YORK COUNTY — Chomping a cigar and standing tall in his York County factory, Bob Dively’s eyes probe every piece of metal in the assembly line at Marina Electrical Equipment.
Dively looks at the stacks of aluminum and stainless steel sheets before giving one of his 30 employees a curt wave and stepping back onto his golf cart.
His company manufactures electrical equipment for marinas across the world. From Korea to Canada and even Cuba, the utility equipment all arrives on pallets with a stamp of approval from Williamsburg.
“Most anywhere you go, you’ll see Williamsburg, Virginia on the pedestal,” Dively said.
But neither Dively nor his business have origins in Greater Williamsburg — but the jobs he has created have been right here.
Greater Williamsburg-based since 1984
Back in 1984, Dively moved from Michigan to Ohio and then Richmond, Virginia, before finally settling in Kingsmill.
In the intervening years between 1985 and 2014, he filed for seven patents for his various York County-based businesses with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to a patent database.
“I don’t like to sit behind a damned desk,” Dively said. “I like to be doing something all the time, designing. I mean I’ll haul off and design something right here in this office, sawing and cutting.”
He has leveraged his designs to create several small businesses, according to York County Economic Development Authority director James Noel.
“What makes this a bit more special is that it’s manufacturing,” Noel said. “It builds wealth in your community and that’s the ideal situation for any locality.”
Dively noticed a problem in the mid-1990s when designing the Willoughby Harbor Marina in Norfolk.
Marinas were installing electrical wires and lighting on poles and waterpipes dockside, wasting precious space.
“The whole damn thing was just antiquated,” Dively said. “So I designed a unit that had the light, the receptacles, and the metering. It provides all the utilities in one unit.”
In 2012, Dively founded yet another electric utility manufacturer, Marina Electrical Equipment, with just two employees and no equipment.
Fast forward five years, Marina Electrical Equipment has grown on average by 38 percent annually with more than $10 million in annual sales by 2017, Dively said.
“We do the full gamut, we don’t just provide the utility on the dock,” Dively said, waving his cigar in his right hand. “Boats now are so big, a boat takes as much power as 10 or 15 houses.”
Beyond supplying utility equipment to new marinas, part of the company’s sales include selling new equipment to marinas that are rebuilding after hurricanes.
By 2017 the company needed room to expand. Dively bought the former Phillip Morris tobacco factory for $4.8 million before investing an additional $500,000 in renovations and machinery.
The 147,000-square-foot facility is big enough workers need adult tricycles or golf carts to travel quickly inside the work areas.
The building sat vacant for six years before Marina Electrical Equipment purchased it, Noel said, but now the company has a lot of room to grow.
“We’re now the largest in the industry again,” Dively said. “As I grow, I’m going to hire.”
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