Business North Carolina February 2022

HOW JIM MELVIN & THE GANG LASSOED TOYOTA TO THE TRIAD AN ASTRONAUT-POLITICIAN MATCH • MICKEY MICHAUX’S LEGACY• VAN ISLEY’S SHREWD SHIFT TO CONSTRUCTION

FEBRUARY 2022 Price: $3.95 businessnc.com

Cover_and_inside_cover_Feb-2022.indd 1

The stories of 25 minority-owned businesses hurdling challenges to achieve striking success

1/19/22 4:36 PM

Cover_and_inside_cover_Feb-2022.indd 2

1/19/22 4:36 PM

F E B R U A R Y

01-03_Contents_Feb2022.indd 1

2 0 2 2

1

1/19/22 4:40 PM

2

B U S I N E S S

01-03_Contents_Feb2022.indd 2

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 2:01 PM

+ DEPARTMENTS 4 UP FRONT 8 PILLARS OF NORTH CAROLINA

Civil rights pioneer Mickey Michaux gained distinction for a record commitment to service in the N.C. General Assembly.

FEBRUARY

2022

10 NC TREND

Big money flows into N.C. tech companies; Van Isley’s savvy shift from accounting to construction; small N.C. airports land $100 million for expansions; Durham’s smoking history.

80 GREEN SHOOTS

A corporate lawyer supports his Native American tribe’s quest for recognition.

COVER STORY

LEADERS OF THE PACK 25 N.C. minority-owned companies are sustaining impressive success.

+ SPONSORED SECTIONS 24 ROUND TABLE: ECONOMIC FORECAST Nine leaders discuss why the state’s strong economy may remain robust in the coming year.

60 POWERING NC: ENERGY EVOLUTION

North Carolina’s energy industry is answering the call for more renewable, cleaner power.

A CHARGED FUTURE How Toyota’s battery factory will accelerate the Triad’s growth.

BY TUCKER MITCHELL

68 COMMUNITY CLOSE UP: THE TRIAD Carolina Core’s opportunities, connections, workforce and quality of life are making the Triad a center of attention.

JOAN & SMUGGIE Smashing barriers is the life story for a Charlotte couple.

BY TED REED

February 2022, Vol. 42, No. 2 (ISSN 0279-4276). Business North Carolina is published monthly by Business North Carolina at 1230 West Morehead Street, Suite 308 Charlotte, NC 28208.

Telephone: 704-523-6987. Fax: 704-523-4211. All contents copyright © by Old North State Magazines LLC. Subscription rate: 1 year, $30. For change of address, send mailing label and allow six to eight weeks. Periodicals postage paid at Charlotte, NC, and additional offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Business North Carolina, 1230 West Morehead Street, Suite 308 Charlotte, NC 28208 or email circulation@businessnc.com.

Start your day with business news from across the state, direct to your inbox.

SIGN UP AT BUSINESSNC.COM/DAILY-DIGEST. F E B R U A R Y

01-03_Contents_Feb2022.indd 3

2 0 2 2

3

1/20/22 2:22 PM

UPFRONT

David Mildenberg

CAPITAL VENTURE

V O L U M E 4 2 , N O. 2 PUBLISHER

Ben Kinney

bkinney@businessnc.com EDITOR

Business North Carolina got a lot better last fall when Raleigh journalist Colin Campbell joined our company.

He’s written several excellent stories for the magazine and quickly enhanced the quality of our Daily Digest email newsletter and social media postings.

His popular @RaleighReporter Twitter feed deserves a follow for anyone who loves North Carolina.

▲ Colin Campbell

Now we’re excited to see Colin lead the North Carolina Tribune, a paid newsletter focused on the intersection of Tar Heel business and politics. It will be published five days a week starting in February.

Here’s how Colin explains the plan: “My goal is for the North Carolina Tribune to be the go-to source for state politics and government news, both for the business community and for folks who work in lobbying, political campaigns and government agencies.

Much as Business North Carolina has done for 40 years, we'll help our readers get to know the movers and shakers on a personal level, while gaining a better understanding of the policy actions that affect your work.

“We won't get distracted by D.C. political intrigue or controversial comments from fringe politicians. We'll keep our focus on important policy issues and the influential people who shape our state and its future.

Recognizing that there's lots of great journalism being produced across our state — but that few people have time to check 20-plus news websites daily — we'll include a roundup of important stories from other news outlets alongside our original reporting.”

4

B U S I N E S S

04-05_Masthead_UpFront_Feb2022.indd 4

N O R T H

Colin has been a journalist for 14 years, including a dozen years with The News & Observer in Raleigh and its affiliates. He grew up in Charlottesville, Va., but was shrewd enough to attend UNC Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism.

He and his family live in Wendell in eastern Wake County. He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of North Carolina diners and geography, though he confesses to having never visited Currituck County in the northeast and Clay County in the far west.

Our capital city has many fine media organizations as Colin notes. Some have clearly stated political agendas. Everyone involved with the North Carolina Tribune wants the publication to be as nonpartisan as is possible in today’s polarized environment. We’re thrilled that Colin is leading the charge.

Check it out and please subscribe online at nctribune.com.

David Mildenberg

dmildenberg@businessnc.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Jennings Cool

jcool@businessnc.com

Colin Campbell

ccampbell@businessnc.com

Cathy Martin

cmartin@businessnc.com SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Edward Martin

emartin@businessnc.com SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR

Pete Anderson

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Connie Gentry, Ebony Morman, Jim Hughes, Tucker Mitchell, Ted Reed, Mike MacMillan, Vanessa Infanzon CREATIVE MANAGER

Peggy Knaack

pknaack@businessnc.com ART DIRECTOR

Ralph Voltz

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Alex Cason

MARKETING COORDINATOR

Jennifer Ware

jware@businessnc.com AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT SPECIALIST

Last month’s Legal Elite feature requires several corrections. Most important, Charlotte lawyer Ben Hawfield is very much alive, contrary to our inaccurate reporting.

Other changes: Joe Fernandez works for Moore & Van Allen.

Elizabeth Brooks Scherer of Fox Rothschild is a previous winner and a Hall of Fame member.

Alyssa Michelle Levine’s firm is titled Alyssa Levine Law. The Creator's Law Firm was misspelled.

Scott Leonard

sleonard@businessnc.com ADVERTISING SALES ACCOUNT DIRECTORS

Sue Graf, western N.C. 704-523-4350 sgraf@businessnc.com

Melanie Weaver Lynch, eastern N.C. 919-855-9380 mweaver@businessnc.com CIRCULATION: 818-286-3106 EDITORIAL: 704-523-6987 REPRINTS: circulation@businessnc.com

Nehmath Taouil Douglass works for Garfinkel Immigration.

Shannon Brock Raich works for Zendesk.

BUSINESSNC.COM OWNERS

Jack Andrews, Frank Daniels Jr., Frank Daniels III, Lee Dirks, David Woronoff PUBLISHED BY

Old North State Magazines LLC

Contact David Mildenberg at dmildenberg@businessnc.com.

PRESIDENT

David Woronoff

C A R O L I N A

1/21/22 11:05 AM

04-05_Masthead_UpFront_Feb2022.indd 5

1/19/22 4:47 PM

BNC ONLINE We love getting feedback from our readers.

Here’s a sampling of what you had to say about Business North Carolina on social media last month.

Green Shoots

Legal Elite

Visit Statesville, NC @visitsvlnc

North Carolina Bar Association @NCBAorg

Thanks for spending the weekend with us and helping to share our story!

Congratulations to NCBA member Brooks Jaffa of Cranford, Buckley, Shultze, Tomchin, Allen & Buie for being elected to @BusinessNC's Legal Elite Hall of Fame in the Tax Planning & Estate category. Access the full list of 2022 Hall of Fame members: https://buff.ly/3zlBe3v.

N.C. Economic Forecast Virtual Round Table

NC Community Colleges @NCCommColleges @NCCCSPresident is honored to join a panel of experts as they discuss the direction of the North Carolina economy in 2022.

Thank you @BusinessNC for hosting this highly informative NC Economic Forecast Virtual Roundtable.

MFGCon Legal Elite

Beer City IP Atty @RebCrandall Really thrilled to be @BusinessNC’s Legal Elite honoree for #intellectualproperty this year! Thanks, friends. Check out my interview to learn about my love of @Shoneys and @GlennonDoyle.

Daily Digest

Gaston Community Foundation @cfgaston Thank you, @businessnorthcarolina for the feature article about the Foundation's new office location. Read more here: https:// businessnc.com/gastonia-foundationbuilding-10m-headquarters

Tisha Campbell, PHR Plasgad and I are very proud to be sponsors and attendees of the 2022 Manufacturing Conference. We look forward to networking with and learning from our business colleagues at this great event in Durham, NC. #manufacturing

Weekly Round Up

Business North Carolina On this podcast episode, Ben Kinney speaks with Ged King, the CEO of Sales Factory.

Ged talks about the history of the company, about being one of the first companies to adapt utilizing marketing analytics, customer behavior and shopping trends are they finding in the market during the pandemic, and more. #marketing

Pictured here: David Mildenberg, @businessnorthcarolina, Ernest Sumner, President @cfgaston, and Elizabeth Patton, Donor Development Officer @cfgaston

Shoney's @Shoneys Replying to @RebCrandall @BusinessNC and @GlennonDoyle We love you too, Rebecca! We'd like to send you some coupons (so you can get some free Hot Fudge Cake), so please send us a DM with your address and we'll get them in the mail to you!

SCAN ME to find Business North Carolina everywhere online or go to linktr.ee/businessnorthcarolina.

6

B U S I N E S S

Digital-Comments_Feb2022.indd 6

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 4:48 PM

F E B R U A R Y

Digital-Comments_Feb2022.indd 7

2 0 2 2

7

1/19/22 4:48 PM

MICKEY MICHAUX The civil rights pioneer’s career is distinguished by his ability to negotiate and his commitment to public service.

BY VANESSA INFANZON

P

art of a prominent Durham business family, Henry McKinley “Mickey” Michaux Jr. became the longest-serving member of the North Carolina General Assembly after short stints as a federal and state prosecutor. His 50-plus-year career as an activist, businessman, lawyer and politician was marked by an ability to negotiate with community members, leaders and other stakeholders.

The Durham native, 91, remembers seeing segregated water fountains at the downtown United Department Store and not understanding the meaning behind the signs. Michaux graduated from high school from Palmer Memorial Institute, a boarding school for Black students that operated near Greensboro from 1902 to 1970. Following in the footsteps of his father, Henry Michaux Sr., he attended North Carolina Central University, playing on the school’s first tennis team in 1948. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1952 and a law degree in 1964. N.C. Central’s education school building is named after Michaux.

He and his younger brother, Eric Michaux, joined their family’s Union Insurance and Realty, founded in 1929. Michaux sold property and casualty insurance. In 1964, his father and brother agreed to let Mickey pursue a political career while they ran the business. Still led

by Eric, who is 11 years younger than Mickey, the company also owns the Glenview Memorial Park cemetery in Durham.

Michaux ran for the N.C. House of Representatives in 1964, losing by 120 votes. Disillusioned by politics after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he served as chief assistant district attorney in Durham County from 1968 through 1972. He returned to campaigning and won three straight two-year terms as a state House representative starting in 1972. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Michaux as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, the first Black person in the position.

During his tenure, Michaux urged the U.S. Department of Justice to press federal charges against Klansmen and neo-Nazis who shot and killed five members of the Communist Workers Party during

8

B U S I N E S S

8-9_Pillars-Michaux-Feb-2022.indd 8

N O R T H

▲ Michaux is the longest-serving member of the North Carolina General Assembly.

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 10:34 AM

a rally in Greensboro in 1979. When Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980, Michaux stepped down. Nine men indicted on civil rights charges related to the shootings were acquitted in 1984.

In 1982, Michaux ran in the Democratic primary for Congress, coming in first with 48% of the vote, just short of the required 50%.

He would have been the first Black representative from North Carolina since 1901, but he lost a contentious runoff to Tim Valentine, a Nash County lawyer who ended up serving six terms. Eva Clayton of Warren County gained that distinction in 1992.

With his congressional dreams dashed, Michaux returned to the state House in 1984 and served for the next 34 years. Among his successes was helping change the required margin of victory in primaries from 50% to 40%.

Michaux and his wife, June, live in Durham. He has a son, Cicero Leak, who is a talent agent in Raleigh. His daughter, Jocelyn Winston, is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. He stepped in as an interim state senator for three months in 2020 while a runoff election was held. The longest-serving House member is also the shortest-serving senator.

Comments are edited for length and clarity.

I met Martin [Luther King Jr.] in October 1956 near the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I invited him to Durham to participate in a program that I was chairing. He stayed at my parents’ house. He said he always wanted to come to Durham because Durham and Atlanta had a rivalry going. Atlanta had Atlanta Life Insurance Co. and Durham had North Carolina Mutual. Atlanta had Citizen Trust Co. and Durham had Mechanics & Farmers Bank. Atlanta had a savings and loan; we had a Mutual Savings and Loan in Durham. Both cities showed an increased number of Black homeownerships.

In politics, that’s where the art of compromise raises its head. Let me give you an example: East Carolina University wanted a medical school. They were coming to the General Assembly to do it. I was going to vote against the medical school but decided to compromise. We were able to get a new building constructed for the law school at [N.C. Central]. That’s what politics is all about in my book.

We take advantage of electoral politics. We go vote. We chastise our community every time we get an opportunity to become politically active, which in Durham, it’s on a daily basis in the Black community. We did not have the majority to elect anybody but you couldn’t get elected without support from the Black community. I don’t call it volatile. I call it doing what everyone else does. Get out the vote.

When Research Triangle came in, it was evident we were willing and able to grow but you had to have all the communities coming together to help Durham grow. That attitude has been made. There have been factions that have tried to intercede, take that power unto themselves. It’s been a coming together, particularly in the Black community, pushing the idea of coming together to build a better, stronger community.

I have chaired every major committee in the House, except finance. I never wanted to raise money. I wanted to spend it.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MICKEY MICHAUX

▲ Eric Michaux, Henry Michaux Sr. and Mickey Michaux

You got on a bus going downtown (and) when the bus got to the corner of Pettigrew Street and Dillard Street to cross the railroad tracks, the bus would stop and all of us sitting in the front of the bus would move to the back of the bus before we crossed the tracks. On the bus, there was a big sign that said, ‘White seats from front to rear. Colored seats from rear to front.’

I have coached Arthur Ashe. Since white folks wouldn’t let us play tennis with them, we formed our own association: The American Tennis Association, which had tournaments throughout the country. One of the major tournaments was in Durham, on an annual basis. Arthur got to the point where he won major tournaments. And they began to realize, here again: Watch out; here we come into the tennis arena.

Ken Royall was the only person I knew who knew what the state budget was, how it operated and all the nuances involved in it. [Royall was a Durham furniture-store owner and among the state’s most powerful lawmakers in the 1980s and ’90s.]

One year, I got the Durham Committee [on the Affairs of Black People] to support Ken Royall for the Senate seat in the N.C. legislature. Nobody in the Black community had ever supported Ken Royall for anything. He felt sort of indebted to me. He told me, ‘Anything you need, you let me know.’ I told him, ‘If I could take away half of the knowledge you have about the state budget.’ He really took it to heart. I learned more about the budget from him than sitting in the senior chair of the Appropriations Committee. ■

F E B R U A R Y

8-9_Pillars-Michaux-Feb-2022.indd 9

2 0 2 2

9

1/20/22 10:35 AM

NCTREND 10 14 16 17 18

›››

Tech investing

Tech investing Construction Aviation History Statewide

VIRTUOUS CIRCLE? Heftier capital raises reflect the increasing influence of N.C. tech companies.

By Mike MacMillan

T

here’s a lot of money out there. Some of it has made its way to North Carolina.

The past 12 months has seen Durham-based Humacyte go public via a special purpose acquisition company at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Charlotte’s AvidXchange raised $660 million in an IPO last summer with an initial valuation of about $5 billion. Raleigh software company Pendo landed $150 million in capital. Pendo has now raised $356 million since forming in 2013 and is valued at $2.6 billion.

Then there was the July announcement by SAS Institute co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight that the company is planning to go public by 2024 in a transaction that could value it as high as $20 billion.

Capital begets capital. The challenge for the state is to recycle some of that cash into new companies and new investment vehicles, laying the foundation for the kind of “virtuous circle” that has underwritten the growth of California’s Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. These large liquidity events are a good place to start. “Are these billion dollar plus exits good for capital formation and reinvesting in the ecosystem? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Hunter Young, head of capital at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development in Durham.

“The flywheel is in motion and gaining momentum,” adds David Jones, co-founder and general partner at Bull City Venture Partners in Durham. “We’re definitely seeing more and more people who want to invest, more angels coming into deals, and more mid-level managers wanting to start something new.”

Something else that’s new is that West Coast and New York firms are coming to the state, further deepening the pool of available capital, Jones says.

All that sounds great, but one well-known N.C. investor begs to differ when it comes to early-stage companies. David Gardner,

10

B U S I N E S S

10-12_Trend_TechVenture_Feb-2022.indd 10

N O R T H

who started Durham-based Cofounders Capital in 2015 and is among the state’s most active angel investors, says, “These big exits have no bearing at all on early-stage capital in the state.”

The reason is simple: The larger pools of capital can’t be invested efficiently in small startups. “The funds are so big they can’t write small checks.”

The math is pretty straightforward. A typical VC can manage 15 to 20 portfolio companies per fund. “Once a fund approaches $100 million, it’s impossible to deploy any money into early-stage startups,” says Gardner. At the same time, smaller investors, who are the traditional sources of seed capital, are being squeezed as the funds lift minimum capital commitment requirements in order to attract more dollars.

Angels and LPs

It’s been a good period for raising money in North Carolina, to be sure. Total funding hit a record $3.4 billion in 2020 and was on track to possibly top $4 billion in 2021 with a 10% increase in the number of companies funded, according to the CED. (PitchBook puts the 2021 number at $3.6 billion, flat with the year before, and 328 deals.) However, more than half of the 2020 funding went to a single company: Carybased Epic Games, which attracted $1.8 billion. It gathered another $1 billion last year, putting its valuation at $28 billion.

Like Epic, more highly touted private companies are putting off IPOs as capital remains available, enabling private-market investors to capture more of the upside. When it comes to attracting capital, “liquidity events help a lot,” says Gerald Cohen, chief economist at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise in Chapel Hill.

There’s the money, of course, but there’s also the confirmation that you’re in a place where money can be made. Cohen calls it “home bias, where if locals have a liquidity event they are more likely to invest locally. You had success here, you know the area, you know the people. Take some of that money and put it where you live.”

CED’s Young says investors often tend to spread the money around. “They’re dabbling in everything from angel investing and

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 10:53 AM

club deals to coming into an existing fund as a [limited partner].”

Ted Zoller, who teaches entrepreneurship at UNC Chapel Hill, agrees that the impact of the new capital will be felt across the investing landscape, initially with new angel and “super angel” investors and limited partners and then, over time, larger funds.

“The $50 million funds will become $250 million funds,” he says.

But larger funds also tend to migrate away from the early-stage segment of the market. That’s because of the economies of scale and the lower risks of more mature companies. “It’s not the laterstage companies that are a challenge,” says Art Pappas, managing partner at Pappas Capital in Durham. “It’s the early-stage.”

Growing up

Lister Delgado is managing partner at Durham’s Idea Fund Partners, which typically invests in startups. He has been seeing increased interest in the firm’s funds among investors and entrepreneurs. “The significant thing is how the ecosystem is maturing,” he says. “These exits create more capital, but they also increase the demand for capital as the pool of people who are looking for money grows. The money comes into the system and feeds the system. It’s getting more and more momentum.”

Justin Wright-Eakes is a Durham native who worked in New York at Citibank and distressed debt fund Aurelius Capital before returning to North Carolina in 2015. He has a slightly different take. He launched Raleigh-based Oval Park Capital in 2018 to invest in early-stage technology and enterprise software compa-

nies, ultimately raising $20.5 million. But it wasn’t easy.

