Marion County is home to many businesses. Some of them are large, some are midsize and some are small. Every single one of them has an impact on the local economy no matter their size. A business that opens and is successful is a treasure to the area and should be appreciated by everyone who works and lives in this community.
According to Lori Watts, President of the Marion County Development Partnership, between 70% and 80% of all jobs are not created by larger companies but by small businesses.
“If a community has five, 50-employee companies, that has as much impact as a 250-person plant with less damage should one of them fail," she said.
Two such companies, R&R Roofing and Sheet Metal and Ridge Roll-Offs, are both owned by Steve and Kathy Rowell.
In 1968, Paul Rowell started a sheet metal business and branched into roofing. Rowell Sheet Metal was open until 2003. This was the end of one era, and the next began in 2004 when Paul's son, Steve Rowell, revived the business.
Both companies are a family affair. Steve's brother, Burt Rowell, is the vice president of the company. Eli Rowell is the son of Steve and Kathy. Eli and his wife, Brooke, oversee Ridge Roll-Offs. Their son, Cole, also works for the company. The family is originally from Foxworth and still lives there.
Even Clyde, the puppy, who was infamous for going across Mississippi 35 and stealing bones from the Dollar General, is a member of the staff and family. Clyde is now mostly an inside dog and really runs the place. He eats his snacks in the office, including a daily supply of two peppermints.
R&R bought Southern Roofing out of Pearl in 2011, and the company has a satellite office located there now.
R&R does business in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and is also licensed to build in Georgia and Tennessee. It caters to companies across the country, building shopping centers with owners all over the country.
R&R Roofing and Sheet Metal does commercial upkeep and reroofing. It does new construction and replacement roofing. It has a division that does repairs, including small roofing jobs like Popeye's and large industrial/commercial facilities. It has had a big impact on the local community, especially after the bad tornado in 2014, when it worked to do many of the jobs rebuilding the businesses in Columbia.
R&R has between 40 and 45 employees, while Ridge Roll-Offs has three to four employees at a given time.
The company has a bid in right now for more than 11 acres in Pearl near its satellite office. It rebuilt a part of the Crown Laundry roof after the tornado in 2014, as well as part of Woodlawn Church. It also assisted with the new pizzeria in Columbia, Plain and Fanci and The Church on Main. The largest project it has done, and may ever do, was an 11.6-acre shop in Mobile, Ala.
Ridge Roll-Offs began when R&R got the dumpsters originally due to the cost of taxes and upkeep on their dump trucks that it uses for the roofing business. The plan would have worked if it had not started renting to the public. Now, the dumpsters stay tied up, and it can't get enough of them.
Ridge Roll-Off Containers was started in 2019 with the motto, “If you want to build something great, you’ll need to get a little messy.”
It provides dumpsters for residential and commercial clients and has really taken off in the past few months. The company goal is to have 200-plus dumpsters. It began with four and now has 70 in sizes of 20, 30 and 40 cubic yards. At press time, only five of those 70 dumpsters were available.
The company picks up and dumps the containers. It is hard to drive all the way to U.S. 98 in Hattiesburg to dump them. Eli Rowell said this will be improved when a new landfill opens on Columbia-Purvis Road.
Some places just keep the dumpsters full time, and the company services them — dumps and returns. It also owns the lot on U.S. 98 right before the National Guard Armory, and the company parks its dumpsters there until needed.
Brooke Rowell handles all Ridge office business such as billing, accounting, dispatching. Basically, she says, she is the office manager. She pointed out that the entire family lives in the immediate area, and it is nice to walk to work. She said she is in the conference room because Ridge is growing so fast that they did not know where to put her.
Normally, Ridge supplies dumpsters up to 60 miles out, but with gas prices increasing, it has decreased that to 45 miles for now.
The company knows building sites need to be safe, streamlined and free of debris and that any smart builder is looking for value and top-notch service. It strives to provide roll-offs at a price its competitors simply can’t beat and to prioritize its clients every single time the phone rings.
As its advertising says, "We see ourselves as the Big Yellow Container that makes all the little problems at your site disappear. Give us a call and schedule a Ridge Roll-Off today."
Another important business to Marion County on the opposite end of town is Quality Manufacturing Group.
It was founded as Quality Welding & Fabrication, Inc. in 1994 by its current owner and president, Kenneth Breakfield. In 1994, Quality Welding & Fabrication was nothing more than an idea and a small tin shed that had been moved from the backyard of the Breakfield home. That original building still stands on the current site of the plant.
The company now builds pressure vessels and has grown over the years in capabilities, services and size. It builds large-volume Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) storage tanks and oil field production equipment. It also does five-year inspections of petroleum tanker trucks. Services include various types of material cutting, such as plate and water jet. Plate cutting cuts steel up to eight inches thick with high definition plasma.
Water jet cutting cuts granite, steel and glass using 160 pounds of water pressure with water as the carrier and garnets doing the cutting.
It does a process called plate rolling where employees take a large piece of steel from the mill, roll it into a can shape and weld it. They then attach the cans together to make a storage tank. These cans can be anywhere from 11 to 16-feet in diameter. Anyone who witnesses this process will never look at a tanker the same way again.
