Mark Stavish, America Online's executive vice president for human resources, is new chairman of the board of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce.
Stavish came to the Internet service provider in 1995 from senior human resources jobs at Pepsi Co. Inc. and Mobil Oil Corp. Since then, he has tended AOL's rapid growth from fewer than 1,000 employees in two domestic sites to more than 15,000 employees worldwide in more than 148 locations in 40 countries.
When AOL moved to Dulles from Vienna in 1996, it was largely Stavish's decision. According to Stavish, one of the company's main concerns at the time was that it might lose workers who wouldn't want to commute to Dulles every day.
The result? "We lost three employees," he said. "That was about it, and now we can't keep them out of the place."
In an interview last week, Stavish talked about his plans for the chamber and shared his thoughts on Loudoun County, AOL and the technology industry in Northern Virginia.
hat are your goals for the year ahead as chairman of the board?
ell, I think we've got four goals. First, we really want to continue the momentum we've got with our small-business community.
Second, we want to be really clear and crisp on our public policy positions and to advocate for things that will help business grow here in Loudoun County.
Third, it's all about transition to become the "E-Chamber" building a much more connected business community by using our Web sites and this new electronic medium.
Finally, we want to continue to expand our membership base. We'd like to get our membership base to 1,500 members, up from 1,200.
What made you want to take the job?
A sense of wanting to contribute to the county. Loudoun County's been very good to AOL, [and] it's been very good to me and my family.
How long has AOL been a member of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce?
Since early 1996, when we first moved out to Loudoun County. It's allowed us to build better relationships in the county, [and] we've made some good friendships along the way, friendships that have evolved into business relationships.
For example, Atlantic Coast Airlines runs our AOL proprietary shuttle back and forth from Dulles [International] Airport to New York and from Dulles airport to Columbus [Ohio] and back. I don't know if we would have done that had we not known the Atlantic Coast Airlines people from the chamber.
Most chamber members are small businesses. AOL is not exactly a small business. How are you going to meet the needs and issues of the vast majority of the small companies that make up that constituency?
Small businesses want opportunities to build their businesses, whether it's networking events or information about business opportunities or opportunities to share ideas.
I think the backbone of the chamber is small business. But what really helps make that go is to have a good number of large businesses active in the chamber. When you have just sheer numbers of business people together, good ideas get shared, leads get shared and that's what builds a vibrant chamber.
We understand the challenges a small business sees. When I started with AOL, we had 700 employees. Now, that's not a small business, but we've got 18,000 now. So we know what it's like to try to build a business.
A lot of our executives started with small businesses. [AOL Chairman and CEO] Barry Schuler was acquired as a small-business entrepreneur. [AOL Vice Chairman] Ted Leonsis was acquired as a small-business entrepreneur.
So, we think we've got a kindred spirit with small-business people, but big businesses need to be there to form the nexus of the chamber.
At the end of the day, it's the small-business owner or entrepreneur that really is the spirit of the chamber, and we're going to help create those networks and those opportunities and events to enable them to grow their businesses.
Barry Schuler has referred to last year as a "character building year." Do you see any positive indications for AOL for the year ahead?
I think AOL's going to continue to grow as a business. We've got another 200,000-square-foot building under construction right now on our campus.
We'll probably take a number of our employees who are in Reston right now, our network engineers, our data center operations, and we'll move some of those folks out to the campus. We have a call center location in Herndon. They're really the administrative offices of our call center operations, so we'll be moving those out to the Dulles campus.
had layoffs last year. Is AOL doing any hiring now?
Yes.
We completed the merger with Time Warner in January of 2001. There's always going to be some redundancies between organizations, and that was the case there.
As we take a look at the future, we're going to constantly be hiring network engineers, software engineers, good business development people. Those needs are ongoing.
What's ahead for the technology community in Northern Virginia in general?
I think in the long run, the technology community's going to be just fine.
We're going through the aftermath of the bubble-bursting of the dot-com industries, but look, Northern Virginia is right in the center of the Internet.
We have lots of people here, we're squarely in the middle of building out the Internet infrastructure and as the next wave of the Internet begins to take off, I believe the businesses in Northern Virginia will be at the heart of that. I just don't see any other conclusion.
Moving AOL to Loudoun County was largely your call. What attracted you to the area?
Well, I'd like to say I was a smart strategic guy and I could see the future, but the fact of the matter is there were two big pieces of property that were in existence in Northern Virginia. One was down at Westfields [in Fairfax], and the other was here out in Loudoun County, which was the old British Aerospace property.
I'll tell you what attracted us. First of all, we felt that the county government was very receptive to having AOL move out here, and they were helpful in getting our permits approved so we could build out the property very quickly.
The old adage "time is money" is really true, especially when you're in a fast-growing business, and the county helped us through moving permits very quickly, helped us build out our property very, very quickly so we found that the county was very supportive.
Where do you stand on "smart growth" in Loudoun?
I think smart growth is one of those things where if you ask 15 people, they probably have 15 definitions of what smart growth is.
There's no magic elixir that's going to fix everybody's problems except keeping the dialogue open and then making good decisions. I think communities like Ashburn and Cascades are good ideas. Planned communities are good ideas. You build schools and parks and shopping centers in and around homes and town houses. I think that's smart growth.
Making sure that you accommodate rail coming out to Loudoun County and you build business and residential concentrations around where that rail loop is going to go, I think, is smart growth.
The one thing that AOL and, I think, the chamber has tried to do throughout the last year of the debate over this Comprehensive Plan is to ensure that there is a fair and even-minded discussion of the issues because we believe that's the most important component to getting to the right solution.
The official headquarters of AOL Time Warner, after the merger between the two companies, is in New York. Has that changed anything at the Dulles campus?
It hasn't changed much of anything. We probably moved about 30 people up to New York.
The fact of the matter is that AOL headquarters remains in Dulles, Virginia, and will remain there and will play a very prominent role in the future of AOL Time Warner.