“We don’t see enough local angel investors willing to take venture risk at the earliest stages, which is what our ecosystem needs most,” Wright-Eakes says. “We often see groups of angels teaming up to write a small number of $3 million to $5 million ▲ Art Pappas checks to Series A or even later-stage companies. But we believe the ecosystem would be better served by angels investing more independently and writing a larger number of $50,000 to $100,000 checks to preseed companies.”

People skills

Of course money isn’t everything. “If you have good people, you can attract capital,” Pappas says. “I’d rather rely on new or existing entrepreneurs than on someone bringing in a pool of capital.”

Keeping talent in North Carolina has been an issue. “As far as people making money and staying in the state and creating further pools of capital, I think that’s been a bit of a disappoint-

ATTRACTING CASH

N.C. companies raising the most money in 2021 Company

Amount (million)

Epic Games

Closing date

City

Sector

$1,000

Jun. 2

Cary

video games

Prescient

190

May 2

Charlotte

software

Pendo

150

Jul. 27

Raleigh

software

Cdata

140

Dec. 16

Durham

software

Printful

130

May 24

Charlotte

business products

Agbiome

116

Sept 14

Durham

agriculture

Pairwise

90

Feb 3

Durham

agriculture

ServiceTrade

85

Dec. 6

Durham

software

StrideBio

82

Mar 11

Durham

pharmaceuticals

Xillis

70

Jul 8

Durham

pharmaceuticals

Well Dot

70

Dec. 17

Chapel Hill

health care

Phononic

50

Jul. 21

Durham

semiconductors

Upstream

45

Nov. 17

Greensboro

health care

Istari Oncology

43

Apr. 19

Raleigh

health care

Jupiter One

30

May 4

Raleigh

software

Inceptor Bio

26

Jun. 14

Raleigh

health care

Carewell

25

May 13

Charlotte

consumer products

Payzer

23

Jun. 21

Charlotte

software

Spiffy

22

Oct. 26

Durham

consumer products

Medicom Technologies

22

Nov. 16

Raleigh

health care

Source: Pitchbook, Raleigh News&Observer

F E B R U A R Y

10-12_Trend_TechVenture_Feb-2022.indd 11

2 0 2 2

11

1/20/22 12:44 PM

›››

Tech investing

ment in North Carolina,” Pappas adds. “It’s a short list of those who made a lot of money and who stayed to be entrepreneurs or to put that capital to work.”

Cofounders’ Gardner adds, “I had a list of everyone who made money on (IBM's purchase of) Red Hat and I emailed them.

The only response I got was from [former Red Hat CEO] Jim Whitehurst and he told me he was no longer living in the state or investing here.” Whitehurst became IBM president but resigned last year and is now a board member at Tanium, a Kirkland, Wash.-based cybersecurity company.

Delgado thinks that may be starting to change. “Fifteen or 20 years ago you didn’t have the number of (liquidity) events, and if entrepreneurs exited a company, you never heard from them again. Only a handful continued to invest. Now there are more role models, people who are exiting companies and then investing. We see lots of companies getting started because entrepreneurs fund them. It’s part of the evolution of the area.”

Another issue, says Jones, is that “we haven’t had a ton of companies that have gone from $15 to $20 million (in sales) to $100 million so the talent to do that had to be recruited from other cities. You need money and people, but people are the most important part.”

CED’s Young adds, “We have always seen the Duke, UNC, or N.C. State grad who moved away in their 20s, went to San Francisco or New York, and then came back home to start a company.

More recently, we’re seeing folks with very little historical affinity for the area coming here — some of them CEO-founders and Csuite executives. Having those CTOs and CFOs locally helps.”

Entrepreneurial people like to talk with other entrepreneurial people, says the Kenan Institute’s Cohen. “Apple, Google moving here — all of that can create really positive network effects.”

Here again, liquidity events help. Several former Red Hat executives have become CEOs, and more have come out of companies like Bandwidth. Not all stayed in North Carolina, but some have.

“We’re just emerging to the unicorn level ($1 billion-plus valuations),” Zoller says. “We’re not quite San Diego or Seattle but we could easily become another Austin. We could be the next big hot spot not only for venture capital but also private equity,” for which the state’s historic strength in banking is an advantage.

The good news is that North Carolina is well positioned in many core technologies such as business-to-business software, biotech and genomics that are expected to grow massively. Epic Games is a bit of an outlier but is poised to compete with Apple and Meta in augmented and virtual reality, Zoller says.

Agriculture-related biotech is another important N.C. industry that is set for huge growth. Pappas Capital recently announced a new initiative to expand its presence in the sector as part of its specialized funds portfolio and has paired with SAS to provide analytics and data-science expertise to agtech startups.

Every last dollar may not stay in North Carolina, but that’s the beauty of working with a bigger pile — it doesn't have to. “At the end of the day, if 20% of the wealth stays here, it’s great for the state,” says Pappas. ■

N.C. FUNDS RAISING MONEY IN Q4 2021 Pappas Capital FUND

NCTREND

Asia Innovation Ventures

Closing Date

9/17/21

Amount Raised $200 million

City

Durham

Golden Bell Partners Golden Bell Partners Fund IV

Closing Date

2/4/21

Amount Raised $179 million

City

Chapel Hill

SJF Ventures SJF Ventures V

Closing Date

2/4/21

Amount Raised $175 million

City

Durham

TrueBridge Capital Partners TrueBridge Seed & Micro-VC Fund I

Closing Date

9/8/21

Amount Raised $170 million

City

Chapel Hill

Morgan Creek Capital Management Morgan Creek Blockchain Opportunities Fund II

Closing Date

1/1/21

Amount Raised $71 million

City

Chapel Hill

Golden Bell Partners GBPH21 Fund

Closing Date

6/17/21

Amount Raised $25 million

City

Chapel Hill

Oval Park Capital OPC Venture Fund

Closing Date

9/2/21

Amount Raised $20 million

City

Raleigh

Source: Pitchbook

12

B U S I N E S S

10-12_Trend_TechVenture_Feb-2022.indd 12

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/21/22 11:07 AM

F E B R U A R Y

10-12_Trend_TechVenture_Feb-2022.indd 13

2 0 2 2

13

1/20/22 12:43 PM

NCTREND

›››

Construction

Van Isley made a savvy shift from accounting to building supplies.

By Ebony Morman

W

hen Van Isley left a 10-year career at Raleigh’s Carolina Builders to start a construction supplies company in 2003, he and his partners had a heady goal of achieving $200 million in revenue within 15 years.

It took Professional Builders Supply 13 years to meet that goal, prompting a new goal of $500 million by 2021. Last year’s revenue soared more than 50% to $700 million as contractors snapped up moldings, doors, windows, lumber and other products amid a historic explosion in demand and prices.

It’s quite a success story for CEO Isley and partners Troy Wilkerson and Steve Lockbaum at a business that started with four outside investors and six employees. By late 2021, Professional Builders employed 685 people with 12 offices in the Carolinas including Charlotte, Raleigh and Wilmington.

Isley also skillfully managed ownership transitions as the business grew. In 2017, Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting bought a majority stake in Professional Builders, which then had more than 300 staffers. The private company owned by the Goodmon family operates a diversified group of businesses including WRALTV, Rocky Mount Mills and the Durham Bulls minor-league baseball club.

In December, US LBM, the nation’s largest privately held building products distributor, acquired Professional Builders.

Terms weren’t disclosed. Buffalo Creek, Ill.-based US LBM, which was bought by the Bain Capital private-equity group in December 2020, has been on a rapid acquisition spree over the past few years.

Isley grew up in a Burlington family with much building trades experience. He worked for various family members and used his weekend and holiday earnings to pay his way through East Carolina University, earning an accounting degree. He worked at Price Waterhouse in Raleigh for seven years before changing careers.

“I knew my way around a job site for the most part, but in many ways, I was trading in a suit and tie for a pair of boots,” he says.

“Obviously, I don’t regret that decision.”

Isley seized a management-training opportunity in Greenville, S.C. with Carolina Builders, then owned by United Kingdombased Wolseley. He worked for about 10 years at the company, which is now part of Dallas-based Builders FirstSource.

He and Wilkerson then started their own company. “I had always had entrepreneurial desires and wanted to own my own

14

B U S I N E S S

14-15_Trend-Isley_Feb-2022.indd 14

N O R T H

business,” Isley says. “I had two young children at home, I was traveling a fair amount and I wanted to be there as they grew up.

In short, I wanted to control my own destiny.

“Eighteen short years later, we feel that we accomplished those objectives.”

The Capitol investments enabled three outside investors to exit at fair-market value, Isley says. Additionally, he, Wilkerson and Lockbaum had essentially all of their net worth invested in the company, so reducing risk was important. Lastly, he was seeking a partner that fit culturally and would allow the company to maintain the same processes.

“We did our research, ran a detailed and thorough process, and Capitol emerged as the perfect fit to achieve all of those objectives.”

Less than four years later, US ▲ Van Isley LBM snapped up the business. Minimal changes in how Professional Builders operates are expected, says Isley, who remains CEO. “US LBM provides a lot of autonomy,” he says. “The cultures are very similar.”

Isley credits the company’s growth to its customer service, work environment and becoming more efficient as it grew. “We have always believed in investing in great people — maybe before we actually need them,” he says. “That approach allows us to seize opportunities and grow rapidly when those opportunities present themselves.”

Professional Builders also benefited from its fast-growing Carolinas markets with job growth fueling record demand for housing.

The onset of COVID-19 led to supply shortages and other challenges that continue, Isley says. When the pandemic hit, business slowed for about 45 to 60 days as everyone processed how to move forward. Then, business picked up, sparking pricing pressures for many products.

PHOTO COURTESY OF VAN ISLEY

IF I HAD A HAMMER

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 12:56 PM

“There was rampant inflation in the commodity markets, lumber specifically. And there were challenges in being able to get commodities that have since settled back down a little bit and transitioned over to some other product categories,” Isley says.

“Things like windows, doors and anything that is imported (have) become problematic. So it's clearly been a challenge pretty much since the second half of 2020 continuing on through today.”

Finding labor for construction remains a challenge that is likely to continue, Isley says. Not enough people are willing to do the work to meet the current housing demand.

“We may see some relief in the latter half of 2022 but I don’t envision any significant improvement before then,” Isley says.

“Until we see demand cool, we may not see improvement in the related supply chain issues.”

Partnering with a bigger company provides more resources, new product lines and more purchasing power, he adds. US LBM has annual revenue of more than $3.5 billion and operated 19 sites in the Carolinas before the Professional Builders deal.

“In a nutshell, the stars aligned,” Isley says. “US LBM had a sizable hole in their geographic footprint in the Carolinas and became very active with their M&A activity at the same time our top-line revenues were soaring as a result of a vibrant housing market here.” ■

Change in U.S. building materials prices | 2000-2021 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2%

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

-2%

2001

0% 2000

PERCENT CHANGE (JAN.-OCT.)

16%

Price of inputs to residential construction | Jan. 2018-Oct. 2021 160 155 150 145 140

Services

135 Goods less food and energy

130 125 115 110

Jul. 2021

Jan. 2021

Jul. 2020

Jan. 2020

Jul. 2019

Jan. 2019

100

Jul. 2018

105 Jan. 2018

(1986 = 100)

120

Source: eyeonhousing.org F E B R U A R Y

14-15_Trend-Isley_Feb-2022.indd 15

2 0 2 2

15

1/20/22 12:15 PM

›››

NCTREND

Aviation

TAKING OFF North Carolina sends $100 million to small airports to land expansions.

By Colin Campbell

Biggest 2021 general aviation grants Person County Airport: $12 million Smith Reynolds Airport (Winston-Salem): 11.5 million Washington-Warren Airport (Washington): 10 million RaleighExec Jetport (Sanford): 9 million Johnston County Airport: 7.5 million Columbus County Airport: 7 million Rockingham County Shiloh Airport: 7 million Harnett Regional Jetport: 6 million Mid-Carolina Regional Airport (Salisbury): 5 million Cape Fear Regional Jetport (Oak Island): 3.5 million * SOME AIRPORTS ARE RECEIVING SIMILAR AMOUNTS IN THE 2022 FISCAL YEAR. SOURCE: N.C. GENERAL ASSEMBLY

16

B U S I N E S S

16_Trend-Grant-Money_Feb-2022.indd 16

N O R T H

rural communities looking to land a manufacturing facility. Corporate executives want a direct flight to check on their operations, rather than having to drive an hour after flying into a large airport, he says.

“This is one of the pegs in the puzzle that we’ve got to have.”

Columbus County’s public airport, near Whiteville, is a refueling spot for planes headed up and down the East Coast. The county’s population declined about 13% in the past decade to about 50,600.

“These little airports are used a lot more than we think about,” Jones says. “It’s the rest stop of the sky. We want to make them pretty and attractive.”

People who fly only on commercial airlines might be unaware that general-aviation facilities are in high demand among those willing to pay the extra cost. The COVID-19 pandemic has made some hesitant to travel on packed airline flights, making private planes a popular alternative.

Rockingham County airport has about 30 people on a waiting list for hangar space to park their planes, and Brooks receives daily calls asking about it. Some callers are from as far away as Raleigh — 100 miles from Rockingham — and willing to make the drive for an available hangar.

Bob Heuts, director of RaleighExec Jetport in Sanford, says corporate prospects often ask about general-aviation airports. Pfizer and other major Sanford employers are frequent users.

The Sanford airport is getting $9 million. It hasn’t decided how it will use the money but has about a dozen pending construction projects. The airport is seeing high demand for aircraft hangars, and it wants to purchase neighboring property.

“We have a lot of options out there and certainly some needs,” Heuts says.

The Sanford airport is 35 miles from downtown Raleigh. Heuts says the name is appropriate because the smaller facility helps ease demand for private aircraft traffic at Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

“As much as we can move general aviation out of RDU, it opens up more time slots and availability for commercial” flights there, he says.

This year’s grants continue a trend of more state money for small airports from the legislature and N.C. Department of Transportation.

“The state has done an outstanding job of funding aviation,” Heuts says, and it’s “upped the funding seemingly every year.” ■

PHOTO COURTESY OF HONDAJET

S

ituated on a two-lane road between Stoneville and Reidsville, Rockingham County’s Shiloh Airport is a polar opposite to bustling Triangle and Charlotte airports.

It has one runway surrounded by airplane hangars and a small onestory terminal. But the facility for private planes is about to receive a $7 million windfall from the 2021-22 state budget.

The amount exceeds the $2.7 million assessed tax value of the property, which is owned by Rockingham County government.

State funding for nearby Piedmont Triad International Airport was $10 million.

Shiloh Airport manager Mike Brooks says county leaders are working with a consultant to determine how to spend the grant. “Right now we have no idea what we’re going to do.”

About 15 general-aviation airports are receiving nearly $100 million for unspecified capital improvements. Senate leader Phil Berger requested the money for Shiloh, which is in his district, a spokesman confirms.

About 45 other publicly owned general-aviation airports did not receive funding.

State Rep. Brenden Jones, a Columbus County Republican who chairs the House’s transportation appropriations committee, says lawmakers “looked at the areas that we thought could really benefit” from a major investment in the local airport.

Jones considers airports a critical economic development tool for

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 2:44 PM

NCTREND

›››

History

TOBACCARNA – THE RISE OF SMOKETOWN

By Jim Hughes

PHOTO BY CHUCK GIVENS

I

n the days when almost half of Americans smoked cigarettes, Durham was happy to feed the habit. The American Tobacco plant stood at one end of Main Street, Liggett & Myers at the other. From them spewed millions of butts every day — Luckys and Chesterfields, Tareytons and Larks, Pall Malls, and the Fatimas immortalized in Dashiell Hammett stories.

Then it all went up in smoke. Hacking coughs and gasping lungs were suddenly out of fashion. As early as 1953, scientific researchers showed a connection between smoking and lung cancer.

In 1964, the surgeon general said smoking was, in fact, killing us.

A few years later, cigarette ads were banned from the airwaves.

America slowly lost its taste for cigarettes. In 1960, more than 100 million Americans smoked cigarettes. Today it’s down to 45 million, about 15% of the population.

Durham took the big hit. The brands that made the city famous are now mostly dead. The factories that spit them out have assumed new identities as shops, offices, condos and apartments.

The university that bears the name of the original tobacco tycoon is now a worldwide leader in cancer research.

That’s how it ended. But does anyone remember how it started?

How did Durham become the center of the smoking universe?

The story begins at the tail end of the Civil War with a Confederate general named Joseph Eggleston Johnston. For most of 1864, he dodged a showdown with the superior Northern forces under William Tecumseh Sherman across the South until finally facing the inevitable in April 1865.

Johnston came to rest at Bennett Place, a small farm just west of what was then Durham’s Station in the heart of bright-leaf tobacco country. Encamped there, waiting for the final surrender, were 80,000 soldiers — 50,000 Union and 30,000 Confederate.

For the armies of the North and South, tobacco was almost as indispensable as food — mostly quid and cud and chaw and plug, an occasional stolen stogie, and some old roll-your-own.

Shortly before the formal surrender on April 26, a squad of Union cavalry commandeered a huge stash of Bull Durham brightleaf smoking tobacco from a nearby factory owned by local farmer John Green and took it back to camp.

After the war ended, Green received letters from former soldiers asking how to get “some of that fine Durham smoking tobacco.”

His business boomed and attracted competitors. Within five years, the town was home to at least a dozen tobacco manufacturers, including W. Duke, Sons & Co., the progenitor of what by 1900 would be the world’s largest tobacco company.

The full story is told in Robert F. Durden’s The Dukes of Durham (1975), which recounts the rise of James Buchanan "Buck" Duke and the founding of American Tobacco Co., as well as Duke Power and the university that bears his name.

An inexhaustible supply of smoking scholarship — I call it tobaccarna — can be found in the bowels of Perkins Library on the Duke campus. Just for sport, you should read W.J. Cash’s “Buck Duke’s University,” published in American Mercury in September 1933. Better yet, watch Gary Cooper and Lauren Bacall in Bright Leaf, a 1950 drama.

There’s no better way to discover a time when smoking was cool, tobacco was king and Durham stood at the center of it all. ■

F E B R U A R Y

17_Trend_Tobaccarna_Feb-2022.indd 17

2 0 2 2

17

1/20/22 1:34 PM

NCTREND

›››

Statewide

DOUBLE TIME

F

irst Citizens BancShares completed its merger with CIT, more than doubling the size of the Raleigh-based banking company and elevating its impact as the largest family-controlled U.S. bank.

The combined company will rank as the 19th largest U.S. bank with $110 billion in assets. Its 640 offices span 46 metro areas in 22 states from Florida to Washington state. The transaction is expected to increase First Citizens’ earnings per share by 50% within a few years as it cuts 10% of combined expenses by eliminating duplication.

BOWING OUT

K

en Eudy, a veteran N.C. marketing executive and key behind-the-scenes figure in Gov. Roy Cooper’s political career, left the administration on Dec. 31. Eudy had served as Cooper’s senior adviser since the Democrat took office in 2017. He had also worked informally with Cooper during his 17-year tenure as attorney general.

Eudy, 68, previously had a long career in public relations, founding and leading Raleigh-based Capstrat as CEO. The company employed more than 100 with clients including Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, Lenovo and Duke Energy. New York-based PR firm Ketchum bought the business in 2013.

Before that, the Stanly County native served as executive director of the N.C. Democratic Party and worked as a television and newspaper journalist in Charlotte. After Cooper was elected governor in 2016, Eudy led his transition team before

18

B U S I N E S S

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 18

Approval of the transaction took at least six months longer than expected amid President Joe Biden’s executive order in July calling for greater scrutiny of bank mergers. Regulators also questioned First Citizens’ limited experience in CIT’s specialized national lending businesses involving rail, energy and factoring, according to an October report by the Moody’s credit rating agency.

The Holding family, including Chairman and CEO Frank Holding and several other top bank executives, controls voting power of the company. Former holders of CIT Group will own about 39% of the common stock.

First Citizens shares had a total return of about 130% over the last three years through Jan. 17, and 158% over the last five years. That was more than double the return of the S&P Regional Banking ETF during the same period, reflecting performance of peer banks. The company had a stock market capitalization of $14.3 billion in mid-January.