QMG also builds the hemispherical heads that go on the ends of the tankers once they are put together. Other services include stress relieving, insulation of vessels and piping and transport trailer inspections and repairs. Also offered are trucking and delivery, along with storage options for finished products.
The main industries served are oil and gas, green energy, LPG, chemical, process heating and water treatment.
The plant has a lifting capacity of 170,000 pounds, which is important in the manufacturing industry because a larger weight capacity means an increase in the weight of what can be built or handled.
Quality Manufacturing has a climate-controlled booth for indoor blasting and painting and refurbishing of transport containers. They can be made new again, and this is much more cost efficient than building new at this time of volatility of the steel industry.
The company has three main departments: engineering, quality control and estimating.
The plant has 60,000 square feet of manufacturing floor space. Right now, it employs about 30 people, but at one time, there were more than 100 employees. This decrease can be attributed to COVID, steel prices and inflation, according to Breakfield.
After turning 65 on March 14, Breakfield said he does not have the same drive to go constantly to increase the business the same way he did in his younger days.
Breakfield is originally from Marion County and grew tired from always travelling and staying gone as a welder, so he came home and built the company. According to him, he never expected it to get to be this size.
He reminisced about growing up when the shops next to The Columbian-Progress building were a pool hall. He says he even has two of the 13 pool tables in the plant office now.
"We are trying to grow and support the community," Breakfield said. "Most of our employees live and work here, and the tax based revenue goes to the county."
Most of the company's business is for out-of-state companies. In 2013, Quality was the largest exporter in the state of Mississippi. Currently, it has no overseas contracts but has some bids out that Breakfield is hoping will be awarded to it.
Another part of the business is Quality Rentals, which owns and leases out four to five billboards in Marion County, and Breakfield is looking for other Marion County businesses to advertise on them.
Quality Manufacturing Group has received recognitions from the Governor of Mississippi, Mississippi Business Journal and The Better Business Bureau. Customer service is its top priority, and it is committed to providing its valued customers with the highest quality manufactured goods.
Management strives to be in constant communication with its customers until the job is done. With growth and success, the company has never lost its commitment to continuous improvement, quality and standing behind what it produces. Customers will find that their motto, “Quality is everything,” is not just something it says but also reflected in everything it does.
Right in the middle of these businesses, in Columbia, is where Crown Health Care Laundry can be found.
Crown employs around 200 to 250 people in Marion County. The starting production employee wage is $10 per hour. After 90 days, it goes up to $10.50 with annual increases.
Founded in 1955, Crown Health Care Laundry Services is an independent, full-service healthcare laundry processor and linen rental company headquartered in Pensacola, Fla. It has nine processing facilities located in the southeast, including Columbia.
With 1,600-plus associates across the country, they process approximately 200 million pounds of healthcare linen annually. The Columbia plant has a record high of 740,000 pounds of laundry in a week.
Columbia was a great match for Crown as it expanded its operations west.
The company said one advantage of the Columbia location was community support. It said the residents and business community embraced Crown then and continue to be extremely supportive. A great example cited is the assistance the company received after the EF-3 tornado directly hit the facility on Dec. 23, 2014 — not long after it opened. The employees, local authorities and business community were there to lend a hand as they rebuilt and got back to business.
Three other advantages are overall ease of doing business with county agencies, the availability of land and buildings and a great workforce from which to recruit employees.
One last advantage is the proximity to metropolitan areas as it is only three hours from its corporate headquarters in Pensacola and only two hours away from New Orleans, offering the ability to easily access its customers in that area. Easy access to major roadways like I-55 and I-10.
Crown services more than 2,000 hospitals, clinics and physician offices at the nine processing plants and six distribution centers. All of its plants have the unique distinction of being Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council and Textile Rental Services Association certified as providing linens that are hygienically clean.
The facilities offer a controlled and regulated environment that exceeds the highest healthcare industry standards to ensure that the linens it provides are clean and pose no danger of transmitting illness. It works hard to ensure being good corporate citizens by operating "green," and is certified Clean Green by TRSA, confirming its efforts to conserve natural resources like water and energy and to minimize its environmental impacts.
The plant itself has a clean area and a soil area. The soil area is where the "green" concept comes into play. All leftover materials are bundled into balls there and recycled by various companies to limit waste.
A quick tour of the plant in Columbia shows that Crown is extremely efficient. Employees have very little contact with the linens until the end of most of the processing. The main functions are executed by machinery with chutes and conveyers moving the materials around like clockwork.
Two huge machines wash 10,500 pounds of laundry per hour. A machine presses the excess water out, and those items are then divided between ten dryers. Afterwards, linens are separated by type and sent to the correct machines.
Every type of item is kept separated, and assembly lines complete what machines do not.
There is an ironing board larger than many offices, which reaches over 310 degrees Fahrenheit.
Machines even take the sheets and other items and fold them into squares with no human contact until the end where they are counted out, bundled and tied to be sent to businesses. A few types of laundry items, but not many, are folded by hand.
A breath of fresh air is the positioning of television screens throughout the plant that show sporting events, post news and articles from around all of the Crown sites and display positive, uplifting messages throughout the work day.
While none of these three companies can be described as hidden gems, they are all definitely studies in positive impacts on the communities of Columbia and Marion County through economic development while providing great value to their employees.
