by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
Standing before a large banquet hall filled with some of Jacksonville’s most recognizable business people and politicians, William Foley, chair and chief operating officer of Fidelity National Financial, Inc., addressed the question on everyone’s mind: why move a Fortune 500 title and real estate-related services company from Santa Barbara, Calif. to Jacksonville?
The weather notwithstanding, Foley, who’s been with the company for over 20 years, said it just made sense.
Earlier this year, FNF acquired the financial services division of Alltel Information Services, Inc., a Jacksonville-based mortgage processing services business, and that, coupled with a “bias for action,” gave the company the option to reevaluate the location of their corporate headquarters.
“Santa Barbara is a beautiful place, but it is much too secluded to do business the way we want to,” said Foley, a former U.S. Air Force captain who later earned a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree. “Most of our customers are based in the eastern half of the United States and they want to see our senior officers.
“It just doesn’t work to be based in California when everyone else is working from a different time zone. We wanted a hands-on presence.”
Currently, Fidelity National, Inc. ranks 326th in the Fortune 500 — the third, including Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. and CSX Corp., based in Jacksonville — with an estimated $5.1 billion in annual revenue.
Foley said it was the City’s willingness to accommodate FNF, including property tax abatement and job training incentives, that helped close the deal.
“Jacksonville and Florida both made the move very easy for us,” he said. “When we wanted to see if anything could be done to keep us in Santa Barbara, we couldn’t get the mayor to return our calls. To this day, we’ve never met. I guess the two-mile drive was too far to make.”
California state representatives, though moderately more willing to make it easier for FNF to do business, only made an offer to move the company to Fresno, an Empowerment Zone at the time, but “cruddy” by Foley’s standards.
“California just isn’t a business-friendly place and the legislature is dominated by anti-business influences,” he said. “It’s counter-productive.”
And now that FNF has officially established its operations on Riverside Avenue — they also own the land and the building formerly occupied by Alltel — Foley said the company would focus heavily on growth.
“We want to concentrate on moving more high-paying jobs to Jacksonville,” said Foley, who previously estimated at least 450 additional jobs and close to 1,700 over the next few years could be based locally. “We’ve moved a lot of families here and we’re here to stay. Our past is in California. Our future is in Jacksonville.”