“This is a transformational milestone in our 124-year history,” Holding said in a press release. “We’re not just creating a bigger bank – we’re creating an even better bank – one that helps more people in more places and strengthens the communities we serve.”

CIT, CIT Bank and OneWest Bank will initially operate as divisions of First Citizens Bank. Three former CIT directors will join 11 current First Citizens members on the company’s board. ■

N O R T H

shifting to the advisor role. He was rarely in the public eye but was an influential figure in many key programs and decisions made by the administration.

“Ken Eudy brought vast experience in the business world to our office and was instrumental in helping recruit major companies and moving North Carolina in the right direction,” ▲ Ken Eudy Cooper said in a release. “He is a forceful advocate for our state and its people, we are grateful for his work and stronger for his service.” ■

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:21 PM

CHARLOTTE CHARLOTTE PNC Financial Services Group named former Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock to its board. He is also on the boards of ConocoPhillips and Lamb Weston Holdings.

CHARLOTTE Nucor chose Mason County, W. Va. for a $2.7 billion steel mill expected to employ 800 people starting in 2024. It’s the biggest construction project in Nucor’s history and the company’s first plant in that state. Nucor may receive more than $1.6 billion in tax credits and other incentives. wages higher than the Iredell County average of about $51,100. ▲ Robert Niblock

MOORESVILLE

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PNC, NUCOR, ATRIUM HEALTH

Atlanta-based Battle Copacking plans a $13.6 million packaging plant here that is expected to create 20 jobs with average

EAST

GASTONIA Trinity Capital Advisors of Charlotte is partnering with New York-based Clarion Partners to develop Edgewood85 Commerce Park here. The speculative project will include four industrial buildings totaling about 1 million square feet.

WILMINGTON MegaCorp Logistics is expanding its Port City headquarters through a $15.2 million acquisition of three buildings totaling 63,000 square feet. The logistics company will share space with current tenants including Morgan Stanley, Truist and others.

LINQ, a provider of software for K-12 schools based here, has received an undisclosed investment from the privateequity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. LINQ serves more than 4,000 customers and supports about 32,000 schools nationwide.

CONCORD The expansion plans for the 457-bed Atrium Health Cabarrus call for 22 medical-surgical beds in the hospital’s heart and vascular tower. Construction is slated to begin in early 2023.

Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties had a record median home sales price of $325,000 in December, a 14% increase from the previous year, according to Cape Fear Realtors officials. Inventories remained at record lows as homes sold in record times, they add.

F E B R U A R Y

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 19

2 0 2 2

19

1/19/22 6:22 PM

NCTREND

›››

Statewide

TRIAD GREENSBORO

RALEIGH North Carolina set a new record for the number of businesses created in a year with 178,300 startups in 2021, according to N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.

It was a 40% increase from the previous year. A department survey shows fewer than 10% of recent startups have annual revenue topping $500,000.

WINSTON-SALEM Cook & Boardman, a distributor of door and security products, acquired Riviera Beach, Florida-based National Millwork. It’s the company’s 19th acquisition since it was bought by Connecticutbased investment firm Littlejohn & Co. in 2018. Terms were not disclosed.

▲ Sharon Contreras

The final leg of the 49-mile beltway around the Gate City is entering its last year of construction with grading starting in the next month or so, according to the N.C. Department of Transportation. Construction on the last section of the loop from Lawndale Drive to U.S. 29 will cost about $137 million. The beltway, which connects to Interstates 73 and 85, was first discussed in the late 1940s.

British American Tobacco, which owns Reynolds American based here, may announce a share-repurchase program potentially worth at least $1.36 billion during fiscal 2022, an analyst said. The move could come as early as February. Reynolds American has about 2,500 employees in Forsyth County.

TRIANGLE RALEIGH City Office REIT of Canada bought the Bloc83 mixed-used development on Glenwood Avenue for $330 million, a

20

B U S I N E S S

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 20

N O R T H

record price for downtown Raleigh. The seller of the One Glenwood and Tower II office buildings was Baltimore-based Heritage Properties, which is planning an adjacent third tower.

Gov. Roy Cooper took executive action to set more aggressive goals for the state’s greenhouse-gas reductions and zero-emission vehicles. His orders set a statewide goal for 2030 to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% compared with 2005 levels and register 1.25 million electric and other zero-emission vehicles.

The N.C. Craft Brewers Guild named Lisa Parker as executive director. She has worked with the nonprofit since 2025, most recently as associate director. The state has more than 380 independent craft breweries and brewpubs.

Pepsi Bottling Ventures announced Derek Hill will become CEO after serving as CFO since 2008. Hill has worked with the company since 1999.

He succeeds Paul Finney at the largest North American bottler of Pepsi products.

Japan’s Suntory owns the company.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF GUILFORD COUNTY

Guilford County Schools Superintendent Sharon Contreras is leaving her job at the end of the academic year to become CEO of Raleigh-based The Innovation Project. The nonprofit is led by N.C. school superintendents and promotes innovative education practices. Contreras has led Guilford schools since 2016.

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 11:15 AM

F E B R U A R Y

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 21

2 0 2 2

21

1/20/22 11:12 AM

NCTREND

›››

Statewide SANFORD The nation’s largest homebuilder, Texas-based D.R. Horton, plans a 95-home project here, its first entry into the city.

It bought the land for $5.4 million, a deed shows. The company closed about $250 million in contracts in the Triangle in 2020.

WEST RALEIGH Concord Hospitality Enterprises sold two Marriott-branded hotels to a hospitality trust based in Singapore. The Residence Inn Durham McPherson/Duke University was sold for $33.9 million, and the Courtyard Raleigh North/Triangle Town Center fetched $14.4 million.

DURHAM

said privately. Other manufacturers are reportedly looking at the site.

The Climate Service was acquired by New York-based S&P Global for undisclosed terms. The Climate Service, which developed a methodology for analyzing climate risk, opened in 2017 and raised $3.8 million in 2020.

HOLLY SPRINGS

ASHEVILLE Mission Health medical director Dr. William Hathaway left HCA Healthcare to become CEO of the Mountain Area Health Education Center. MAHEC is not part of HCA, which acquired the largest hospital system in western North Carolina in 2019.

MORRISVILLE Fujifilm Diosynth announced that about 145 jobs will be added to support an 89,000-square-foot expansion of its BioProcess Innovation Center, which opened here in 2016. It is separate from a $2 billion Holly Springs plant that is under construction.

Ecobot, which designs software related to pre-construction environmental permitting, raised more than $2.8 million from nine investors including Cary-based Cofounders Capital and the Charlotte Angel Fund. Lee Lance is CEO of Ecobot.

Charlotte-based Crescent Communities plans a 200-acre biomanufacturing and office development here with a planned Feb. 16 groundbreaking. Crescent and CBRE Raleigh will lease facilities at The Yield project.

A U.S. semiconductor company considering the Triangle Innovation Point site in Chatham County for a multibilliondollar factory withdrew its interest, the Chatham News & Record reported. The company was also looking at sites in Texas and Arizona. The plant was expected to employ a few thousand people and require perhaps $1 billion in state and local incentives, economic development officials

22

B U S I N E S S

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 22

N O R T H

MORRISVILLE Charlotte-based Trinity Capital plans a life-sciences campus here that is expected to add 1.5 million square feet in biotech companies. Called Spark LS, the campus shown in a rendering above is expected to include restaurants, retail and buildings designed for lab space and biomanufacturing.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MARRIOTT, TRINITY CAPITAL

MONCURE

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:23 PM

18-22_Statewide_Feb-2022.indd 23

1/19/22 6:23 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

BETTER TIMES ARE AT HAND Supply chains, labor, inflation, COVID-19 — there have been plenty of concerns over the past year when it comes to the economy. While all are being felt to some degree in North Carolina, they aren’t slowing the Old North State, which Site Selection magazine named 2021’s top business climate.

People continue to flock here and businesses — big and small — are choosing it for relocations and expansions at record rates. But how is its economy being shaped by those concerns and what does its future hold? Business North Carolina magazine recently gathered business, economic development and education leaders to discuss how the state’s economy fared last year, what are the biggest issues shaping it and where it’s headed, each from their unique perspective.

Brooks Pierce, Campbell University, ElectriCities of North Carolina, First Bank, N.C. Biotech Center, N.C. Community College System, North Carolina Healthcare Association, and Small Business and Technology Development Center sponsored the discussion. It was moderated by Business North Carolina Publisher Ben Kinney and edited for brevity and clarity.

24

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 24

N O R T H

FROM YOUR VANTAGE POINT, HOW DID NORTH CAROLINA’S ECONOMY FARE LAST YEAR? STECKBECK: Last year was good for North Carolina. Its gross domestic product increased 8.7% from the year prior; the average GDP in the U.S. increased 8%. Its population was the country’s 11th fastest growing at 0.9%, which was down from 1.3% the year prior. Many states, including California and New York, have decreasing populations. North Carolina’s unemployment rate was 3.9% in November. It was

C A R O L I N A

about the same in all its metros except Fayetteville, where it was 5.1%, and Rocky Mount, where it was 5.7%.

The latter will feel the effects from the almost 2,000 people who were laid off after a fire-damaged QVC warehouse was permanently closed last month.

Those rates reflect basic employment numbers. The U-6, which measures unemployment by including marginally attached workers and people working part time, was 9.5% in November, down from 12.3% the year prior. Airline travel increased. Before the pandemic, it was about 2.3 million passengers a day. That

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:27 PM

PANELISTS FIRST ROW:

CHRISTOPHER CHUNG

CEO, Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina

TONY COPELAND

senior eonomic development and corporate strategist.

Brooks Pierce

ADAM CURRIE

chief banking officer, First Bank SECOND ROW:

DOUG EDGETON

president and CEO, N.C. Biotech Center

ANDY FUSCO

vice president of member services and corporate planning, ElectriCities of North Carolina

BYRON HICKS

state director, Small Business and Technology Development Center THIRD ROW:

STEPHEN LAWLER

president and CEO, North Carolina Healthcare Association

MARK STECKBECK

associate professor of economics, Lundy chair of business philosophy and director of the Truist Business Fellows Program, Campbell University

THOMAS STITH

president, N.C. Community College System

fell to 87,000 passengers in April 2020, but it was back to about 1.9 million passengers in December. Hotel vacancy rates are down. Restaurants are getting busier, but they still serve far fewer people than they were before the pandemic. Some people are going out to dinner, but more are choosing to bring home take out. Manufacturing orders nationwide were up 15.5% last year over 2020. The purchasing managers index, which was up to 69, slipped to 62 in November. Manufacturing is above its index of 50, so we’re in growth territory.

That will increase with the easing of

supply chain issues, which will remain a concern through this year and into next.

Supply chains are complex with millions of products and people worldwide. It’s not something one person or entity can control. Companies can’t get the products they need. It has affected automobile manufacturing, which dropped in December after an increase, computers and technology. Companies are concerned about what pushed up the price index almost 19% year over year.

It’s impacting production. The personal consumption expenditures price index saw a 4.7% increase in November from

the year prior; that’s the biggest jump since 1989.

EDGETON: The life sciences sector was on fire again last year. There were 34 recruitment and expansion announcements by life sciences and related companies, representing almost $4 billion in investment and 4,800 jobs across the state. Biomanufacturing has been our bread and butter for the last 20 years. A number of announcements were in that sector last year, accounting for 3,000 new jobs. As a result, North Carolina has the country’s highest per capita employment

F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 25

2 0 2 2

25

1/19/22 2:28 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

in biomanufacturing. We also saw 800 new jobs announced by contract research and testing companies and nearly 800 by gene- and cell-based therapy companies, both sectors where North Carolina holds a global leadership position.

STITH: The community college system’s customized training efforts helped 22,000 people last year, providing $9 million worth of support to businesses.

Its Small Business Center Network helped grow or retain more than 3,800 jobs and start more than 650 small businesses. State leaders invested more than $1.4 billion in the system. That’s the largest investment in more than a decade and will provide the resources needed to continue its economic development efforts. Through Gov. Cooper’s Longleaf Commitment, more than 10,000 high school students are

26

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 26

N O R T H

able to move forward in their education, in many cases free of tuition or fees.

We’ll start with that high school student who is interested in joining our more than 500,000 students pursuing short term workforce training or a two-year associate degree. Support from key stakeholders, such as the Belk Endowment, launched a pilot program that helps adult learners obtain education and training, making them immediately competitive in the job market. North Carolina was one of six states to receive a national grant that, in partnership with the Belk Endowment, funds a workforce development program for adult learners in diverse communities. More than 20 community colleges are participating in it. We’re partnering with health care providers. The community college system provides almost half of the nurses in the state. The GlaxoSmithKline Foundation

C A R O L I N A

is helping fund a $2 million pilot program that ensures that nursing pipeline remains full.

CHUNG: The statistic that reveals the most about last year is 24,224 announced new jobs and more than $10 billion in new capital investment. While both are records for North Carolina, they only represent corporate recruitment and expansion projects that received state assistance such as incentives.

Others, such as Google, which announced a Durham hub that will employ hundreds of engineers, and Fidelity Investments, which is adding 1,500 jobs at its Research Triangle Park campus, didn’t use state assistance, so they aren’t included in those amounts. It takes a team, including EDPNC, SBTDC, N.C. Biotech Center, community college system and utilities, to reach these results.

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:28 PM

A large portion of our recent economic development success has skewed toward industrial, such as manufacturing, fulfillment and food processing. Projects usually break down 70% industrial to 30% office. It has been about 95% to 5%, respectively. We’d love to see it return to what we saw pre-pandemic, which included more corporate headquarters relocations. That’s something North Carolina has long excelled at attracting. Charlotte and Raleigh have proved attractive to companies fleeing states such as New Jersey, New York, Illinois and California. But many companies are in limbo, wondering about the future workplace. Will people continue to work from home? How much time will they spend in an office? Until there are answers to those questions, it doesn’t make sense for them to uproot their current headquarters. That may

be one reason demand is low for these projects. Consumption shifting to goods from services explains the increase in manufacturing projects.

COPELAND: Even with the pandemic and labor shortage, North Carolina is better off than many places. Financial services is one of the state’s leading industries. I recently met with executives from the world’s fifth largest bank, and they said businesses have to look at North Carolina if they’re planning an expansion because of its workforce. North Carolina has created a great education system, and it’s adding infrastructure to attract companies. We’re watching the state corporate income tax disappear.

North Carolina’s GDP is larger than Sweden’s GDP and twice that of South Carolina. We’re the 21st largest economy in the world. The corporate world,

whether it be Toyota, Fujifilm, Merck or Bank of Japan, takes note of that. North Carolina is well prepared for the future.

HICKS: SBTDC served more than 12,000 small businesses in North Carolina over the past two years. We saw their challenges and uncertainty, then we saw their hope and optimism toward the end of last year. The small businesses that we serve created and retained more than 16,000 jobs. Workforce is a huge challenge for small businesses. Take a 10-employee company. When two people don’t come back to work, that’s 20% of its workforce. Most small businesses depend on a specific supply chain. They don’t have numerous suppliers to reach out to or toggle between. One way they overcame recent economic challenges was by reaching out for assistance.

North Carolina has many resources for

F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 27

2 0 2 2

27

1/19/22 2:28 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

small businesses, including SBTDC and the community college system’s Small Business Center Network. They have provided countless hours of service. We’ve seen a lot of growth with certain small businesses, especially those in manufacturing. Many are looking to expand.

FUSCO: Load growth is universal among our members, from municipal utilities near major metropolitan areas to those in standalone cities and rural communities.

The departure of the state’s traditional manufacturing, such as textiles and tobacco, is more or less behind us. New customers, including transportation and logistics businesses and advanced manufacturers, are arriving. Many coastal communities, for example, are welcoming boat builders. High-tech companies, many bringing data centers, demand a lot of electricity. Cryptocurrency miners,

28

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 28

N O R T H

which may or may not have a significant impact on economic activity, are locating here because of the state’s affordable electricity rates. We are seeing foreign direct investment by companies who want to onshore portions of their supply chain instead of relying on overseas options, whose reliability has been tested during the pandemic. Uncertainty is an issue for my industry, which is heavily regulated.

Regulatory changes that happen quickly have significant impacts on it. Some of those contribute to the inflationary fears that we see, especially with the cost of clean energy. It’s important, and we want to drive toward it. But the bill that Gov. Cooper signed into law in October, which calls for carbon neutrality by 2050, will likely increase the cost of electricity. We’re positioning ourselves to help many of our new customers meet their sustainability targets. North Carolina is a

C A R O L I N A

relatively clean energy state. It has a lot of nuclear and a fair amount of natural gas generation. It will improve as more renewables come online. While that presents some challenges, the energy industry is positioned to handle them, opening the door to more opportunities down the road.

HOW IS RISING INFLATION AFFECTING NORTH CAROLINA? STECKBECK: Inflation is a worry. It was up 6.8% from a year ago in November.

Four factors are driving most of the jump. The first is supply chain issues.

Demand is increasing without a comparable increase in supply. Government fiscal transfer packages and spending have increased significantly. And now with President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan, there’s concern about the infla-

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:28 PM

tionary effects of that spending. The Federal Reserve assets increased to $8.6 trillion from about $7 trillion over the last 18 months. Thirdly, liquidity has to be reined in. The Fed says it’s planning three interest rate increases this year, instead of two. We’ll see if that’s effective. The fourth factor is less labor-force participation. There were about 12 million job openings in the United States in December, and plenty are going unfilled. A big reason is stay-athome parents, who are mostly women.

Schools are closed, so they have to care for their children instead of working.

Some people that had low-wage jobs are realizing that that work isn’t worth its pay. But the biggest is baby boomers deciding to retire early. Their number jumped 3.8% in 2020 from the year prior. The selling price of their house and their stock portfolio are both up, so they

decide it’s time to cash in. Hopefully many of these issues will abate soon.

The Fed is predicting a 2.5% inflation rate by the end of the year. I think that’s overly optimistic.

CURRIE: There’s an extraordinary amount of liquidity in the system. The Federal Reserve and federal government have pumped in a lot of it. It will take time to work its way through. The drumbeat of inflation will get louder, not quieter, this year. It has created a lot of growth in the financial services sector, but it has created imbalances, too. It has been a long time since our economy has faced inflation. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it’s difficult to get it back inside. The Fed is working to contain it sooner rather than later, and that tightening of economic policy will impact businesses.

HOW WILL COVID CONTINUE TO SHAPE THE STATE’S ECONOMY? LAWLER: We’re starting year three with an unprecedented pandemic that has made the past two incredibly challenging. The people working every day at hospitals and in health care systems are heroes. Their sacrifices and determination have kept North Carolina from the dire situations seen in New York, New Jersey, California and other places. The COVID mutations remain a question moving forward, but we’re optimistic.

We’re convinced the pandemic situation will improve, because we’re better at our work. Our ability to care for COVID patients has significantly improved over the past two years. There are new therapeutics, and we’re confident that we can return patients home, even if they’ve been critically ill. Wearing a

ONE MODERN GE SYSTEM E L L O C Y IT N U M M O C NGINE. E B O J .’S .C N G IN L E FU 58 colleges

525,000+ students enrolled Third largest community college system in the U.S.

COUNTLESS MPANIES. O C R O F S IE IT N U T OPPOR Short-term workforce training Career and technical education options Registered ApprenticeshipNC Program – yielding 170% ROI to employers Small Business Center Network – helping 650+ businesses get started each year, creating or retaining 3,800+ jobs annually Customized training and professional development – trained 21,700 people last year, serving 1,012 companies

LEARN MORE AT

ION.COM YOURHIREEDUCAT F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 29

2 0 2 2

29

1/19/22 2:28 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

year. We’re seeing an influx of demand because of the need for more facilities and treatments.

mask and getting vaccinated and boosted are the most important things that North Carolinians can do. The science doesn’t lie: 98% of ICU patients are unvaccinated, and 98% of patients on ventilators are unvaccinated.

