Despite being located thousands of miles away from many of the key players in its industry, a Grimes anime company has achieved phenomenal growth during its 18 years of operation and now posts annual sales of $10 million.

Shawne Kleckner, the president of The Right Stuf International Inc., said his company’s success is proof that with the help of technology and the right people on staff, “location is unimportant anymore.”

Not that Kleckner hasn’t put a significant amount of thought into his location. The Des Moines native decided years ago that he didn’t want to move out of state. Even when other states approached him several years ago with economic development packages in hand, he couldn’t see a good enough reason to move his company’s production operations and warehouse out of Central Iowa.

“I’m from here, and I don’t want to move,” Kleckner said. “We have an excellent staff here that takes good care of our customers, and the cost of living is reasonable.”

Other Greater Des Moines companies have also boosted their bottom lines by maintaining their headquarters in a state where they have few, if any customers. Dennis Albaugh’s agricultural-chemical company in Ankeny, Albaugh Inc., has grown significantly over the past decade, primarily through expanding its operations in South America.

Check-All Valve Manufacturing Co. in West Des Moines is nearing its 50th anniversary, and only recently started taking orders more regularly from a handful of Iowa clients. A local advertising and marketing company, International Marketing Communications Inc., creates commercials seen on Univision, a Spanish-language TV network, often using actors from hundreds or thousands of miles away, all from its Waukee office and production studio.

The Right Stuf International Inc.

Kleckner and a former business partner launched The Right Stuf in 1987 from the former partner’s home. They started by obtaining the licensing rights for a 1960s Japanese animated program, “Astro Boy,” and transferring episodes onto VHS. Kleckner, who was still in high school at the time, continued to operate the business while studying computer engineering at Iowa State University.

In addition to publishing Japanese animation programming in English and sometimes Spanish, The Right Stuf also has a mail-order fulfillment house from which it sells its DVDs, its competitors’ published titles and a variety of toys, posters, clothing, comic books and other products.

“The reason we started the company was because, at the time, our product was a niche product that was difficult to get into the mass market, so we started our own mail-order company,” Kleckner said.

In 1994, Kleckner moved the company to Clive, but moved again two years later to an Urbandale location that was five times larger. Even after several expansions, The Right Stuf still needed additional space, so the company moved this past June to a 76,000-square-foot building in Grimes formerly occupied by Faribault Food Co.’s Mrs. Grimes canning plant. About 55 employees work at the new office and call center.

In 1999, Inc. magazine listed Kleckner’s company as one of the 500 fastest-growing private companies. Between 1994 and 1998, The Right Stuf’s annual sales grew from $237,000 to $2 million. Today, it has annual sales of $10 million.

“Today we do more business in one day than we did during the entire first year we were in business,” Kleckner said. “I certainly didn’t envision it growing like this when we started. I would have laughed if you told me I would be selling comic books all my life.”

But growth hasn’t come without challenges.

“My main problem is that it’s difficult to get people to come here,” Kleckner said. “My primary business is in Asia, and there’s no direct way to get here from Tokyo. It can be very difficult to convince someone to come visit your facility when you’re not on the coast or in a major city, and that can be frustrating.”

Kleckner adapted to that challenge by traveling to his customers and vendors instead. Until last year, when he hired two people in Japan to work for him, he was traveling several times each year to Japan to meet with vendors. Now he doesn’t travel nearly as much.

Although the production and localization of anime can be difficult in Iowa, the fulfillment side of the business benefits from being centrally located in the United States, Kleckner said.

“Fortunately, in terms of transportation, our location is good for us because shipping time to either coast takes the same amount of time,” he said. “Location is unimportant because we’re not a point of sale business.”

Albaugh Inc.

Dennis Albaugh grew up near Ankeny and started his business, Albaugh Inc., in that community 25 years ago. It started out as a small business, but today bears little resemblance to its early years.

Albaugh Inc. manufactures generic agricultural-chemicals and sells them to other companies. Albaugh started his business by selling to ag dealers in Central Iowa, and from there it grew to cover a five-state region, according to Spencer Vance, president of Albaugh Inc.

Vance said Albaugh Inc. now has only one large client in Iowa, and half of the company’s revenues are generated outside the United States. South America has been a major growth area for the company in recent years. In Argentina alone, the company operates seven manufacturing plants – some manufacture agricultural-chemicals and others are sugar refineries. The company operates these refineries to use the sugar as a raw material in chemical manufacturing.

“The company has experienced very significant growth in the last 10 years,” Vance said. “In 1991, we were a $10 million company. Today we’re approaching $650 million with the combined companies.”

