“How do we go about getting orders from U.S. companies for goods that are now being produced in foreign factories?”

There is no easy answer that that question, however, I earlier suggested a way to start. If our political leadership were to promote the advantages of producing goods at home and demonstrate its feasibility, corporate management could be motivated to investigate their options.

Simply put, the next step would be to reverse the outsourcing process. In my August 6th post I sketched the scenario that has played for more than 25 years. The task at hand is to throw the sourcing engine into reverse.

It needs to begin as a few scattered projects . . . and then more and more, and then everywhere. At first a trickle, then streams and finally rivers of work flowing out of foreign lands; creating an incoming tide of work and jobs for the United States.

Just as BS, Joe and Richard found foreign factories for their U.S. customers, so, now, must their successors look to U.S.-based contract manufacturers for the way forward. And, where factories sit idle or do not exist at all, the opportunity exists for purpose-built facilities to be paired with their customers.

It would be at this juncture that Restart America morphs from an idea into an active participant in the process. At a minimum, a visitor to the Restart America website would gain access to available real estate, university-based manufacturing support programs, government assistance programs, executive and management personnel and contract manufacturing companies: everything needed by consumer products companies and their sourcing agents to relocate work to the United States.

In addition, in its startup phase, Restart America would deploy staff to help match appropriate resources with the needs of consumer products companies. Once the initiative reached a modest degree of momentum, this “matching” function would almost certainly be subsumed by the sourcing agents.

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