STECKBECK: COVID is the great uncertainty that will continue to be a major issue this year. Employment in all sectors stayed the same or increased last year except for health services and education. I was a member of a charter school’s board up until last summer, and we are struggling now to find teachers and substitutes. Many are passing on jobs because they don’t want to risk catching COVID by going into a classroom. And the vaccine mandate may be keeping some health professionals from remaining on the job. COVID can change life quickly. Schools, for example, are open one day and closed the next. I’m not a COVID expert, but I have read that there’s optimism that future mutations will be less dangerous than recent ones.

While vaccinations will help improve the situation, I believe COVID, in some form, is here to stay.

COPELAND: Gov. Cooper met the pandemic with stay-at-home orders on March 27, 2020. We’re in a different place today. Most of us will admit that we’ll survive COVID, learn to live with it and keep our economy. North Carolina didn’t halt construction during the pandemic. It also had few restrictions on manufacturing. Those responses differentiated us from other states. So, while we struggle with some supply chain issues, it’s nothing like states that shut down manufacturing. Truck-maker Freightliner, for example, which has operations in Stanly and Gaston counties, couldn’t source key parts because Michigan shut down its manufacturing.

EDGETON: The pandemic accelerated activity in the life sciences industry last

30

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 30

N O R T H

STITH: Every community college in the state remained open last year despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. Many pivoted to virtual learning in addition to on-campus classes. The pandemic caused our enrollment to decline, but numbers from our most recent fall semester showed a slight increase.

We’ll build on that moving forward.

WHERE ARE NORTH CAROLINA’S ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES? COPELAND: President Biden recently signed an executive order that calls for electric vehicles to make up at least half of new-car sales by 2030. What happens when we no longer have internal combustion engines? North Carolina has thousands of people making auto parts. We need to prepare by rigorously training and deploying people to work on EVs. STITH: North Carolina’s competitive advantage is its skilled workforce, which attracts companies and supports expansion of existing ones. Incentives are important, but when it comes down to that final decision, corporate leaders want to know there will be a continuous supply of properly and sufficiently trained workers.

LAWLER: Our opportunities lie in workforce. There are about 700,000 health care jobs in North Carolina. And for every job in a hospital or health system, there are two-and-a-half jobs supporting it.

Replenishing our talent supply is important. But we need to add talent, too, so we can continue to grow a health care presence that’s attractive to business and industry. We’ve been sending North Carolina tax dollars to other states to help expand their Medicaid coverage for

C A R O L I N A

too long. There are half a million North Carolinians without coverage. Expanding coverage in North Carolina is a wise investment and wise strategy. It will be good for business and create more coverage opportunities. It will reduce charity care and bad debt, which hospitals have been carrying for years.

CHUNG: We’re excited about what the new energy legislation means to companies. It was a difficult thing for the governor and General Assembly to thread the needle on; how do we meet climate objectives without compromising reliability or competitive rate structure for utilities. The legislation has done a good job of that? When companies, especially those in advanced manufacturing, evaluate potential locations, more of them want to be assured that their energy is generated from reliable, sustainable and clean sources. The fact that North Carolina has been proactive is one more advantage over states that haven’t taken that step yet.

EDGETON: We are rich in many ways, including talent and ideas. Universities and research labs statewide have ideas and items that could be sped to market.

We’re looking for ways to do that efficiently and effectively. Local, venture or early stage investments are needed to bring that science to market. It fuels industry growth. Infrastructure is currently being addressed. We also are working to ensure more people and companies see North Carolina as competitive with other major life-science markets such as San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

FUSCO: Growth isn’t expected to slow this year, based on the leads and projects in the works. Toyota’s $1.3 billion battery factory project at the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite is interesting.

It’s the type of load that we see growing on our members’ systems. Amazon and other logistics providers are converting

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 10:09 PM

F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 31

2 0 2 2

31

1/19/22 2:32 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

their fleets to EVs. That will create future load. Most people recognize the effort to electrify vehicles, but many don’t realize manufacturers are electrifying their processes, too. North Carolina is an energy hub, home to utilities, industry-specific workforce training, research and development, and manufacturing. That’s a great resource for those companies.

be driven by businesses already here.

We need to continue growing small and large businesses.

WHAT WILL THIS YEAR BRING?

HICKS: We’re well-poised for smallbusiness growth. Almost 190,000 businesses started in North Carolina last year. They make the state as a whole better. They offer the supply chain support, for example, that larger companies need.

STECKBECK: North Carolina has a $660 billion economy. It’s expected to grow 4.5% to 5% this year. The prime age workforce has shrunk as baby boomers leave, but it’s growing again.

Expect to see many more people coming to North Carolina. Businesses, such as Apple, are coming, too, and they’ll bring even more people. That influx will improve the economy. GDP follows population growth.

CURRIE: North Carolina does an outstanding job attracting investment and talent, but it also must focus on what’s here. Most of its economic growth will

LAWLER: We’re optimistic. There have been positive discoveries throughout the pandemic in regards to better connecting with our communities and

32

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 32

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

intervening with patients outside of a hospital setting. Those will continue as we think about health care from a consumer’s perspective rather than as a funnel, which catches patients and their family at a time of their greatest need. There are leading institutions in the state that have been doing that for years. We’re learning about the value of telehealth, for example, and its ability to reach rural communities and provide state-of-the-art care and a subspecialty physician presence. We’ll continue to look for ways to connect with patients.

The industry will see growth this year.

Strong health care is key to attracting businesses. Schools, hospitals and physicians matter. Hospitals and health systems will continue investing, creating clinical presences in growing communities. They will focus on securing and stabilizing health care in rural regions

SPONSORED SECTION

1/21/22 11:08 AM

of the state, which in many cases have been impacted and challenged the most during the pandemic. A health care workforce shortage is predicted, so we’re working with community colleges and universities to produce more health care professionals. Addressing that shortage requires creativity and attracting teachers and preceptors. It also requires the General Assembly to step up and write a check.

EDGETON: A federal Build Back Better challenge was offered at the end of last year, and 530 submissions were made nationwide. The program wanted projects that spread the wealth of employment across demographic sectors.

Projects chosen in Phase I received $500,000. Then they apply for Phase II, which awards between $25 million and $75 million. We coordinated with 28

partners and applied, becoming one of two projects in North Carolina that were approved out of 60 overall. We’ll apply for Phase II in March and hope to hear if we’re chosen by September. It solidifies North Carolina’s ability to work together across geography. Before the pandemic, we noticed demand for skilled workers within the biomanufacturing, cell and gene therapy, and ag-tech spaces. We’re seeing demand for workforce go up faster than we predicted. In just two years, we’ve eclipsed what we thought would happen in five years. We think this year will bring continued growth based on the leads that we’re working on with EDPNC. We have programs that help people into these careers. Our community colleges train people. About 3,500 people graduate from North Carolina universities with a master’s degree or Ph.D. in the hard sciences every year. We

need to show them the pathways into life sciences jobs, because they’re really good careers. The salaries are more than double the state’s average annual wage.

STITH: The community college system will apply last year’s investments and expand relationships with key partners such as the Golden LEAF Foundation.

It helped expand community college scholarships to students from historically tobacco-dependent communities.

Toyota’s factory is a gamechanger for all of North Carolina. It’ll have a statewide impact. We’ll have a regional response, providing a well-trained workforce for the automaker, which will be building batteries for electric vehicles, and the businesses in its supply chain. When I speak with business leaders across our state, they want to know how we’ll produce a highly trained and educated

F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 33

2 0 2 2

33

1/19/22 2:32 PM

ROUND TABLE

ECONOMIC FORECAST

workforce for the opportunities that are coming to North Carolina. We’re competing in a global arena, and the community college system is well positioned to meet the workforce needs of businesses here and those that will be part of our future economic growth.

We are very optimistic about our role in North Carolina’s economy and ability to be the leading educational and training entity in the state.

CURRIE: Issues around the tight labor market will continue this year. It’s difficult for any business to attract talent right now. As a state and as a country, we’re becoming more understanding in today’s strange pandemic affected environment. We’re shrugging our shoulders, surrendering to slower service or an understaffed business that’s forced to close for the day. North Carolina continues to be a great place to live and work. People continue to move here, and its economy will continue to flourish as a result. That’s happening statewide — Charlotte, Raleigh, Pratt & Whitney in western North Carolina and Toyota in the Carolina Core. We’re having a revival of small-town North Carolina, too.

CHUNG: EDPNC is carrying about 200 active projects — potentially $70 billion in investments and 70,000 jobs — into this year. They include manufacturers of EVs, batteries and semiconductors; food and beverage; life sciences and biopharmaceuticals. Tourism continues to suffer in the state’s major cities because of a lack of business-related travel. COVID variants, which continue to cause meetings, conferences and conventions to be delayed or go virtual, only compound the stress felt by those who depend on this business. It’s neither a healthy nor sustainable situation. Leisure travel bounced back quickly starting in mid2020. That favors the coast, mountains and rural regions, where people who want to escape the pandemic can

34

B U S I N E S S

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 34

N O R T H

recreate or work remotely within the relative safety of wide-open spaces and a sparse population. We’re optimistic about returning to a life that more closely resembles the pre-pandemic normal this year. But we’re conscious of the crosswinds that need to be dealt with, too.

COPELAND: We’re watching North Carolina’s economy evolve, from tobacco and textiles to advanced manufacturing.

That requires fewer employees and more capital investment. We saw a k-curve with employment during the pandemic, when as many as 54,000 unemployment claims were being made each day on a system designed to handle 3,000 in a week. Most were from residents who earned $30,000 or less annually. At the same time, we set a record for capital investment and job growth. Some people say we’re awash in cash, and we are. The Trump and Biden administrations provided stimulus packages. The bottom end of the wage differential has changed dramatically.

When Amazon advertises for 125,000 jobs today, they pay more than what workers earn in typical industries. What’s keeping North Carolina afloat is its workforce development infrastructure.

It has about 600,000 people employed in private and public universities and community colleges. Businesses are going where they can find a workforce.

TOP PERFORMER North Carolina is a great place to do business. The state’s competitive tax rates, infrastructure, customized workforce development and quality of life are a few of the reasons it consistently ranks as a top state for businesses.

#1

BEST BUSINESS CLIMATE Site Selection magazine, 2021

BEST STATE FOR BUSINESS Forbes, 2017, 2018 and 2019

BEST STATE-LEVEL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION Development Counsellors International, 2020

#2

TOP STATES FOR BUSINESS CNBC, 2021

HICKS: Small businesses are nimble and resilient. I’m optimistic about this year. There’ll be a few hiccups and challenges such as debt. Most small businesses work with their own money, so they’re leveraged. The SBA’s economic injury disaster loans, for example, were wonderful. But a lot of it will come back as heavy debt for small businesses. ■

C A R O L I N A

BEST BUSINESS CLIMATE Business Facilities magazine, 2021

#3

LOWEST EFFECTIVE STATE TAX RATES FOR NEW FIRMS Tax Foundation, 2021

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:33 PM

F E B R U A R Y

Round_table_econ_forecast_Feb2022.indd 35

2 0 2 2

35

1/19/22 2:33 PM

Toyota’s giant battery factory may reshape the Triad.

ews that Toyota Motors will build the batteries to power its coming fleet of electric vehicles at a new factory in Randolph County, just south of Greensboro, spread quickly.

Just a few days after the Dec. 6 announcement, Greensboro Symphony Maestro Dmitry Sitkovetsky essentially dedicated the orchestra’s debut performance in Steven Tanger Center to Toyota. His comments received a loud ovation from the nearsellout crowd.

A few days later, Randolph County Commission Chair Darrell Frye was shopping at the Walmart in Archdale when an elderly constituent stopped him.

“Saw you on TV the other day,” the man said. “You were talking about that new battery factory. … That is the best news around here in years. It’s going to be great. Thanks for working that up.”

Pleasing a Walmart shopper and the symphony crowd in one

36

B U S I N E S S

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 36

N O R T H

fell swoop is a rare feat, any politician would confirm. But attracting Toyota to the Triad has that kind of dynamic impact, a signal economic development achievement likely to shape the region for decades, according to more than a dozen people involved in the project.

“We know it’s big — real big — but no one really knows exactly what will happen down the road,” says former Greensboro Mayor Jim Melvin, executive director of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation, which has provided critical funding and leadership since about 2011. “We don’t know what all Toyota will do there, but this is the world’s second-largest automaker (behind Volkswagen). … Toyota is a company that does not go backward. So it’s a pretty good bet that we won’t either.”

The battery factory is just a beginning, Frye adds. “It’s hard to think of all the places this could take us.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF TOYOTA

BY TUCKER MITCHELL

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:24 PM

Toyota is investing $1.3 billion in a 1,825-acre campus in northeast Randolph County. Toyota’s first electric battery facility in the United States is scheduled to crank up in 2025 with an expected 1,750 employees and four assembly lines.

Further development may more than double the size of the workforce.

If Toyota hits its investment and job creation targets, the supporting investment by public and private organizations at the site will exceed $700 million through 2064. Construction of the plant will also produce a major local stimulus. Toyota is sending more than 100 staffers to supervise construction with contracts soon to be let for site work, machine tooling and other support. Improving the area’s robust transportation network of railroad lines and interstate-like highways will require more construction and jobs.

Taxes on equipment and an annual payroll of more than $100 million will help fill state and local coffers. Randolph County expects its $14 million investment to be recovered in relatively short order, says Frye. Toyota pledges that its philanthropy will be the “best in town” for each of its markets, and boosters expect major ancillary benefits for the area.

Toyota’s past practice has been to host key suppliers on its own campuses. The company’s purchase of the entire 1,825acre site suggests a similar setup is planned in North Carolina.

New industrial, retail and residential development in adjacent areas also is expected.

A battery plant won’t draw as many suppliers as an automaking facility because fewer parts are required. But some suppliers will locate plants and warehouses in the region, says Kevin Franklin, president of the Randolph County Economic Development Corp.

“We’re developing other sites, and we certainly want as many of these other new jobs — suppliers and so on — in Randolph County as possible,” he says. “Some will have to be close by, and that favors us as the county where the site is located. But throughout this process, everyone involved has understood that this can be something that benefits an entire region, an entire state.”

Toyota’s first batteries won’t roll down the lines for three and a half years at a site that’s taken more than a decade to assemble. “As things progress, I think there will be more understanding that this is not something that’s just going to fall out of the sky all at once,” says Brent Christensen, CEO and president of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce.

“It happens over a long period of time — five years, a decade, and longer. There’s going to be a long roll-out,” he adds. “That’s a good thing. It allows for the process to be smooth, for some of the growth to be absorbed. This really has to be viewed in that sort of way.”

Christensen and other project leaders picked the code name “Darwin” for the Toyota project, suggesting an evolutionary event for the region that opens the door for significant opportunities.

The most obvious addition is a new era of manufacturing power in the Triad, which foundered in recent decades from the loss of textile and furniture factories. Population in the Charlotte and Triangle areas has grown at more than twice the clip of the Greensboro-Winston-Salem region over the past 20 years. The region has 30,000 fewer people employed now than in 2000, federal data shows.

But Toyota’s battery plant, and associated industries, could bring as many as 10,000 jobs, averaging more than $60,000 annually over the next 20 years. Many expect the company to add an adjacent EV manufacturing facility. Several existing U.S. automotive production facilities are near Toyota’s internal-combustion engine factories. Preliminary megasite plans on file with Randolph County show a 1,000-acre footprint with numerous buildings.

At the announcement attended by Gov. Roy Cooper and many state leaders, Toyota North America Chief Administrative Officer Chris Reynolds said, “this is only the beginning.”

A Toyota spokesperson says the comment referred to the company’s future with electric vehicles and nothing more.

But of course it does, local leaders say.

Toyota’s announcement also may unlock development that is only loosely connected to batteries, cars and transportation.

Greenville, S.C.’s experience with BMW — which operates an 11,000-employee manufacturing campus on Interstate 85 between Greenville and Spartanburg — is an example of this phenomena.

The German automaker began production in 1994 and has made a huge mark. Outposts on the BMW supply chain dot the landscape. Trucks and trains full of parts and completed vehicles pass each other daily from a new inland port near Spartanburg on their way to the Charleston port.

Greenville leaders remain amazed at the business that came because of BMW’s location decision. The area has added more than 370,000 people over the past 20 years, a 66% gain. Its downtown has become a popular entertainment district.

“When BMW began to look for a place, I know that there were conversations we (local leaders in Greenville) knew nothing about that took place with companies — not auto companies — that BMW knew who had been successful here,” says Mike Farris, CEO of Greenville Development Corp. “I’m sure (Toyota in the Triad) will have a similar effect. It will take time, but word does spread that way.”

BMW’s presence in South Carolina helped attract other European-based businesses to the Greenville area, says Bobby Hitt, a former state commerce secretary. It helped persuade Boeing to expand to the Charleston area in 2011, he adds.

F E B R U A R Y

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 37

2 0 2 2

37

1/19/22 6:24 PM

“You do like to see your city mentioned in The Wall Street Journal, other places,” Jim Melvin says. “That lets people know that there just might be something going on down in North Carolina. We were doing fine before, but this is better.”

There’s also hope that Toyota’s expansion will help turn the Triad and central North Carolina into a hub for a vital technology of the 21st century. Many battery-building partnerships are being formed, while major automakers are ramping up their battery supply chain, a natural response to government policy worldwide that is accelerating EV development. President Joe Biden and Gov. Cooper are pushing for

38

B U S I N E S S

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 38

N O R T H

EVs to account for 50% of new vehicle sales by 2030, up from about 4% currently.

The science and engineering communities are pressing for battery technology breakthroughs in vehicle range, charging time, cost and safety measures. Fortunately, North Carolina has a lot of pieces that could lead to a hub where brains, business and capital come together in a “Lithium Hills” environment, economic development executives say.

Belmont-based Piedmont Lithium is working on a $500 million effort in Gaston and Cleveland counties to mine the critical material for many electric batteries. Charlottebased Celgard, a Japanese-owned company that has a leading market share of components that separate the positive and negative ends of batteries, operates a 135,000-square-foot plant in the Queen City. Other component makers are within a one-day truck drive.

North Carolina also has powerhouse universities and more than 5,000 engineers living within an hour of the Randolph project.

Still, other areas have a head start in this race, and Toyota’s role as a catalyst can be exaggerated.

“Toyota is building a facility here for mass production, not research and development,” says Jin Cho, the South Koreanborn CEO of startup battery equipment maker Soelect in Greensboro. He led Johnson Control’s EV development team in the early 2000s, then came to North Carolina in 2013 and later taught at N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOYOTA

▲ Toyota executive Chris Reynolds shared the news about Toyota’s new battery plant in North Carolina on Dec. 6.

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:25 PM

“I’m very familiar with the Japanese. … R&D generally doesn’t leave Japan,” he says. “So that will take a long time if you’re counting on Toyota to lead it.”

Toyota’s new plant will produce a battery similar to those that power its Prius and other hybrid models. Toyota’s speciality is perfecting quality and improving technique. The “battery of tomorrow” is a long-term goal.

“There aren’t many people who really know batteries around here,” Cho says. “When I was at A&T, it was me and a guy at N.C. State. There are a few more there [at State] now. As far as startups in the state, we [Soelect] are about it. You look at Silicon Valley and Stanford, and there are 300 startups. There are probably 30 in Boston around MIT. There are quite a few in Detroit. This is what we’re up against.”

Cho says he has struggled to recruit “battery people” to

Soelect because there is no ecosystem in North Carolina. A state-funded battery technology center could help charge the ecosystem, Cho suggests, though he’s been unable to generate much enthusiasm so far. The Future Renewable Electric Energy Distribution and Management Systems Center at N.C. State researches battery technology, among other projects.

Frye, who has been a county commissioner for 40 years, says Toyota’s expansion creates an optimistic future.

“This is still an area where we’re based on furniture and textiles. That’s still the base here. We weathered all that but we had to do something else. We had to. There were problems developing. People were leaving. Our hospital was closing. But now we have [Toyota],” he says. “This will fix a lot of that. It will provide.” ■

A 2017 setback reinforced state leaders’ push to attract a big factory.

Melvin says a critical meeting involved McCrory, former N.C. Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker, and auto dealership kingpins Don Flow and Rick Hendrick. All agreed that it was time for North Carolina to assemble a serious megasite and offer a competitive incentive package. For too long, big automotive manufacturing projects were landing in more generous Southern states.