Albaugh Inc. has a total of about 3,500 employees across the company. Only about 20 are based at the company’s Ankeny headquarters, another 60 are at its St. Joeseph, Mo., production facility and five sales managers live in various places throughout the United States.

Although the company does little business in Iowa, Vance said “we’ve had nothing but positive experiences being headquartered here.”

“We’re really right in the middle of the agricultural belt of the United States, and it’s very easy to attract quality people here for employment, with the quality schools and the high quality of life,” he said.

Vance also credits Albaugh’s personal determination to make the business thrive in his hometown as being a big part of the company’s success.

“Dennis is a very aggressive, risk-oriented entrepreneur,” Vance said. “He is a very persistent, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of guy. You can put obstacles in front of him and he’s going to find ways to persevere.

“I think banks told us 27 times that we weren’t going to buy this business in Argentina, but we got it done,” Vance said.

Check-All Valve Manufacturing Co.

Even though many U.S. manufacturers have moved their operations offshore in recent years to reduce production costs, Check-All Valve Manufacturing Co. has no plans to move elsewhere, even though the market for the company’s products in its home state is extremely small.

Check-All ships its check valves all over the world for use in processing industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to chemicals – any process that involves moving a fluid.

“We would love to have a local client base in Iowa, but this is an industrial product, and Iowa has been mainly agricultural for years,” said Connie Eller, Check-All’s senior manager. “But we are starting to see a little increase in business in Iowa over the past few years with the construction of ethanol plants.”

Started in 1958 in a small garage, Check-All was purchased in 1962 by Crawford Hubbell Sr. Hubbell owned the company until 1987, when he sold it to a group of Iowa investors. In 1994, Check-All moved to its 26,000-square-foot production center on Fuller Road in West Des Moines.

Mark Novak, Check-All’s general manager, said the quality of the local workforce has contributed to the company’s decision to remain in Central Iowa and been a major factor in its growth. Novak said the company’s revenues have doubled over the past 15 years, and it plans to grow another 50 percent over the next five years.

“Workforce is probably the biggest asset we have here,” Novak said. “We have good people and low turnover. On average, our workers stay with us for nine years.”

Eller agrees with Novak on the strength of the workforce.

“The Midwestern work ethic has been good for us,” she said. “It’s pretty much do whatever you need to do to get things done, and our employees have demonstrated that commitment and their ability to work well together over and over again.”

Another product of the company’s location is the relationship it has formed with Des Moines Area Community College for lean manufacturing training. Eller said Check-All is using this training to identify cost-savings measures to help it stay competitive despite having higher overhead than some of its competitors around the world.

“We want to make sure that we’re working smarter and to try to be competitive with the companies going offshore,” Eller said. “Customers don’t really care where the product comes from, as long as they get a good product for a good price and they have quick deliveries. Our product speaks for itself.”

International Marketing Communications Inc.

When Enrique Peña talks with potential clients about his business, they are often surprised that he lives in Des Moines, instead of in a city with a high concentration of Latinos. When Peña recently presented a demo tape of his work to a representative from Univision, the reaction he received was “you did all that in Iowa?”

International Marketing Communications Inc. has a staff of three, including Peña, and has many clients outside Iowa. Peña does some of the voice and talent work for the commercials and communications pieces he produces, and he hires other native Spanish speakers for jobs that he cannot do. Technology now enables him to hire professionals who live far from Iowa.

“In the late 1980s, we were doing work in Des Moines with local talent,” Peña said. “Now we have the capability of performing the same task with resources on the other side of the world. I can access resources anywhere in the world, and almost in real time, you can get on the phone and monitor the recording to make sure it’s done right and have that sent to you via satellite right away.”

Peña, a native of Colombia, moved to Iowa in 1980 to attend college, first at Grand View College and then at the University of Iowa. He moved to Des Moines in 1985 and took a job in Latin American sales for Townsend Industries. In 1987, he started his own business that focused on international marketing, translation services and video production. Since then, Peña has narrowed down his business focus to Spanish-language marketing and communications and moved his company from downtown Des Moines to Waukee.

To supplement its communications work, International Marketing Communications also sells coffee, another one of Peña’s interests.

“The coffee business grew from my heritage in Colombia, and today we do business around the country and in other parts of the world,” he said. “We’re now doing some business with people in China who have started a specialty coffee business.”

Peña likes that Des Moines is centrally located between three major metropolitan areas – Minneapolis, Omaha and Kansas City – that have been good markets for his services. Another reason he has stayed in Iowa is because his wife is originally from Des Moines, and he recognizes this area as a good place for his family.

“I think Iowa is a well-kept secret,” he said. “With all the travels I’ve done around the country, I’ve come to appreciate it as a great place to grow a business or raise a family.”