EDITOR'S
               CORNER         

For the executive compensation story, we pore through securities filings of more than 200 major Virginia public companies, review the previous year's initial public offerings, and take a look at other public companies that appear on our radar screens from time to time. We tally salaries, bonuses, long-term incentive payouts, exercised options and any other reported compensation -- personal use of the company plane, insurance premiums, you name it.

For some companies, it's obvious that no executives will make the cut. They're simply checked off the list. With the rest, we plug names and numbers into a spreadsheet -- this year's raw list had close to 300 names -- and Mr. Excel does the math. Editorial assistant Leila Ugincius gets the credit for the nitty-gritty of finding the numbers and actually reading footnotes in company proxies. This is the third year she has taken on the challenge.

For a while there, it looked as if Smith wasn't going to make it. He was No. 101, which briefly made him the only executive with compensation of more than $1 million who didn't make the final list. What you see on these tables is rounded; Smith's pay of $1,013,089 was $139 less than the compensation earned by John E. Stokely, president and CEO of Richmond's Richfood Holdings.

But on a subsequent proofing -- these numbers are checked and rechecked -- another name came off and Smith was back on, which adds to the beauty of our cover story. It really did take $1 million to make the cut -- not a penny more, not a penny less.

"I expect he will top that magic number again next year," Roanoke Electric's Joe Crawford, vice president of administration, says of his boss. The bonus is based on the company's earnings, and Crawford says the numbers are ahead of last year's. The company saw a record year in 1995, when net earnings were $20 million. "I expect this year we will approach that again, and have an opportunity to exceed that," he says. "We could have a record year this year. It will be close."

Through the third quarter, which ended in July, earnings were $12.8 million, up 23.7 percent from the same quarter last year. Times are good in the steel business. Roanoke Electric Steel serves many construction-related markets, and construction is on a roll. "Demand for our products has been tremendous," Crawford says. It doesn't hurt, either, that steel prices are at an all-time high.

Still, $139 is cutting it awfully close. Perhaps Roanoke Electric Steel's compensation committee ought to consider giving Smith a little boost. Maybe in the "other compensation" category.

-- The Editors

© OCTOBER 1998, VIRGINIA BUSINESS MAGAZINE