“So we said, ‘OK. You get the incentives. We’ll get the land,’” Melvin says.

In 2017, lawmakers approved aggressive incentives for massive corporate expansions after Senate leader Phil Berger — who had opposed them previously — agreed change was needed. Toyota’s incentives package, which could total more than $635 million if employment and investment targets are met, gained approval with relative ease because of backing from Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore and Gov. Roy Cooper.

ttracting Toyota to Randolph County was an economicdevelopment coup that will resonate across the state for decades to come.

For some leaders, it’s meant decades of preparation, too.

The genesis of the plan came from the Piedmont Triad Partnership in 2001, former Greensboro Mayor Jim Melvin says.

But the real work began in 2011 when leaders began to focus on large tracts in Randolph and Davidson counties.

In late 2012, then-N.C. Gov. Beverly Perdue, with a push from N.C. Rep Harold Brubaker of Asheboro, awarded a $1.67 million economic-development grant to the county to create a site. Perdue’s successor, Pat McCrory, picked up the ball in 2013.

F E B R U A R Y

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 39

2 0 2 2

39

1/19/22 6:25 PM

As for land, Melvin’s team in 2015 hired Realtor Sam Simpson and real-estate attorney David Joseph, both of Greensboro, to plan for a site in northeast Randolph County. The area offered great access to highways and rail lines.

Simpson and Joseph recommended offering property owners 2.5 times assessed value. This would jumpstart land purchasing

by Randolph County and the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation. Paying a top rate would also negate any need for eminent domain proceedings, referrring to forced sales.

“It worked,” says Melvin. “As soon as word got out, our phone started ringing off the hook.”

Adds Darrell Frye, chair of the Randolph County Commission, “It became a 401(k) for a lot of people who maybe didn’t have a 401(k).”

A single owner who controlled more than 500 acres was among the first to call. Eventually, 92 individual pieces of property were acquired. The average price was about $35,000 per acre, on par with other large commercial projects in the county.

Just as funds for land acquisition were running out, N.C. Railroad President Scott Saylor approached Melvin about joining the effort. The railroad’s board approved a $13 million investment in 2015, the first of several serendipitous events that would eventually involve more than 21 public and private entities.

Under Saylor, the railroad company — which leases track and doesn’t operate a railroad — had started investing in major projects to benefit the entire state. Its investment in the site eventually grew to $44 million.

“We were running out of money,” says Melvin. “The county had capped its land purchases at $10 million, and we couldn’t spend everything the foundation had on this project.”

Where would the money have come from if Saylor hadn’t shown up?

“Don’t know,” says Melvin. “Fortunately, I never had to ask.”

The partnership acquired about 1,500 acres, which it thought was plenty. Then, Toyota suggested it might bypass the site because its shape was wrong. Brent Christensen, president of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, flew to Chicago to resolve the problem.

“Essentially,” recalls Christensen, “our site was a rectangle and the client was looking for more of a square.”

Additional parcels of more than 200 acres helped “square off” the megasite and meet Toyota’s needs. The result was the final 1,825-acre site.

Melvin says the team’s response to negotiating with Toyota was simple. “Basically, our answer to everything they asked for needed to be ‘yes.’ Fortunately we had the kind of teamwork and collaboration that could make that happen. It was just magic.”

Other officials cite good chemistry among a broad partnership that helped tamp down conflicts among Triad municipalities and organizations.

Indeed, forging an agreement involving conservative Randolph County and urban Greensboro was not simple.

Donald Trump won Randolph County with about 78% of the vote in 2020, while President Joe Biden took Guilford County with 61%.

But Randolph County brought the site and enough dollars to the table to have skin in the game. Frye handled the local politics adroitly, although he says his support for the project, especially the first vote to purchase land, cost him the chairmanship for two years. Two other incumbents lost to newcomers who weren’t enthusiastic about the project.

Transportationrelated grants

Taxpayers and other groups are contributing more than $750 million to support the Toyota battery plant over the next 30-plus years.

Land purchases and related expenses N.C. Railroad Co. The Joseph M. Bryan Foundation Randolph County

Job development investment grants (Tied to meeting job and investment targets over 39 years)

$44 million $15 million*

First phase: $14 million

Second phase:

*The Bryan Foundation also contributed for other expenses

40

B U S I N E S S

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 40

N O R T H

$79 million $236 million

Phase 1 N.C. DOT appropriation

$135 million

Phase 2 N.C. DOT appropriation

$185 million

Golden LEAF Foundation

$40 million

Infrastructure grants City of Greensboro water and sewer Golden LEAF Foundation

$21 million $7 million

Source: N.C. Department of Commerce

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:26 PM

Greensboro 85 62 Pleasant Garden 421 62

Greensboro Randolph Megasite

Liberty

▲ The megasite is 25 miles from downtown Greensboro.

The city of Greensboro is spending $21 million to extend water and sewer service across the county line to the plant. The project is unworkable without that contribution because the existing sewer system in the area is maxed out, Frye says.

Then there is $40 million from the Golden LEAF Foundation, another key state economic-development engine. That money, one of the group’s biggest single commitments, will pay for adjacent road improvements designed by the N.C. Department of Transportation. It also is making a separate $7 million grant.

Project organizers also credit Duke Energy’s ability to move a major power transmission line that runs through the site as pivotal. Major grid systems are rarely moved, but Duke created a complex plan to run the line on the edge of the site, turning it at near-right angles twice on each end.

Duke has an 18-month timetable for moving the line. Anything more would have been unacceptable to Toyota.

Company policy also prohibited Duke from contributing to a project without an identified client, so some of the foundations ponied up for the work, says Andrew Tate, Duke’s director of economic development for North Carolina. Duke will reimburse those entities when Toyota starts paying for electricity.

The utility also crafted a plan to help Toyota meet its renewable-energy goals. Toyota will work with Duke and other vendors to fund construction of renewable-energy resources to produce power comparable to what Toyota will use at the plant.

The megasite partnership weathered a variety of other storms.

A “No Megasite” move gained some traction but was largely defused by listening to local concerns, Saylor says. The new owners took good care of the land and held several meetings to assuage concerns of a local volunteer fire department that used a lake at the property as a backup water source.

HB2, the state’s “bathroom bill” that passed in March 2016 and was rescinded a year later, also caused some worry. It oc-

curred as a joint venture of Toyota and Mazda considered a plant at the megasite. They instead chose Huntsville, Ala. in late 2017. It was the second time Alabama had won out over North Carolina for a big automotive project. (Mercedes chose Vance, Ala. in 1993.)

But out of those economic-development ashes came the realization that the Triad had the right site and right team.

Just days after the Toyota-Mazda decision, N.C. Railroad Co. board Chair Michael Walters rallied the troops at a dinner in Pinehurst. A few months later, Christensen invited site consultant Meredith O’Connor of real-estate giant JLL to address the Greensboro chamber. Her message: Don’t worry. You’ve got a great site. This will happen.

“The line that everybody remembered was, ‘Keep that champagne on ice,’” says Christensen. “And that’s what we did. We kept going forward. The team stayed together. Everybody was on board.”

In early 2021, the megasite team heard about a new client for the site, which turned out to be the old one.

“We thought all along [Toyota] really liked us,” says Melvin, “but it’s rare to get two bites from the same company.”

The conversation moved fairly quickly. The incentives were in place, and Toyota knew details of the state’s transportation and tax systems and abundant labor force. More than 800,000 people work within a 50-mile radius.

North Carolina’s low corporate tax rates are slated to decline in the next few years, and the state has few union members.

Unions represent about 1,000 employees at seven U.S. Toyota sites, a fraction of the company’s 176,000 domestic workers. A union isn’t necessary because of Toyota’s collaborative business practices, a spokesperson says.

Still, competition was fierce. Toyota looked at more than a half-dozen states in the Southeast and Southwest. One contender was a site near Austin, Texas to complement Toyota’s truck manufacturing operations in San Antonio and North American headquarters in suburban Dallas.

But in late November, North Carolina officials learned that the facility was coming to the Randolph megasite.

Losing the Toyota-Mazda deal to Alabama “actually turned out to be pretty important moving forward,” says Anna Lea Moore, the N.C. Railroad’s vice president for economic development. “We weren’t successful with that project, but it was obvious to everyone involved that we had something special, that our vision was on target.”

Melvin agrees that looking ahead is always critical in economic development. He tips his hat to John Motley Morehead, North Carolina’s governor from 1841-45, who later helped create a precursor to the state railroad. That’s the same entity that is critical for a project that may reshape Greensboro, where he once lived.

“And he did all that back in 1849,” says Melvin. “Now how’s that for long-range vision?” ■

F E B R U A R Y

36-41_Toyota_Feb-2022.indd 41

2 0 2 2

41

1/19/22 6:26 PM

Smashing barriers in politics, commerce and outer space is the life story for an influential Charlotte couple.

BY TED REED PHOTO BY ALEX CASON

42

B U S I N E S S

40-43_Joan-Smuggie_Feb-2022.indd 42

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 9:34 PM

PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA

e married an astronaut. She married a politician she calls “so likable” that even opposing candidates are fond of him. He started a drywall company in October. She works for a Fortune 100 company. He is well known in Charlotte as Smuggie. She is known globally, one of three Black female astronauts.

James Mitchell and Joan Higginbotham set goals and then accomplish them. They’ve broken through racial barriers, emerging as an enterprising power couple.

Mitchell was a Charlotte city councilor for 20 years, starting in 1999. He gained recognition as a conciliator who was in the middle of many key Charlotte development efforts, particularly downtown projects and affordable housing. He lost his 2013 run for the Democratic nomination for mayor to Patrick Cannon, who was arrested five months after the general election for wire-fraud charges that led to a 44-month prison sentence.

Higginbotham spent 13 days on a 2006 space shuttle mission to the International Space Station. She was a curious teenager, interested in math and science, who overcame lots of hurdles to become an astronaut.

When they make joint appearances, she speaks second after Mitchell says, “Let me introduce my queen. You are going to hear from someone who has been in space.” Mitchell’s aunt, retired Charlotte educator LaFredda Wallace, says Higginbotham is “a warm, wonderful person [who] can make anything pretty, and she has done the same for his life.”

Where they succeeded, success was not promised. “Black folks don’t go to space,” Mitchell says. “She ran into some of that.” He studied computer programming at N.C. Central University in Durham, graduating in 1985. “They ain’t going to hire no Negroes to run computers,” he recalls being told. Most of his friends majored in criminal justice, teaching and social work.

But a teacher at West Charlotte High School told him computers were a growth sector, so he became a programmer. He’s now an N.C. Central trustee.

Last year, Higginbotham considered running for the Democratic nomination to succeed U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican who is retiring. She later nixed the idea. “I think I can affect change in other ways,” she says.

She works for Collins Aerospace, a Charlotte-based division of conglomerate Raytheon Technologies whose products include systems that provide oxygen and water to the space station. Higginbotham’s job is to sell the systems to Boeing and other companies that support space exploration.

For Mitchell, 2021 was more dramatic than expected. He stepped down from the City Council in January to lead a construction company started by his mentor, Ron Leeper, who became Charlotte’s third Black City Council member in 1979.

Leeper, who is in his mid-70s, was looking for an exit from the business and started with backing from banker Hugh McColl Jr. in 1997. Since retiring two years later, McColl has invested in private-equity and investment-banking companies.

He and two local Black investors — Malcomb Coley, a regional

leader for the EY accounting firm, and retired Duke Energy executive Lloyd Yates — formed Bright Hope Capital.

Last January, Bright Hope struck a $1.5 million deal to buy Leeper Construction, enabling its founder to retire. The firm also hired Mitchell as president and made him a 25% owner.

Six months later, in early July, Mitchell was fired in a move that surprised him and the local construction industry. (See adjoining story for more details.)

Mitchell’s response was to use his industry contacts to start a drywall company, 5-Star Supply. He also plans to run for an at-large City Council seat this year.

Ms. Astronaut, meet Mr. Charlotte Higginbotham and Mitchell met in 2009 at a Congressional Black Caucus party in Washington, D.C. Then living in Houston, she was representing her employer, Marathon Oil. Both were divorced.

The party “was for young professionals under 35, although neither of us were,” she says. “I was there with friends — I wasn’t looking for love.”

Mitchell asked where she worked. She said Marathon after retiring from NASA. What did she do there? “She said, in a nonchalant way, ‘I was an astronaut,’ then she just kept talking,” Mitchell recalls. “She was so humble. I challenged her. I said only three Black females went into space.’ She said, ‘Name

▲ Joan Higginbotham worked at NASA for 20 years.

F E B R U A R Y

40-43_Joan-Smuggie_Feb-2022.indd 43

2 0 2 2

43

1/19/22 9:34 PM

▲ Bounced from R.J. Leeper, Mitchell started a drywall business.

Leading the construction company of his mentor, Ron Leeper, seemed like a dream come true for James Mitchell. But it didn’t pan out when his vision didn’t align with his partners.

Hugh McColl Jr., Malcomb Coley and Lloyd Yates formed Bright Hope Capital in December 2020 to boost businesses owned by Black and Hispanic operators. Their first acquisition was R.J. Leeper Construction, which had completed more than 150 projects since 1993. They hired Mitchell as president with a 25% stake in the business.

Six months later, in early July, Mitchell was fired in a move that surprised him. He and the partners “had different views of risk and the ultimate direction of the company,” he says.

Mitchell says he helped secure contracts that would have tripled Leeper’s revenue in 2021 to more than $60 million and them.’ I said, ‘Sure. First there was Mae Jemison. Second was Stephanie Wilson. Third was Joan Higginbotham.’”

He went speechless, realizing whom he was talking to. Mitchell knew the history. “You know how you follow something? I was intrigued with space, with how people train.”

Mitchell joked that he thought he matched up well. “She had played her big card, so I played mine,” he says. “I said I had been on the Charlotte City Council since 1999. And she looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I can’t stand politicians.’

I thought I had struck out, and I said, ‘Can we dance some more?’”

Later, Higginbotham, now 56, said she had grown up in Chicago, where crooked politicians are a tradition. Says Mitchell, “I started out at a deficit. I had to work my way up.”

Despite the obvious impediment, Higginbotham found Mitchell to be “a quintessential Southern gentleman, personable and outgoing.”

44

B U S I N E S S

40-43_Joan-Smuggie_Feb-2022.indd 44

N O R T H

led to more than $250 million in long-term opportunities. He oversaw planning for a Wilmington office.

Coley, who is board chair of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, says, “We wish him much success in his future endeavors; we want nothing but the best for him.”

Mitchell responded by starting 5-Star Supply, a drywall business. He gained experience in drywall construction while working for Winston-Salem-based Cinda Corp. in the early 2000s.

By late December, 5-Star Supply had nine employees and seven projects underway or planned, including a 12,000-squarefoot custom home in Mint Hill and work at Johnson C. Smith University and Fayetteville State University.

“My goal is that in year number six, I want to have $20 million in revenue.” ■ Eventually, Higginbotham moved to Charlotte, where Mitchell had two daughters. They married in 2012.

Fascinated by wires Higginbotham’s father was a dental technician. Her mother was a registered nurse who later earned a teaching degree. Her parents are her heroes, she says.

Early on, Higginbotham showed an aptitude for electronics. One night, when she was 10 or 11, she observed a wall outlet with colored wires at each of its four corners, and she came across a telephone with four loose wires in the same four corners. “I wired it one night and got a dial tone,” she says.

Another time, she took apart her brother’s transistor radio. “I was fascinated by the circuit board and wires.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Southern Illinois University in 1987. The placement office sent NASA her resume, prompting a recruitment call from an agency official.

C A R O L I N A

1/24/22 12:10 PM

▲ As a city councilor, MItchell earned a reputation as a dealmaker.

Higginbotham had hoped to work for IBM, where she interned for two summers. But IBM wasn’t hiring engineers then, instead offering her a sales job. “I’m not a salesperson,” she says.

She decided to work for NASA at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “I figured I would give it five years.”

By 1994, she had worked as an engineer on about 50 missions. A supervisor suggested that Higginbotham apply to be an astronaut. About 6,000 applied, and she was among 120 chosen for interviews but didn’t make the final 15 cut.

So she ramped it up. “They were not happy with my first master’s in engineering management [from Florida Institute of Technology], so I went back and got a second one [also from FIT], and I was selected in 1996.” She entered an astronaut class of 44.

During a December 2006 mission, Higginbotham’s crew hauled about 6,000 pounds of equipment and rewired the space station. “As I was looking back on Earth, I saw that Earth is very fragile. I had an epiphany. I became more aware of that.”

In 2007, Higginbotham concluded 20 years at NASA and stayed in Houston to work at Marathon as a senior technical consultant. For two years, she ran a malaria prevention program in Equatorial Guinea in west Africa. In 2011, she moved to Charlotte to work in community relations for Lowe’s and be closer to Mitchell. She joined Collins Aerospace in 2018.

Dealmaking, Charlotte style Mitchell, 59, received his nickname early. “He always had a smudge on his face,” says his aunt LaFredda Wallace. “He loved peanut butter and jelly.”

After college, Mitchell programmed computers for General Electric in Canton, Ohio, and then for American Greetings in Cleveland. Tired of cold weather, he returned home in 1989.

At the time, “African American business in Charlotte was almost nonexistent,” defined largely by former Mayor Harvey Gantt’s architectural firm, McDonald’s Cafeteria, The Charlotte Post, The Excelsior Club and a couple of funeral homes.

He worked for several companies before setting up his own consulting company. Ron Leeper, among the city’s best-known Black politicians, discerned a future public official.

During his 20 years on the City Council, Mitchell spent three years on the board of the National League of Cities, serving as president in 2011. As a councilman, Mitchell was a negotiator in projects including stadium upgrades for the Carolina Panthers, venues for the city’s NBA and minor-league baseball teams, national conventions for Democrats in 2012 and Republicans in 2020, and construction of the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

Mitchell learned the intricacies of land development and subsequently worked on six public housing projects. He’s proud of helping pave the way for Northlake Mall, a $160 million regional shopping mall that opened in his diverse district in 2005.

After its opening, he says, “I saw my public service career take off because I was seen as a dealmaker.”

Charlotte Republican John Lassiter, who served a combined two decades on the City Council and the school board, credits Mitchell’s “businesslike point of view. He understood the bid process and how to negotiate compromise, and when he gave his word, it was good. Trust is hard to find in a political space.”

The two backed a controversial center city public-private partnership that grouped three local museums on South Tryon Street with an office tower and condos planned by Wachovia Corp. It occurred just before the bank’s financial collapse in the 2007-09 recession. “Both Democrats and Republicans didn’t understand the project,” Lassiter says. “James hung in there and tried to make sure we had the votes. I thought it was going to leave a lasting impact on uptown [Charlotte] — which it did.”

For Mitchell, the 2013 mayoral primary versus fellow Councilman Cannon was a turning point. “I knew Patrick was not the right leader for the city, and I thought that with my local success and national profile, people would see great leadership.

But when I got beat, I realized I needed to make some money.”

Leeper helped Mitchell land a sales job in Charlotte for Southfield, Mich.-based construction firm Barton Malow. Later, he moved to another contractor, Kansas City-based JE Dunn, attracted by annual compensation topping $200,000.

With Leeper eyeing retirement, McColl connected the two.

At his new firm, Mitchell wants to join the half-dozen Blackowned businesses in Charlotte with annual revenue topping $20 million. “The landscape has improved, but the size of most companies is too small,” he says. “I would love to be Atlanta.”

Leeper was surprised by Mitchell’s departure. “I had a great desire for James to be a continuing part of the company I started. That was my desire and his desire. But it seems clear to me that was not the path the Lord chose for him.

“He would have done well at R.J. Leeper, but sometimes it takes a while to figure out what the right path is.” ■

F E B R U A R Y

40-43_Joan-Smuggie_Feb-2022.indd 45

2 0 2 2

45

1/19/22 9:35 PM

LEADERS OF THE PACK

Stories of 25 N.C. minority-owned companies sustaining impressive success.

Profiles were written by: Colin Campbell, Jennings Cool, Connie Gentry, Edward Martin, David Mildenberg and Ebony Morman.

