(WGHP) — If Algenon Cash meant to get tongues wagging, he succeeded. Cash is a lifelong resident of Winston-Salem and recently wrote an opinion column for some local newspapers about his hometown. In it, he said, among other things, “Winston-Salem’s historical significance as a corporate hub is fading.” Triad coffee company honors memory of Sgt. Dale Nix As evidence of that, he refers to the Fortune 500 companies that once called Winston-Salem home that have left, over the last few decades: Wachovia, BB&T, Piedmont Airlines, RJ Reynolds and Krispy Kreme. The city has looked to recruit new corporate headquarters, of course, but Cash particularly laments the homegrown ones getting away. “It's like playing sports. I mean you can't just be good at offense and not worry about defense,” Cash said. The obvious benefit of having a corporate HQ is that it provides a series of high-paying jobs, but it goes beyond that. “If a corporate headquarters is located in the community, I think it creates a leadership type of role for this community,” said Jake Cashion, another Winston-Salem person who works for the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, trying to bring in those new companies, among other work. “I've been a lifelong native of the Triad and I've often been discouraged over the years, particularly in my role at the state level. It's all about Charlotte/Raleigh, Charlotte/Raleigh, Charlotte/Raleigh. But I firmly believe if the Triad can work together, which I think we're starting to see a lot of that come together, come to fruition, I think it can be as big or bigger than some of the Raleigh and Charlotte – I think we're primed for growth and I think that's what's important.” Cashion says things began to change in earnest for the state shortly after former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory was elected governor in 2012. “The governor asked his people where the economic blueprint was for the state. At the time, no one could find it, so the business community and business leadership got together and said if it's not going to be, if we don't have one, who's going to create one?” said Cashion. “And so they created what we call Vision 2030 and that became the blueprint for the state. The legislature liked what they heard in that – in the Vision 2030 – and so we went from a state at the bottom of the pile in a number of criteria and categories to the number one state for business and for two years in a row.” What is the future of tobacco in the Piedmont Triad? It was definitely a different story back in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1992, the German automaker, BMW, chose South Carolina over North Carolina to build its first, major U.S. plant – a facility that has directly led to more than 50,000 new jobs in the upstate near its Greenville plant. Then, the major names that were grown in Winston-Salem began leaving. Some analysts believe Wachovia had a chance to buy First Union, rather than the other way around. When First Union and Wachovia “merged,” in 2001, it was an ominous sign of what was happening. It happened at the end of Mayor Jack Cavanaugh’s term and caught him by surprise. “I kind of felt like this was something that was going on for months and months in negotiation, and yet the rhetoric we heard was that Wachovia was going to be a major force here and all that. So, it’s very disappointing and it’s numbing, in a way,” Cavanaugh told FOX8 at the time. Also at that time, Wachovia’s chairman, Bud Baker, promised it wasn’t all bad news. “We have no intentions of simply walking away from this community, we will be here for a long time,” Baker told FOX8 in an interview shortly after the merger was announced. But the truth was, not just those high-paying jobs left town but so did the people with the authority to say where the corporations' money would go and what it would support. Other famous local names followed suit: RJ Reynolds in 2017 (when it was bought by a British company which moved the headquarters to London), Krispy Kreme and BB&T (after a merger with SunTrust), and other Triad cities aren’t immune. Jefferson-Pilot was sold to Lincoln Financial and moved to Philadelphia when a lot of observers felt it should have gone the other way (JP buying Lincoln Financial and moved that company to Greensboro), and the big blow was when VF Corporation moved to Denver, saying, in essence, the young talent we want to recruit prefers to live in bigger cities with more amenities. Algenon Cash believes that, first, Winston-Salem has a lot of amenities to sell and that if they work things the right way, they can compete with the major hubs of Charlotte and Atlanta. He wants the city to admit there is a problem it can solve. “The end goal was always about creating a conversation and I think I achieved that,” Cash says. See more in this discussion in this edition of The Buckley Report.