change with the factory. That makes the workforce challenge a long game that can't be solved when an employer suddenly needs 50 people.

Camco's expansion is easy to describe as another 130,000 square feet of industrial development, but the more interesting part happened before the groundbreaking.

A company bought more land than it immediately needed. It maintained its ability to grow rather than boxing itself into a site. An economic development organization stayed close enough to understand the business between announcements. A manufacturing ecosystem accumulated over decades around customers, suppliers, transportation infrastructure and talent.

When the company needed more capacity, Northern Kentucky was competing to keep Camco rather than to win it from somewhere else.

For Hothem, the latest decision ultimately came down to a combination that is difficult to manufacture with an incentive package: existing infrastructure, a mature supply chain, available land, institutional knowledge and a place where the owners themselves have deep roots.