D

ecades of talk about the importance of empowering minority-owned businesses has led to limited success. The gap between Black and Caucasian household incomes widened in recent years, partly because of the pandemic’s impact. Wealth-building remains a challenge for many of nearly 40% of the U.S. population that identifies as a racial or ethnic minority.

Still, there’s hope that 2021 marked a turning point given unprecedented attention paid by major corporations and economic development groups to empower minority entrepreneurs. When Business North Carolina sought nominations to spotlight thriving minority-owned businesses, we received an outpouring of suggestions that led to this feature. It presents an optimistic picture.

Featured businesses range from contractors to restaurateurs to small-batch specialty retailers. It includes the state’s largest minority-owned law firm, the nation’s second-biggest minority-owned bank, and a furniture store owner who emigrated from Mexico to Duplin County at age 19. Well-known leaders are spotlighted along with some new faces.

These companies have operated for at least three years, shown revenue growth and demonstrated an impact on the community through innovative products, services and civic leadership. Several diverse N.C. business leaders helped advise the magazine’s editors as we considered the nominations.

There will be a time when business publications won’t need to identify minority-owned enterprises, and some owners this year emphasized their pride in operating successfully without labels. The companies stand on their own merits. Still, most leaders acknowledged the importance of greater inclusion in the broader business community while noting the reality that business success inevitably requires personal initiative.

As Kenansville farmer Ron Simmons quoted his grandfather’s advice, “The only one that controls your destination ultimately is you.”

46

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 46

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:30 PM

THE BANKS LAW FIRM Durham Principal: Sherrod Banks Founded: 1994 Employees: 23

development and housing conferences in Washington, D.C. and you could count the North Carolina lawyers on one hand,” he says.

Now, creating public-private partnerships for housing developments for residents with limited incomes has become a herrod Banks wishes there major focus nationally, creating big opportunities for law firms. were several minority“There’s been a total sea change,” he says. “I used to have to owned law firms in North explain what I did for a living. But during the last presidential Carolina that were larger than election cycle, they were debating affordable housing on the his. “It would mean that other debate stage.” minorities would know it is Banks’ firm has worked with developers and community groups doable and that barriers have from Elizabeth City to Shelby and many government housing come down.” agencies including Charlotte’s Inlivian. Community development But for now, Banks Law Firm has that distinction, reflecting also includes stadiums, convention centers and many other more than 25 years of effort to build a practice with 13 lawyers and civic projects, he notes. “We’ve been able to represent every a main office in Durham and satellites in Atlanta, Charlotte interest around the table, but today it’s mostly nonprofits and and Houston. private developers.”

The Edenton native earned bachelor’s and law degrees at UNC Competing against entrenched firms is challenging, largely Chapel Hill, then joined Durham’s Newsom, Graham, Hedrick, because personal connections are critical in many lawyer-client Bryson & Kennon law firm in 1988. The son of a teacher and a relationships. And Black lawyers haven’t always had similar access textile worker, it took Banks a while to recognize that he had some to the power corridors. entrepreneurial instincts, having started microbusinesses such “It can be harder for corporate decision makers to choose you as a bike-rental business and a janitorial service while attending when they haven’t had a relationship,” he says. “Why take a risk?” college. “I never saw that as being an entrepreneur. It was just a Fortunately, Banks says, strong relationships with long-term way to make money to bridge gaps.” clients provide a bulk of his firm’s revenue and growth In 1994, he started his own firm with a focus on employment prospects are bright. “Completing the projects that cities and and affordable housing cases. The latter subject was an obscure others want to have done is what gives you the personal and practice in the mid-1990s. “I recall going to community emotional gratification.”

S

BOGUES GROUP Charlotte Owner: Brittney Bogues Founded: 2018 Employees: 3 full-time, about 7 contractors

B

rittney Bogues, 34, has been leading entrepreneurial pursuits for 10 years. After closing her first business, All In Public Relations, Bogues worked for several nonprofits before

founding Bogues Group in 2018.

“We always say we are a consulting agency, specializing in marketing, public relations and event planning,” she says. “From start to finish, everything we do for each client is customized. We believe it is all about finding the right solution and connecting them with the right audience.”

The agency’s motto is to leave anything touched better than it was found. She works with business partner Jaclynn Cross, an assistant and a project manager, along with about seven contractors.

Seeing the agency’s work transfer to how her clients contribute to various communities is a notable feat for Bogues and her

team. In 2021, Bogues Group worked closely with nonprofits Communities in Schools and The Arts Empowerment Project, helping raise more than $200,000 to benefit Charlottearea children.

Bogues Group has helped promote both local and national clients including the Mecklenburg County ABC Board, Myers Park United Methodist Church and Muggsy Bogues Family Foundation. Her father, Muggsy, is an iconic former Wake Forest University and Charlotte Hornets basketball star.

Other community partners include Harvest Center of Charlotte, Goodwill of the Southern Piedmont, Mental Health America of Central Carolinas, Salvation Army Center of Hope and Food Lion.

Combined impressions for media placements from philanthropic initiatives in 2021 totaled about 24 million. Other placements were featured on outlets with a total of more than 251 million impressions in 2021.

Bogues says she tries to lead by example and to be a part of the solution without dictating her team. “I would say I am somewhat of a servant leader. I say I shouldn’t be the smartest person in the room, so I really lean on my team to provide expertise in their area.”

Bogues says she measures success with a holistic viewpoint. “Am I living a life I am excited about? Are my clients excited with the work I am doing? Does my team feel important?”

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 47

2 0 2 2

47

1/19/22 6:34 PM

BAYHAVEN RESTAURANT GROUP

Charlotte Owners: Greg and Subrina Collier Founded: The Yolk, 2012 Employees: 17

P

PHOTOS BY PETER TAYLOR

ivoting through the COVID-19 pandemic has been a hurdle for the hospitality industry, but restaurateurs Greg and Subrina Collier have not lost momentum. “We are a Black couple from Memphis, Tenn. [Pivoting] is literally what we have been doing our whole lives,” he says.

While navigating shortages and other obstacles during the pandemic is a notable feat, Collier says the couple’s greatest success has been operating successfully while remaining true to their personal mission.

“People know who we are. People know parts of our story,” he says. “For us, to be authentic and to be good at what we do at the same time is probably our biggest accomplishment.”

The husband and wife team opened their first restaurant, The Yolk, in Rock Hill, S.C., in 2012 after moving to the Charlotte area from Arizona. “We found a place that was really a hole in the wall, had carpet on the ground … and I was like,

‘This is it,’” Greg says.

“I missed the South, and I had something to say. I knew that I wanted to put my food out there. I knew I wanted to learn who I was as a cook and as a chef later,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t going to do that working for someone else.”

At the beginning of 2019, the Colliers moved their business to Charlotte’s 7th Street Market under a new name, Uptown Yolk.

That same year, Greg was a semifinalist for the James Beard Best Chef award for the Southeast, a first for a Black chef in Charlotte.

The pandemic forced the restaurant’s closing in 2021, but plans call for a reopening this spring.

Meanwhile, the Colliers opened Leah & Louise in March 2020 at Charlotte’s Camp North End, a rustic factory redevelopment about 2 miles from the center city. The Mississippi Delta-inspired restaurant with a juke-joint atmosphere gained national renown, though its first four months were restricted to curbside pickup because of the pandemic.

In November 2020, Leah & Louise was named one of the best new U.S. restaurants by Esquire Magazine. In the following year, Greg and Subrina formed BayHaven Restaurant Group with a mission of fostering economic empowerment and community development.

Unafraid to take chances, the Colliers restructured their business model last year by adding a 23% service charge to all Leah & Louise guests’ checks. The purpose was to replace traditional tipping and create more consistent wages for their service team.

“We want people in our community to know that you can use the hospitality industry not just to create money but to be creative and take care of your family and to bring things to the community that may not have been in the community if not for the hospitality industry,” Greg says.

In addition to reopening Uptown Yolk this year, the Colliers are planning the return of the BayHaven Food & Wine Festival — which made its debut in October 2021 — and are launching new concepts, while also focussing on mentoring rising chefs. “At the beginning, my legacy was to be the best chef I could be. Now, my legacy is to create a space for and give the next generation the skills to be great chefs.”

48

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 48

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:35 PM

BLACK FOLKS CAMP TOO Brevard President: Earl Hunter Jr. Founded: 2019 Employees: 5

W

hen Earl Hunter Jr. explains Black Folks Camp Too, people often mistakenly assume he’s running a nonprofit. After all, plenty of charitable initiatives have tried to urge more minorities to take up hiking and camping.

He saw the challenge first-hand while on a cross-country camping trip with his son when he encountered just one other Black family.

But Hunter, 45, is addressing the issue after serving as the vice president of sales for Brevard-based SylvanSport, which makes camping trailers and other gear. He realized that the Black community is a massive untapped market for the outdoor recreation industry, which he calls “probably one of the most segregated industries in the world.”

Instead of taking grant funding to organize camping trips, Black Folks Camp Too partners with major outdoor recreation companies and state parks agencies to conduct research and develop successful marketing campaigns.

Hunter’s company has studied why so few Black people go camping. His conclusion is that for generations, many state parks and campgrounds in the South were for Caucasians, causing a long-term distaste. The resentment also goes back further to the Jim Crow era and advice from family members to avoid “the

woods” because that’s where cross burnings and lynchings often happened, he notes.

“The No. 1 thing that keeps folks like me out of the outdoors is fear,” Hunter says. “We don’t have any knowledge. We don’t know what RVs are. We don’t have any idea of what Leave No Trace principles are.”

Education, he says, is the solution. Black Folks Camp Too is working with state agencies in North Carolina and South Carolina to develop materials to help fill that knowledge gap. Outdoors enthusiasts also need to do their part by inviting Black friends, co-workers and neighbors to join them on trips to explore nature, he adds.

To foster a more inclusive environment, Black Folks Camp Too developed the “Unity Blaze” logo, which appears on stickers and other gear. “It’s letting you know that these people treat everyone equally” and it makes for an easy conversation starter, Hunter says.

His next initiative is helping historically Black colleges and universities develop outdoor recreation programs, attracting more Black professionals into industry and park system careers. Those jobs skew disproportionately white.

While most small businesses have expansion goals, Hunter hopes that Black Folks Camp Too can become obsolete if he’s successful in bringing diversity to the great outdoors. “Our hope is our company won’t be necessary in the next 10 years.”

BRODIE CONTRACTORS Raleigh Owner: Calvin Brodie Founded: 1989 Employees: 350

M

asonry is the foundation of Brodie Contractors, so it’s not surprising that President Calvin Brodie has concrete views about the nature of the company he’s headed for more than 30 years.

“We’re contractors, not

minority contractors.

“I want to compete, and if my stuff isn’t any good, I’m out of here,” he says. “The fact that I’m a minority, I don’t want to live on that. Legislation brought that in and the legislature can take it out. But if I show up with a good product and good crew of men, and my company performs well, the market is going to reward me. Always has.”

Bunn High School classmates Brodie and Alton Vines were

masonry apprentices. In 1978, after graduation, they formed Brodie & Vines Contracting, which became a licensed general contractor in 1985.

Four years later, Calvin Brodie went on his own, forming Brodie Contractors. He encountered the usual ups and downs of startups. “Money is always a challenge, but when times got bad, I found most times I could walk into a place and people would extend me credit.”

Brodie Contracting added projects such as the Veterans Administration Hospital in Fayetteville, Central Prison Medical Center in Raleigh, and many Wake County and UNC System school buildings. Brodie also built the sound barriers along the Interstate 440 Beltline in Raleigh.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused delays and canceled projects, but Brodie’s diversification helped spur growth. It has a trucking and hauling division.

Brodie is a former president of the N.C. Masonry Construction Association and member of the National Masonry Instructors Association Hall of Fame. An idea that started with two brick-laying high-school buddies now employs about 350 workers.

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 49

2 0 2 2

49

1/20/22 1:09 PM

Greensboro Founded: 1984 Owner: Cornelious “CC” Lamberth Jr. Employees: 15

C

ornelious Lamberth Jr.’s C2 Contractors operates on a simple principle. Hold us accountable, he says, “based on the quality of our work and the results we achieve.”

For more than 30 years, that’s worked for Lamberth, who goes by his initials, “CC.” While building his computercabling company, formally recognized by the state as a historically underutilized business, he’s set aside time to crusade for other minority enterprises and his alma mater, N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University.

He’s a 1989 graduate with a degree in electronics and computer technology.

C2’s bread and butter is building electronic networks that link computer servers and workstations, voice-over-internet systems, and other technology.

A prized project is the $34 million Union Square Project in Greensboro, a partnership among Cone Health, Guilford Technical Community College, N.C. A&T State, and UNC

Greensboro. It involved connecting more than 700 lines of highly advanced cabling.

The company has a general-contracting branch that has partnered with British contractor Balfour Beatty and Greensboro-based WeaverCooke in design-build contracts, demolition and other services. It worked with Balfour Beatty on N.C. A&T’s 175,000-square-foot student union building, which opened in 2018 at the Greensboro campus.

Lamberth has also served as a member of the executive board of the Greensboro Chamber and chair of the local NAACP’s economic-development tech program. He’s on the advisory board of his alma mater’s school of technology.

Lamberth says membership in mainstream organizations like the chamber enables companies like his to overcome a common barrier to growth — intentionally or not, potential clients tend to do business within their own circles.

More so than race, he adds, “it’s really all about business.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA A&T

C2 CONTRACTORS

CORE TECHNOLOGY MOLDING Greensboro Owner: Geoff Foster Founded: 2006 Employees: 40

I

n 2016 when electric cars started attracting major public interest, Core Technology Molding supplied German automaker BMW with electrical connectors and other parts for its X3 model. Last year, with pharmaceutical giants in a life-or-death race to develop COVID-19 vaccines, the company pumped out syringes and plungers for Pfizer.

“We just built our second clean room this summer,” founder and CEO Geoff Foster says. “We’re picking up the Merck vaccine business as well as Pfizer. We went from about 5% biopharma business to about 60%.”

The precision injection-molding company has plenty of upside in the automotive industry. It signed contracts recently with Volvo cars and trucks and Mack trucks.

Foster also hopes to develop ties with Toyota Motors North America, which plans a $1.3 billion electric-battery plant at the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite in Randolph County.

50

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 50

N O R T H

Foster, 54, is a New Jersey native who came south to attend N.C. A&T State University. He earned a master’s in industrial engineering there and later added a Wake Forest University MBA. Before starting his business, he was a manager at Becton, Dickinson and Co. in Durham. He’s received top entrepreneurship honors from Ernst & Young, the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and CarolinasVirginia Minority Supplier Development Council.

Core Technology’s most recent successes stem from “teamwork and partnerships,” including close ties with his alma mater. “I’ve been an adjunct professor there, now in my 15th year, in applied engineering, teaching one class a semester,” he says. “A&T has helped us tremendously with recruiting STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) employees.”

The company occupies a 35,000-square-foot building at Gateway Research Park in east Greensboro and sends its products to more than 150 countries.

“This is an extremely capital-intensive business and we have millions of dollars in equipment,” he says. “Starting out, financing is a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Everybody wants to know how many machines you’ve got and how many customers. But you can’t get the customers because you don’t have the equipment. That’s the biggest challenge.”

A decade and a half later, the egg has hatched.

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 11:35 AM

CHOCOLATAY CONFECTIONS Chapel Hill Owners: Danielle De La RosaWhite and Matthew White Founded: 2013 Employees: 2

HEADSHOT BY ANNA CARSON DEWITT PHOTOGRAPHY PRODCUT PHOTO BY DANIELLE DE LA ROSA

I

t fractures the proverb, but for Chapel Hill Chocolatay Confections, motherhood was the necessity of invention.

When their son Mateus, or Tay for short, was born 14 years ago, Danielle De La Rosa-White and husband Matthew discovered he was dangerously allergic to peanuts.

“We had a hard time finding confections he could eat,” she says. Because Matthew was skilled at cooking and had completed professional chocolatier training, they saw an opportunity. “We decided if we couldn’t find things Tay enjoyed, we’d make them.”

When the high-end appliance retailer where Matthew worked shut down, the couple moved from New York to Chapel Hill, where some family members lived. She had worked conventional 9-to-5 jobs in real estate and other ventures.

In 2013, the couple chartered Chocolatay. “North Carolina is one of the few states where you can start a business from home, so it was very low risk,” she says.

Eight years later, it practically defines a successful cottage industry in North Carolina. From a stainless-steel commercial kitchen certified by the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, the couple produce chocolates such as $5 almond ginger turmeric bars, $6 sunflower crunch cups, veganfriendly cherry pistachio bark, and catered boxes for events and

other special orders. Everything is prepared in a peanut-free environment.

Nearly all materials are sourced from farmers markets in Durham and Orange counties or from other local vendors. Salt for their dark chocolate sea salt bar comes from Wrightsville Beach’s Sea Love Sea Salt Co. “As we were honing our skills, we started to notice that people were more and more interested in sustainable food and knowing where your food comes from,” she says.

United Parcel Service recently featured Chocolatay in a national corporate advertising program as an example of smallbusinesses success during the pandemic. De La Rosa-White credits a UPS application called Shippo for helping boost its package shipping from one or two a week to dozens.

Being sole proprietors initially meant a work trap of 14-hour days. “It was like having a newborn — there were no days or nights. We got into the habit of overextending ourselves.” Now, they set formal work hours, balance work with family life and schedule production at least a week in advance. And they focus on their initial goal.

“We just want to make candy we can feel good about,” De La Rosa-White says.

CLEAN TOUCH PRESSURE WASHING CO. Greenville Owner: Russell Parker Founded: 1996 Employees: 3

how to land contracts with government agencies, businesses and other customers such as homeowners. He also served as a military policeman in the N.C. National Guard for 24 years.

Clean Touch’s early customers included the Greenville Housing Authority and Pitt Memorial Hospital (now Vidant Medical o Russell Parker, 59, Center). As his reputation grew, Russell added trucking and success and size are not charter-bus companies, owners of high-end cars and many others. synonymous. How many A specialty is church steeples, which required study in how to work employees does he have? Three, with brick. though he laughs and corrects Meanwhile, commercial and residential buildings have scores of himself. “Well, I guess you could different sidings, all with specific pressure-washing materials and say two. I love work and I get out equipment necessary to prevent damage. Cars, heavy commercial there with them.” trucks, recreational vehicles and charter jets also use different Clean Touch is typical of sole proprietorships that, according to coatings requiring special handling.

N.C. Department of Labor statistics, employ more than a halfParker’s training began before he started the business. “I came million Tar Heels. Less typical might be its 25-year longevity and the from a family of mechanics, and when they’d finished working on enthusiasm of its founder, a native of tiny Fountain in Pitt County. a car, they’d clean it up before sending it back. I learned about “I love to see something dirty, and when I finish, I stand back and cleaning cars when I was 8 or 9 years old.” say, ‘Wow!’” he says.

Cars have changed over the past 50 years, but Parker says a key Since 2010, he’s been president of the Minority Business element of small-business survival hasn’t. “Determination,” he says.

Roundtable in Greenville, coaching less experienced owners on

T

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 51

2 0 2 2

51

1/20/22 11:36 AM

THE DIVERSITY MOVEMENT Raleigh Owner: Donald Thompson Founded: 2019 Employees: 18

T

he Diversity Movement started as an idea to build one e-learning course that focused on inclusion and bottom-line results. Then, global unrest occurred as a result of George Floyd’s death and Donald Thompson — along with co-founders Jackie Ferguson, Kurt Merriweather, Sharon Delaney McCloud and Kaela Sosa — responded to the needs of clients.

Today, The Diversity Movement is a diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy that was one of two North Carolina companies cited in Inc. magazine’s Best in Business for 2021.

The business has served more than 90 clients including Lenovo, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and Truliant Federal Credit Union, while more than 100,000 people have studied its content worldwide, Thompson says.

“As a business leader and entrepreneur, I understand the challenges that C-suite leaders and managers face, so it is incredibly gratifying to watch our team help organizations as

they navigate this new world we now live in,” he says. “We know the best-performing businesses of the coming decade will embrace cultures of diversity, equity and inclusion. So, I am proud of our team’s efforts, especially considering the highly charged and emotional nature of the work.”

