Complex mix can determine where businesses locate

John Saunders had an unlikely path to becoming a manufacturer.

Born in rural Ohio, he ventured east to study entrepreneurship at Babson College in Boston and then moved to New York, where he worked in the finance industry focusing on real estate.

But he was an entrepreneur at heart and had an interest in competitive riflery. He wanted to produce a rifle target that would reset automatically without requiring a sports shooter to venture into the firing range.

Unhappy with the first prototype, he bought a CNC, or computer numerical control, machine that he kept in his small Manhattan apartment to better understand the manufacturing process. “I realized that if I were to succeed, I needed to be smart about the process,’’ he said.

He began learning the technology on evenings and weekends and built a second prototype that he and a partner sold through their company, Strikemark.

With some success selling it to military and government agencies, he and his wife moved to Larchmont, N.Y., where he had more room for his equipment.

But he knew he needed even more space to become a full-time manufacturer.

Ultimately, he quit his job at a private equity firm and returned to his hometown in rural Zanesville, Ohio, where he set up shop near his family’s farm. He cre-