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Rick Newton powering progress in Claysville

5 min read
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Courtesy of Rick Newton

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Jim McNutt/Observer-Reporter

In this 2012 file photo, Rick Newton, president and founder of Newton Consulting talks about the future of the company in Claysville. In the background is a view of the exterior of the newly renovated headquarters.

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Courtesy of Rick Newton

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Courtesy of Rick Newton

The Newton family in 2021, with Rick at the center

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Rick Newton was not an Army brat, but he and his family relocated often as a kid. He moved from his native Wisconsin to North Carolina, then subsequently to three Washington County locales: Peters Township, Canonsburg and the Claysville area.

A 1981 graduate of McGuffey High School, Newton attended Grove City College, where he earned dual degrees in computer science and chemical engineering. Campus life — studying harder, preparing for a livelihood, having fun — often causes young adults to shift perceptions, and so it was with Newton. Home wasn’t wholly where his heart was.

“I thought I would never come back to this area after graduating from high school and college,” Newton said recently.

Then, reflecting for a moment on what has transpired for him since the mid-1980s, on how life and career experiences have shifted perceptions 180 degrees again, he admitted definitively that his heart is fully at home – in western Washington County.

“Now I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” he said, beaming.

A longtime resident of East Finley Township, Newton is an entrepreneur and staunch advocate for a region that has been underserved and not realizing its potential. He is a father of five and grandfather of nine who, despite having quadruple bypass open heart surgery five years ago, continues to toil tirelessly on behalf of the communities he embraces.

Newton is a leader of the McGuffey Area Revitalization Initiative, working with a steering committee whose mission is to revive businesses along a 17-mile east-west corridor between Washington and the West Virginia line, where Route 40 and I-70 essentially run parallel.

He also is a linchpin with the Claysville Area Business Association. He helps to write grants for the Claysville Area Preservation and Revitalization Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed out of the business association. One of CAPRI’s major objectives is Revitalizing Main Street (Route 40) in Claysville. The borough’s retail strip is vibrant in places but lost businesses during the pandemic. Improvements are needed.

This is a vital location, for it is the only business district within the vast, largely rural McGuffey School District. McGuffey encompasses two boroughs (Claysville and Green Hills) and seven townships (Blaine, Buffalo, Donegal, East Finley, Morris, South Franklin and West Finley).

Then there is broadband. Expanding internet service in the McGuffey district is a significant endeavor to serve schools, businesses, municipal services and residents, all of which have been underserved — or unserved. It was estimated that a mere 10% of the district’s nearly 200 square miles had high-speed internet service last autumn.

Newton is at the forefront there, with eight wide-ranging projects selected for phase one of the Revitalization Initiative, launched about four years ago, months before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

Organizers started the planning phase in 2021 by engaging community members and asking them to recommend projects that could enhance the area. Locals devised 30 ideas, from which eight were selected for phase one.

“We’ve made incredible progress,” Newton said. “Five of those eight are underway. We’re working with county government, the Washington County Chamber of Commerce and some key donors, public and private.”

His ambitions coming out of Grove City in the mid-1980s were much different. Newton wanted to run his own business and eventually would. But it took a while.

He started his career impressively, though, doing an internship at IBM in Atlanta before serving as a consultant for the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. Newton secured a job at Black Box Corp. in Lawrence and rose to information technology director. “Not only were they local, they paid for my (master’s in business administration at the University of Pittsburgh).”

Newton did not stay at Black Box or in IT. “I found out that I liked business more than IT,” he said of a realization that hit while working on his MBA. “The light bulb was going off. I wanted to be a business owner.”

He became one, officially, on March 3, 2003, with Newton Consulting LLC. Newton began modestly at a carriage house adjacent to his home before moving into a former warehouse, a two-story brick building at the eastern end of Main Street.

“I had a number of motivations to start my own company,” Newton said. “I wanted to change the way consulting companies operate. I felt they should be offering more customer services and values.”

Newton Consulting, he said, reached a high watermark in 2015. “We were a $27 million company then, with 160 employees working with a number of big companies.”

A few years later, he handed over the reins to a new management team, which rebranded the company Aspirant. That company is percolating today, with $40 million in revenue and more than 200 employees worldwide. His current focus is on another startup, Newton Institute, which helps companies develop leaders, teams and cultures.

Rick Newton is staying busy and remaining dedicated to enhancing the 70/40 corridor. He is optimistic about the future and credits CAPRI president Reita Melvin, community leader Dennis Dutton and local business leaders across the region for their diligence.

“We have a lot of teamwork, a lot of leaders in the area,” Newton said. “We want this region to reach its full potential.

“We laid down priorities. The 70/40 corridor had the least amount of investment in the county. I said it’s nobody’s fault but our own. We didn’t have a community-driven vision. And another thing is collaboration.”

Spending his 55th birthday in a hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery, Newton said, enabled him to also assess his personal priorities. The most prominent were easy to discern.

“I didn’t know how much time I might have left, so I decided to focus on what was important. I want to leave the world a better place for my family and my community.”

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