Thompson, 50, says The Diversity Movement offers business data and training through a suite of employee applications that track results. Its MicroVideo digital learning platform and other offerings help clients solve problems and improve their work environments.

“We view DEI as a business imperative and help our clients across their entire organizations,” Thompson says. “Unlike traditional consultancies that focus just on surveys, raising awareness or just implement one-off campaigns, we utilize a data-driven approach that is built on our clients’ successes.”

Thompson left East Carolina University as a junior to work full time, later becoming a top executive at two Triangle technology firms that were acquired by Adobe and India’s KPIT. He helped build Raleigh-based Walk West into a 40-employee digital-marketing company that ranked in the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in recent years.

He joined the firm in 2016 when Brian Onorio was the only full-time employee and stepped down last year as CEO to focus on The Diversity Movement. He remains Walk West’s board chair.

GLOBAL DATA CONSORTIUM Raleigh Co-founder and president: Bill Spruill Founded: 2010 Employees: 45

customers, and release two new products,” Spruill says. “We can become a $100 million organization in relatively short order. Five years ago, I would never have thought it possible, but I see a clear path — multiple paths — to get us there.”

Since topping $1 million in revenue in 2016, the company has been profitable. Initially funded by Spruill and his ill Spruill describes the partners, Global Data raised $3.5 million in July 2020 with last year as a tale of investments from Refinitiv and Village Capital. two cities. The financialLast March, it was one of five businesses in Plaid’s first technology company he FinRise cohort, which was created to empower early-stage launched in 2010 doubled founders who are Black, indigenous or people of color. San revenue year-over-year, Francisco-based Plaid, which has technology that connects topping $20 million. The team consumer bank accounts to financial applications, was valued grew substantially, with new staff in Seattle, Dublin, Lisbon, at $13 billion last year.

Stockholm and Sydney. In January, he added a staff member “We’ve got significant money in the bank and we continue in Buenos Aires. to grow and invest, so we don’t need to raise capital,” says The fraud prevention company provides digital payments Spruill, a UNC Chapel Hill graduate who previously was companies with identity verification of consumers and chief operating officer of AddressDoctor, a Raleigh database businesses. The company’s platform utilizes databases management company. in real time to mitigate risks associated with anti-money While Global Data’s success has been notable, 2021 was laundering and cybersecurity challenges. Clients run the Spruill’s worst year because of the unexpected deaths of his gamut from mobile payment companies like London-based sister in July and his mother a few weeks later.

SumUp (Europe’s equivalent to Square), to shared-economy “Dealing with the loss of my family was challenging for companies such as AirBnB and Uber, to the burgeoning me mentally, but it brought a new reality to me, and the crypto space. great thing was that my team kept the business running and “In 2022, we’ll expand our products, go deeper with existing growing,” he says.

B

52

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 52

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 1:50 PM

HOLT BROTHERS

PHOTO OF HOLT BROTHERS BY TIM LYTVINENKO

Raleigh Owners: Torry and Terrence Holt Founded: 2007 Employees: 20

F

ame is fickle. Gibsonville natives Torry and Terrence Holt benefited from the stardom achieved from their gridiron success at N.C. State University and a combined 16 years of National Football League experience. Their names opened doors, but nothing has come easy, says Terrence, the company president.

“People answered our phone calls and would even set up meetings with us, but sometimes they just couldn’t view us outside the light of being former football players,” he says.

Their corporation consists of construction and development companies, a foundation dedicated to their late mother, and a

football training business for young athletes.

The company now has general contracting and construction management projects in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

It has partnered on structures such as the $47 million N.C. Central University Student Union in Durham, which is expected to open soon, and the $58 million Raleigh Union Station train depot and event space completed in 2018. It worked with Raleighbased Clancy & Theys on the latter project.

Their launch in 2007 coincided with the onset of a recession, but they persisted. “That reset the table for us,” Terrence Holt says. “Some were going out of business, but because of playing in the NFL, we had resources we could bring to bear on the market.

We could convince people to give us a shot.”

Early on, the brothers dabbled in residential construction “which didn’t seem like such a good idea,” he says, but then settled on commercial building. Their pro football contracts “enabled us to spend four years researching what we wanted to try out.”

Their first contract was to renovate a Raleigh building for payroll giant ADP. “It was a $60,000 project, but Torry and I were there three or four times a week. It could have been $60 million.

We were just overjoyed to have landed a project.”

Hurdles remain. As a historically underutilized business, their company must go an extra mile to land contracts, Holt says.

Businesses “do business with the people they know,” and most construction companies are white male-dominated, he says.

“In the NFL, Torry had to make the catch or I had to make the interception, or we might not be on the team next week. There was no margin for error,” he says. “This is not a business for the meek, the faint of heart.”

LITHIOS Raleigh Founder and CEO: DeShawn Brown Started: 2014 Employees: 8

fast things can change — it happened super quickly.” Their app lost out to Uber’s marketing prowess, but when Brown graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2014, the Campus Cruiser experience provided inspiration to launch Lithios.

“We started with nothing except our skills and our passion for building apps,” he says. “But we don’t just make apps; we create he idea was simple: Solve experiences in people’s lives.” basic problems with Lithios now has business from Raleigh-based startups including user-friendly mobile experiences. Offline Media, Operation 36 Golf and sports officiating app Silbo.

DeShawn Brown and fellow Global brands including Bayer, Cree (now Wolfspeed), Intel and computer science students DraftKings also use apps designed with Lithios’ assistance. were building apps for fun in As virtual became the norm, demand for mobile experiences their junior year at N.C. State escalated and 2020 proved a record-setting year, with revenue University, and one problem they wanted to solve was gaining 40% from the previous year. Speedier work is now the transportation. norm. In 2020, Lithios created an app for Greensboro-based Triad None of them had a car, so they created Campus Cruiser — a HealthCare Network that replaced an antiquated email process ride-sharing app to connect students with car owners eager to make with mobile-based communications that keeps doctors, nurses and a few bucks. It was 2012, the launch year for two San Franciscoothers advised of the latest pandemic news and protocols. Building based companies, Lyft and Uber, unbeknownst to Brown. the app took about six weeks, compared with the more typical six Fast forward another year: Uber arrived in Raleigh and brought or eight months. game-changing lessons to the student entrepreneurs. The first Lithios’ project mix is veering to large corporations, but takeaway: It’s not enough to have a great idea. supporting startups still makes up as much as 40% of revenue, “You have to understand the competition and how it may affect Brown says. Staying ahead of technology evolutions requires your business,” says Brown, who is now 29. “Another lesson, how constant curiosity and innovation, he adds.

T

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 53

2 0 2 2

53

1/19/22 6:41 PM

MANOLO’S LATIN BAKERY Charlotte Owner: Manuel Manolo Betancur Founded: 1997 Employees: 20

“W

e don’t sell cakes; we sell happiness,” says Manuel Manolo Betancur, 46.

Happiness is delivered through experiencing one of the Manolo’s Latin Bakery’s specialty cakes, artisan breads or desserts. Offering Mexican conchas, Salvadorian empanadas, Tres Leches cake and other delicacies, there’s a savory or sweet option for all.

The bakery has become a staple in east Charlotte, with Betancur gaining respect as a major advocate for the state’s Hispanic community. Originally known as Las Delicias Bakery and Charlotte’s first Hispanic bakery, it rebranded to its current name in 2018 when Betancur became the sole owner.

The native of Colombia came to the United States in 2000, seeking a better future after serving in the Colombian military.

He received a student visa and was awarded a scholarship to King University in Bristol, Tenn., which eventually led him to Charlotte in 2005 and his work with the bakery. Betancur was involved in delivery, sales and other key tasks prior to taking over the business.

Difficult times during the recession of 2007-09 prompted the company to enter the wholesale market, which Betancur says saved the business. The bakery has experienced significant growth in recent years.

“We went from six employees to 20, from $300,000 in sales to $1.2 million in four years, including the pandemic time.”

With a focus on community, Betancur’s future plans include adding bakeries in other N.C. towns, starting a gelato franchise, and opening a vegan and gelato factory in Charlotte.

“I am in the business of happiness,” he says. “I make money creating happy memories. And of course, dreams come true in my place. The American dream is always still alive in my bakery.”

MCFARLAND CONSTRUCTION Charlotte Owner: Tino McFarland Founded: 2010 Employees: 50

“As we’ve expanded our footprint, we now have a number of strong clients that we’ve built relationships with, that we have long-standing agreements with, that we partner with and are trusted by.”

Recent projects include work at Charlotte-Douglas ino McFarland, 46, International Airport and UNC Charlotte’s Marriott started McFarland hotel. McFarland Construction offers design-build, general Construction with minimal contracting and construction management to its clients. It resources during the has a satellite office in Fayetteville. aftermath of the recession McFarland, who has a bachelor’s from Purdue University in 2007-09. With little work and an MBA from Indiana University, credits the company’s available, McFarland and his success to resourcefulness, strategic planning and a good wife, Tamara, pressed forward work ethic. It also benefits from having 13 different as the sole employees, using their townhome’s third bedroom nationalities represented on its team, McFarland says. as office space.

“The way we behave, how we consider others and how we Now in its 12th year, the company reported revenue bring diverse thoughts into our solutions shows up well,” he of $36 million in 2020 after working on a variety of says. “We’re a very diverse company, and that makes a huge government, financial-services, energy, health care and difference in how we fit into the marketplace.” education projects in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Its 2021 revenue will be about the same, he says.

T

54

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 54

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/19/22 6:42 PM

MARAND BUILDERS Charlotte Owner: Francisco Alvarado Founded: 1999 Employees: 145

N

ow in its 22nd year of operation, Marand Builders was started by Francisco Alvarado, who had worked for Hoechst Celanese for 14 years in the 1980s and ‘90s. The contractor focuses on finance, health, energy and general commercial projects through its six offices in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

The pandemic delayed some projects, but Marand still had solid results in 2021, aided by strong business in Florida where it operates in the Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa markets, says Laura Hay, a marketing assistant at the company.

Alvarado — who is a passionate supporter of his alma mater, Louisiana State University — has gained influence in Charlotte. He serves as executive chairman of the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council, which is made up of CEOs at the Queen City’s major employers. He is also on the Novant Health Foundation board and Charlotte Sports Council.

The business has a family flavor with Alvarado’s

wife, Jeannette, serving as vice president of finance and overseeing the human resources function. Their sons, Marcelo and Andres, are also active in managing projects.

More than half of the staff is female and/or minority, while the company has a goal of assigning 30% of its subcontracts to minority-owned businesses.

MASTER BLEND FAMILY FARMS Kenansville Owners: Ron and Laurita Simmons Founded: 2012 Employees: 12

I

n a good year, Kenansville’s Master Blend Family Farms will slaughter 700 or so hogs.

Sixty miles east in Bladen County at Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel plant — the world’s biggest — processing 30,000 is a slow day.

Master Blend has thrived for a decade because it has a niche. Eggs from cage-free chickens are increasingly common.

But who in the world of industrial pork has heard of pastureraised pigs, free to have a refreshing mudhole wallow on hot days and shift to greener plots when grass in one goes thin?

Owners Ron and Laurita Simmons have followed his 92-year-old grandfather’s advice.

“He got the grandkids together, sat us down under the apple tree in our yard and said, ‘Life will be hard, but never complain about what you don’t have,’” he says. “‘The only one that

controls your destination ultimately is you.’”

Simmons, 39, didn’t grow up in farming, but his wife’s father, James McGowan, now in his 80s, had raised pasture hogs for 30 years but stepped back in 2012. “I asked him if I could get the business back up and going,” he says.

Old farmers find nothing unusual about letting hogs run free until slaughter, but it hardly fits the industrial model. “I asked them a million questions,” he says. “I decided if we used their wisdom, we could avoid pitfalls.”

He isn’t mired in the past. Master Blend markets its pork online, has a retail store and food truck, and sells to local restaurants. It increasingly uses QR codes to ensure smartphone users that Master Blend products contain no growth hormones, steroids, antibiotics or pesticides. The farm is certified by A Greener World, a nonprofit that advances ecofriendly farming.

Master Blend is one of fewer than 1,600 Black-owned farms left among the state’s 46,000. Simmons credits its success to help from state agricultural extension agents. He teaches courses at N.C. A&T State University, supports 4-H and hosts youth tours.

For those reasons, he was chosen the state’s Small Farmer of the Year in 2018.

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 55

2 0 2 2

55

1/19/22 6:43 PM

MFB BANCORP Durham CEO: James H. Sills III Employees: 74 Founded: 1907

T

he pandemic turned out to be a growth opportunity for the nation’s second-oldest minority bank, CEO James Sills III says. “The year 2021 marked the best year in our history, in terms of total asset, loan and deposit growth, and total income over a two-year period,” he says. Assets jumped from $264 million to $372 million from 2020 to 2021.

Mechanics & Farmers Bank has faced lots of stressful circumstances since its formation more than a century ago. “We were founded to help farmers, mechanics, entrepreneurs grow their businesses at a time when most people of color — AfricanAmericans — couldn’t get access to credit,” says Sills, who has been CEO since 2014. “There’s a lot of pride in our institution, and we’re still carrying on that mission today.”

The Durham bank would become a pillar of North Carolina’s Black Wall Street in an era when similar communities elsewhere suffered. In 1898, white mobs killed an estimated 60 Blacks and destroyed many of Wilmington’s Black-owned businesses. Two decades later, Black businesses in Tulsa, Okla., suffered a similar fate with more than 100 people killed and thousands of homes and

businesses destroyed.

Sills says M&F’s social mission remains similar to its beginning days, but attitudes are dramatically different. The CEO points to equity investments in the past year by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup, and a recent $50 million deposit by grocery giant Food Lion. Those deals are aimed at expanding M&F’s ability to nurture growth of its minority-owned business clientele.

“We still have a lot of support from mom-and-pop businesses,” Sills says, “but large institutions see us as a means of reaching their grassroots. They understand we’re closer to the entrepreneurs in the communities we serve.” With branches in Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh and Winston-Salem, M&F lends out nearly three-fourths of its deposits to local businesses and consumers. It made about 800 loans totaling $50 million in the federal Paycheck Protection Program during the early months of the pandemic.

A banking technologist by training, Sills joined the bank after holding a cabinet role in Delaware state government. His father was the first Black mayor of Wilmington, Del. While M&F’s improved financial strength is welcome, their publicly traded bank faces the challenge of remaining minorityowned. African-Americans now control about 70% of its shares, a percentage that has declined in recent years. The transactions with the megabanks included limits on their ownership stakes.

“As long as we stay about 51% minority shareholders, we’ll be considered minority,” he says. It’s a concern his predecessors likely never faced.

METCON

T

he Southeast’s strong construction market is buoying Metcon, which reported a 43% increase in revenue to $150 million last year. It’s an acceleration of a long-term success story engineered by Pembroke native Aaron Thomas, who started the company at age 23.

He has built a major sense of pride in the Lumbee Native American community that is centered in Robeson County.

Last year, Metcon expanded its management team by hiring Steven Hunt as chief operating officer and named Thomas Plant as vice president of operations for the Raleigh market. Plant is a veteran industry executive who most recently worked for Choate Construction.

Metcon also added 10 staff members last year and maintained its record of never having companywide layoffs.

Key projects in the past year include the Robeson County Administration Building in Lumberton, the business school

56

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 56

N O R T H

building at UNC Pembroke, a residence hall at the UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, and public schools in Mecklenburg and Harnett counties. Metcon is also involved in the construction of the Catawba Two Kings Casino in Kings Mountain and Concord’s electric operations center.

The Charlotte Minority Enterprise Council named Metcon as its Diversity Firm of the Year in 2021.

“I love it because we are creating something that will be there for my lifetime and well beyond,” Thomas told Business North Carolina last year.

PHOTO BY JOHN GESSNER

Pembroke Owner: Aaron Thomas Founded: 1999 Employees: 95

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 1:50 PM

NO GREASE BARBERS Charlotte Owner: Damian Johnson Founded: 1997 Employees: 65 contractors; 35-40 students

F

ounded by twin brothers Damian and Jermaine Johnson, No Grease Barbers has experienced success since a humble start in 1997. The Johnsons secured their barber licenses by age 18 and were acquainted with the industry because their mom was a stylist. The business grew out of Damian’s senior paper about strategic marketing in the barber industry for a class at Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University.

Today the brothers are 49, and No Grease has 12 locations in the Carolinas and Georgia. They started offering franchises in 2017 with four locations now run by others.

A year earlier, they started the No Grease Barber School to provide hands-on experience and intensive education enabling students to make a successful transition to the profession.

“A big part of our growth is when we started to focus on the education side,” Damian Johnson says. “We were influencing the future of the business.”

Viewing their work as a mission is also critical. “Whether we are making people look good from the outside or those things that are intangible — things that you can’t see or touch — we’re affecting people in a positive way,” he says.

“Whether it’s the client in the chair, the barbers that we train or the entire community. Those are the things that get me excited every day, the people that we affect.”

Staying true to some traditions of the African American barber industry is an important aspect of the business.

“It’s holding true to some of those things and adding in creative marketing and strategies, from professionalism, to our image that we’ve always demonstrated with our barbers, to community involvement,” Johnson says. “We still know that we were that lighthouse of the community, and we’ve used that as a main strategy.”

Future plans include expansion to the suburban Washington, D.C. area with another location opening as early as the first quarter of this year.

“We’re not going to stop until we have made this one of the most successful businesses that has ever been seen in the barbering industry — beyond the barber industry, just Black businesses period,” he says.

RAYDAL HOSPITALITY GROUP Charlotte Owner: Dalton Espaillat Founded: 2014 Employees: 250

F

or Dalton Espaillat, 37, community and authenticity are important to his restaurant company’s success. Effectively representing Latin cultures with arepas, burritos, empanadas, tacos and other

foods is key.

“What’s unique about us is that we stay very true to our roots and keep things authentic,” Espaillat says. “First, we have a good product, and then we just have great people helping us execute it and helping us grow.”

Espaillat was born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic before moving to Statesville with his family at 15. He was working as a construction project manager when the last recession prompted him and two friends to buy a struggling Mexican restaurant in east Charlotte as a side gig. He later bought out his partners and turned the restaurant around with aid from his family.

After seven years, Raydal Hospitality has 22 restaurants,

which includes three franchise locations for Sabor Latin Grill. It also owns the Three Amigos Mexican Grill & Cantina and La Caseta concepts, featuring fresh food that’s delivered fairly quickly.

Espaillat views his company as a way of providing a better future for staff members. Sabor’s three franchisees were previously Raydal employees, while other employees are becoming part owners of different locations.

The Charlotte area’s significant growth has helped Raydal expand, but execution is essential, he adds.

“It’s been a combination of a lot of things — being profitable for the bank to provide funding, having the right people to execute and being accepted in the market.”

Plans for 2022 include four or five locations in the Triad area, starting with a Sabor Latin Grill in Winston-Salem. “If we don’t have a Sabor in a town or city near you, more than likely, we are coming that way.”

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 57

2 0 2 2

57

1/20/22 1:50 PM

RED HILL VENTURES

T

odd Collins got into commercial real estate the old-fashioned way by buying a single-tenant rental property and gradually taking on bigger projects. Having generational wealth akin to many large realestate firms would have been nice, but that wasn’t in the cards for Collins.

“We’re slow but steady investors, and we try to buy assets where we can make a difference,” he says, citing his long-term ownership of older apartment buildings that serve a working-class clientele.

Red Hill now has holdings in Charlotte and Austin, Texas, and expects to add a 75,000-square-foot industrial building in Raleigh.

While some of its apartment tenants struggled during the early stages of the pandemic, Red Hill has done fine and benefited from having limited debt, Collins says.

Before starting his company, Collins, 48, was a consultant for nearly a decade at Accenture in Atlanta, which exposed him to many different types of businesses. That experience underscores his desire to diversify beyond real-estate investment and create a fund to help other entrepreneurs get off the ground. His non-real-

estate ventures include The City Kitch, a shared-used community kitchen in west Charlotte with plans to expand statewide, and Nationwide Court Systems, which helps automate evictions, tax appeals and other court transactions.

Being viewed as a minority-owned business gets old but is understandable, says Collins, who has a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College and an MBA from George Washington University.

“We’re just trying to be a great real-estate firm and look more to the day when we aren’t an anomaly. That’s why we have a fund to help more businesses grow so it isn’t a rarity. There are a lot of minority businesses that are doing well, but nobody is writing about them. We are investing in some of those.”

CITY KITCH PHOTO BY ALEX CASON

Charlotte Owner: Todd Collins Founded: 2005 Employees: 65

RODEA’S ENTERPRISES Wilmington Owner: Gustavo Rodea Founded: 2014 Employees: 9

need to do $3,000 in sales a day, or $1 million a year. If we don’t get that, then I don’t need to be in business.”

About two-thirds of his sales come from Latinos, who he notes account for much of North Carolina’s population growth. He helped start the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s Latino wenty-one years after Business Council. arriving in Warsaw in “With my experience, I can help other businesses,” he says. “It Duplin County as a 19-yearticks me off that so many Latino construction people don’t know old Mexican immigrant, that as a subcontractor, you are making less money but doing all of Gustavo Rodea owns three the work.” furniture stores and is a business English-speaking children of the state’s current Latino coach for entrepreneurs. His construction workers will gain increasing influence in the N.C. story follows many obstacles, building sector, he says. “I know these families are making more including losing virtually all of his money during the 2007-09 money because they are buying better furniture and nicer houses.” recession when his rental-property investments collapsed.

Rodea’s biggest revelation has been learning to “work on the “My plan failed because I failed to plan,” says Rodea. He says business, not at the business. I can say now that I am the CEO, his education has come from experience, attending business whereas before I was doing everything. I can leave for a week and networking events before the pandemic and reading works not have to worry much.” by famous motivational authors such as Napoleon Hill, Tony While he loves furniture enough to routinely attend the Robbins, Og Mandino and Zig Ziglar. biennial High Point market, Rodea says his exit plan is to expand He fought back from his failure, starting Mattress & Furniture significantly and then sell his stores in about a decade.

Liquidators with $7,000 of furniture inventory at a store in Making that happen will be easier if the public supports local Warsaw, which has a big Latino population. Without taking on businesses rather than ordering everything from Amazon, he says. debt, he has expanded to Wilmington and co-owns a Sterling, Va., “Our communities are really going to suffer unless we convince location. The stores collectively hold $237,000 in inventory. people to buy from small local businesses and nonprofits,” he says.

Rodea buys lots of furniture from other retailers who are going “Otherwise, Amazon is going to continue to kill a lot of jobs.” out of business. “My constant repetition to my people is that we

T

58

B U S I N E S S

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 58

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

1/28/22 9:42 AM

SEPI INC. Raleigh President: Sepi Saidi Founded: 2001 Employees: 250

C

onstruction stereotypes cast architects as mold-breakers and margin-pushers. Engineers build. Sepi Saidi’s multifaceted firm — created two decades ago — defies those preconceptions.

In the process, it has become a standard-bearer for womenowned enterprises and immigrant entrepreneurs.

Advice for other women? “Don’t doubt yourself,” she says.

“You can do it.”

Saidi grew up in Tehran, Iran but left in the late 1970s as religious revolutionaries began to seize control. She landed in Raleigh, following her older brother, who had studied at N.C. State University. After graduating from Cardinal Gibbons High School, she earned agricultural and civil engineering degrees at N.C. State in 1985 and 1993, respectively.

Saidi worked on highway design and traffic engineering at the N.C. Department of Transportation for more than a decade. She then struck out on her own, which wasn’t unusual coming from an Iranian culture that respected strong professional women, she says.

Starting from an unused room of her home, she worked to find

common ground in her male-dominated profession. Benefiting from experience and contacts developed at the DOT, her business has become a major success story. Many company contracts involve public work, which buoyed it during slack periods such as the 2007-09 recession and when the pandemic caused cancellations and delays, says Jennifer Allen, Sepi’s senior vice president and strategy officer.

“We have a good combination of college and university, city and county, and N.C. DOT work,” Allen says. “We’ve been impacted for sure, but we’ve fared pretty well and will continue to grow.”

Saidi says the company is “structured to stay innovative and adaptive” and isn’t just for engineering. “We’re planners, designers, surveyors, environmental scientists, landscape architects, construction inspectors and more,” including unmanned aircraft systems.

Sepi has offices in Raleigh, Charlotte, Wilmington, Beaufort and Charleston, S.C., and Fort Lauderdale and Palmetto, Fla. A new Asheville office is opening.

Along the way, Saidi has garnered awards that include membership in the N.C. Business Hall of Fame. She is chair of the N.C. Chamber, serves on the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority and has been on the N.C. Banking Commission.

She still practices the stereotype busting that characterizes her early days as an engineer. “If there’s one thing I’d ask women,” she says, “it’s to have much more empathy for each other.”

STEWART Raleigh CEO/chairman: Willy Stewart Founded: 1994 Employees: 200

Stewart’s company culture is based on the acronym THREAD, which stands for Trust, Humility, Respect, Excellence, Accountability and Discipline. Employees take a two-day class on it each year, and Stewart says they “treat each other with the utmost respect, which creates a safe haven olombia native Willy where people can bring their authentic self to work every day.”

Stewart initially set out The firm’s recent big projects include the redevelopment to build a small structural of Seaboard Station on the north end of downtown Raleigh, engineering firm, launching a new communications building at Elon University, the in 1994 with the goal of N.C. Museum of Art Park, Kane Realty’s The Dillon and integrating architecture with Downtown South in Raleigh, as well as the Charlotteeach building’s structural form. Mecklenburg Police Department’s downtown headquarters.

Little by little, the scope Stewart grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, where he of the company known as Stewart has grown to more than attended a private American school that had several teachers 200 employees across eight offices in Raleigh, Durham, who’d graduated from Western Carolina University. That’s Charlotte and Columbia, S.C. It now handles a wide array how he wound up attending college in the North Carolina of engineering, design and planning services — from land mountains on a golf scholarship, eventually transferring surveying to landscape architecture to transportation projects. to N.C. State University because he wanted to become an Stewart added specializations as it brought in new engineer. employees to help with big projects, and it’s grown from there.

He’d hoped to return to his home country after graduating Stewart told Business North Carolina in 2020 that he “leads from college, but unrest there kept him in the U.S. He from behind.” eventually settled in the Triangle in the late ’80s.

“I don’t want to be the face,” he said. “Stewart is not Willy After decades of gradual growth, Stewart was named one of Stewart. It’s an incredible group of leaders that are committed, Engineering News-Record’s 500 largest design firms in the U.S. humble and respectful and live the culture that we are in 2019, with revenue of $32.5 million. promoting here.”

PHOTO OF WILLY STEWART BY CHRISTER BERG

C

F E B R U A R Y

46-59_Diversity_Feb-2022.indd 59

2 0 2 2

59

1/20/22 1:47 PM

POWERING NORTH CAROLINA

ENERGY EVOLUTION Duke Energy, which serves 4 million electric customers in the Carolinas, is changing how it does business. Along with other energy providers, it’s turning to renewable and cleaner burning generation such as solar, wind, nuclear and natural gas.

“We’ve already made incredible progress, retiring two-thirds of the coal plants in the Carolinas and reducing emissions by more than 40% since 2005,” Duke Energy said in a recent news release. It’s a step in the right direction for the Charlottebased utility.

North Carolina, which is home to the nation’s third-most solar capacity among the 50 states, has set ambitious clean energy goals, which were

60

B U S I N E S S

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 60

N O R T H

outlined in a landmark bill that Gov. Cooper signed in October. It calls for cutting power plant greenhouse gas emissions 70% from 2005 levels by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2050. N.C. Utilities Commission has been tasked with creating a plan to make it happen.

When it comes to reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment, North Carolina power providers, educators, businesses and residents are energized. From households to multinational corporations, each has individual energy needs and clean energy goals. Utilities will play a large role in meeting them, and they’ll need innovative generation, workforce, technology and approaches to make

C A R O L I N A

it happen. Duke Energy, for example, offers its largest customers — military installations, University of North Carolina system and large nonresidential customers — the Green Source Advantage Program. It empowers them to select a renewable energy supplier and negotiate all price terms, including the purchase of renewable energy certificates. They connect energy use to clean generation sources.

Richmond, Virginia-based Dominion Energy operates in 20 states. “As we’re working to deliver renewable energy, like solar and wind power, for our electric customers, we are doing the same for our over 600,000 North Carolina natural gas customers with clean energy sources like hydrogen

PHOTO CREDIT: AARON HINES, GREENVILLE, N.C.

Consumers, businesses and lawmakers are calling for more renewable and cleaner power.

North Carolina’s energy industry is answering with innovative generation, distribution, workforce training and technology.

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:35 PM

and renewable natural gas,” says spokeswoman Persida Montanez.

Dominion is investing in natural gas projects in eastern North Carolina and an emission-reducing program that captures and recycles methane, a greenhouse gas. “We also own or purchase output from nearly 1,000 megawatts of solar energy in North Carolina, enough to serve 275,000 homes at peak solar output,” she says.

Carbon-reduction goals can be met by cutting energy consumption, too. Dominion, like other utilities, encourages its customers to reduce theirs by offering incentives, such as rebates on energy-efficient appliances, detailed energy-use reports and home weatherization programs.

“A proposed GreenTherm program would allow customers to voluntarily support renewable natural-gas projects and offset their carbon footprint,” Montanez says.

ElectriCities of North Carolina’s members — almost 90 municipalities, mostly in North Carolina, with their own electric utility — take a similar tact with their almost 1.3 million customers, who also want more say in their energy supply. Andy Fusco, ElectriCities’ vice president of member services and corporate planning, says utilities are offering more options than ever before. “We know that every customer is different and has different preferences and needs,” he says. “Being locally operated, public power providers are well positioned to address the unique needs of their individual customer segments, including more personalized communication and programming.”

Customers’ clean energy wants are met in other ways. Fusco says the trend toward smaller distributed generation from large central generation is one example. “This trend is consistent with the technology that continues to evolve,” he says. “Most of this type of generation will be renewable — primarily solar — often combined with batteries.”

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY When Hurricane Dorian’s surge put Ocracoke under 6 feet of water in 2019, the remote island’s power supply went down. But its residents weren’t out for long. A microgrid installed by Tideland Electric Membership Corp. and North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives two years earlier restored power four days later.

Microgrid technology is one way that electric cooperatives are improving life in North Carolina, from its sandy beaches to rolling mountains. Twentysix electric cooperatives are bringing energy innovation to 2.5 million customers in 93 of the state’s 100 counties. North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives Chief Operating Officer Amadou Fall says many of their efforts are geared toward meeting ambitious carbon reduction goals. “Our Brighter Future plan allows us to chart a thoughtful and concerted path forward as a cooperative network leading at the forefront of the changing energy landscape in North Carolina and across the nation,” he says.

North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives is responding to growing energy demand while keeping environmental goals at the forefront. Innovation is key to making that happen. As a distribution operator, it helps its members gain visibility

across the system by facilitating actions that improve transmission coordination and optimize resources for enhanced grid resilience as well as reliability and cost-savings. “We’ve been preparing for years for this energy evolution and are taking steps now that position us strongly for the future,” Fall says. “We’re relying on continued innovation in the years to come.”

Today’s energy distribution technology needs to move power generated from a variety of sources.

North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives’ members distribute electricity generated with natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal, and nuclear, which is free of emissions. The latter currently makes up more than half of their generation portfolio. “We are also bringing more renewable energy sources online while investing in new grid technology, such as battery storage, to make renewables more versatile and reliable,” Fall says.

F E B R U A R Y

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 61

2 0 2 2

61

1/19/22 2:35 PM

POWERING NORTH CAROLINA

Energy storage — batteries — are part of 10 substation projects across the state. Fall says storage adds reliability and efficiency, especially during times of peak demand and when handling intermittent generation sources such as solar. It also lowers consumer costs. Storage is already paired with solar at 14 sites, part of the Brighter Future initiative. “Our investments in these sites allow us to deliver the most reliable and affordable power possible and allow for the expanded integration of solar energy as we work to achieve a lower carbon future for our state,” he says.

Energy storage is a main component of most microgrids. It has shown its value at North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives’ microgrids in eastern North Carolina. In addition to the Ocracoke microgrid, it has four more across Hyde, Brunswick, Harnett and Franklin counties. “Our microgrids are all different in terms of what they are trying to do, and they allow us to study their different applications,” Fall says.

North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives microgrid in Hyde County, for example, is under construction. It will generate its own electricity when outside sources aren’t unavailable, supplying it to egg producer Rose Acre Farms and the surrounding community. It uses solar panels, energy storage and other components owned by North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives and resources owned by the farm.

Energy storage is expected to play a large-scale role, too. Duke Energy’s biggest North Carolina battery project went online in Asheville last year.

It plans to build 300 megawatts of energy storage across its regulated

62

B U S I N E S S

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 62

N O R T H

businesses in the Carolinas over the next decade. The utility, which is evaluating offshore wind and other next-generation clean-energy technologies, says its solar operations will grow in step with energy storage, which keeps the grid energized when renewable generation slows or stops — under overcast skies, in calm winds or at night.

Electric vehicles are driving the move to clean energy. More charging stations are being installed nationwide, enabling EVs to be used on longer trips. The Environmental Protection Agency reports the median range for 2020 model EVs was about 250 miles.

North Carolina lawmakers passed a bill in July 2020 that appropriates $30.6 million from the Volkswagen Litigation Environmental Mitigation Fund to the state Department of Environmental Quality for several initiatives, including replacing diesel buses and vehicles and upgrading zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure such as fast-charging stations. Several ElectriCities municipalities, for example, received DEQ funding to install charging stations in their communities in March 2021.

North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives are bringing power to electric vehicles through more than 75 recharging stations statewide that are used by commuters and tourists, some from as far away as Texas and Colorado. “We’ve grown our charging station network to the point where we have more than 20 fast chargers that can fully charge a vehicle in 20 minutes or less, and more than 50 Level 2 chargers that support drivers who have more time to dine or shop [while their vehicle recharges], which

C A R O L I N A

also helps economic development,” Fall says.

Duke Energy has developed a $25 million pilot program that deploys public electric vehicle charging stations across North Carolina and funds infrastructure for up to 30 electric buses for public schools. The utility also has filed a $56 million proposal that will lead to more than 1,000 charging port installations in the state.

MODERN WORKFORCE The hundreds of solar panels neatly arranged on northeastern North Carolina farmland have always amazed Zaniya Battle, a Halifax County Early College senior. But she never thought about the electricity they generate until last summer, when she learned to build and maintain them at Halifax Lighthouse Solar Camp. “Never did it cross my mind that I would actually be getting certifications to work in that field,” she says in a video produced

by North Carolina Business Committee for Education, a nonprofit that operates from the Office of the Governor.

Battle was one of 20 Halifax County Schools juniors and seniors who scored well enough on a standardized assessment tool to earn an invite to the pre-apprenticeship program. It was developed by the North Carolina Business Committee for Education, North Carolina Energy Office, N.C. A&T State University, N.C. Community SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:35 PM

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 63

1/19/22 2:36 PM

POWERING NORTH CAROLINA

College System, Halifax County Schools, Halifax Community College and Center for Energy Education in Roanoke Rapids. “We partnered together to see how a program like this would work and to create a model for other school systems,” says Rhonda High, Halifax Community College’s customized training director. “The program was called Lighthouse Solar Energy Camp, because the lighthouse logo is that of Halifax County Schools.”

North Carolina Business Committee for Education Executive Director Caroline Sullivan says the program was born from a U.S. Department of Energy grant earmarked for building the state’s clean-energy workforce. “The state Energy Office was working with N.C. A&T University on a program focusing on energy efficiency in Guilford County and approached NCBCE to partner with them,” she says. “The NCBCE

64

B U S I N E S S

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 64

N O R T H

suggested running a second pilot in solar energy in rural North Carolina.”

The program launched in rural Halifax County for a couple reasons.

It’s home to numerous solar farms.

It also is a Tier 1 County, one of the state’s 40 most economically distressed. The annual scoring system, which includes 40 Tier 2 and 20 Tier 3 counties, helps direct economic development support, such as workforce development programs, to where it’s needed most. Halifax’s median household income was $35,502 in 2019, and its poverty rate was 23.9%, according to the U.S. Census. “For this to be a Tier 1 county, where we normally don’t have these kinds of opportunities, it was wonderful for these students to be able to learn something exciting and fresh and to be compensated,” High says. “This did not only pour blessings onto the students, but it was pouring

C A R O L I N A

blessings onto their families and generating income in our community.”

Students were paid $15 hourly and received lunch daily. Transportation, personal equipment and work clothes were provided. And each earned certificates for career readiness and pre-apprenticeship as a solar technician upon completion of the program. Its success has ignited an expansion. High says Roanoke Rapids, Weldon City and other districts in 10 counties will take part this summer. The goal is to take it statewide. “Today, this program is called the North Carolina Clean Energy Youth Apprenticeship Program, and it is the first of its kind in the country,” she says.

High wrote the program’s curriculum, which has 96 hours of course work. “The education component included soft skills, OSHA training, Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Training and fundamentals of solar energy,” she says. The curriculum also includes 80 hours of hands-on training at Center for Energy Education. Participants used its equipment and space to build a working solar panel, an accomplishment that floored Battle. “I was amazed and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just put together a solar panel, and it operates a building,’” she says.

Battle wasn’t the only student who recognized the possibilities provided by the program. “We had several students who have said their eyes have been opened by a new career path they never would have known about otherwise,” High says. That path continues for some through apprenticeship programs with solar project developer Strata Clean Energy, Roanoke Electric Cooperative and Enviva, which produces biomass that’s used to generate heat and electricity.

Halifax Lighthouse Solar Camp was structured to prepare participants for an apprenticeship. “When NCBCE reached out to us early last year to see if we had an interest in becoming the first registered apprenticeship in solar in the country it piqued our SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 2:36 PM

interest, because if there is one thing we all need right now, it’s a skilled workforce,” says Ashly Johnson, Strata’s director of community outreach. “When we took a visit to see the students in the Lighthouse Solar Camp, it was an easy decision, because they were so excited and passionate about solar. And many of them would have never even considered a field in this industry had it not been for that program.”

Strata plans to recruit two apprentices from the program. They’ll work in its operations and maintenance division in Halifax County, earning $15 an hour to start. Johnson says their pay will increase as they gain experience.

“They will be tasked with learning our safety protocols and all aspects of the technical maintenance of a power plant,” she says.

Johnson hopes Strata’s apprenticeship program expands to other parts of the company, including its corporate office. “We would like to work with more community colleges to offer paired instruction and would love to ultimately see others in our industry join in to become registered apprenticeships, too,” she says.

POWERFUL PARTNERSHIP Since their humble beginnings, North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives members have helped drive economic development. That commitment hasn’t waned. They are prepared to capitalize

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 65

1/19/22 2:36 PM

POWERING NORTH CAROLINA

on opportunities that create good jobs and capital investment in the communities that they serve. Industrial parks, for example, are inviting corporate America to rural North Carolina, bringing economic growth and population gains to regions that previously had been largely agricultural and sparsely populated.

With support from North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives, its members are joining with economic developers to ready industrial sites for development through utility rate incentives, community development projects and recruitment services. “We are seeing a trend where industries are asking our economic developers if they offer a supply of clean energy, and we are responding to their requests to handle their load,” Fall says. “These requests are coming frequently now.”

Many companies that relocate or expand in North Carolina have factories, distributions centers, data centers and other operations that require plenty of power. Duke Energy, Dominion Energy and ElectriCities are working with economic developers to ensure that those needs are meet — many times by clean-energy sources — before they arrive, and in the process, making the state more attractive to other businesses.

“Economic development partnership is a significant reason why municipalities choose to be part of the public power family and have the ability to directly address the energy needs of future customers,” ElectriCities’ Fusco says. “We’re seeing great success in attracting new industries to the state, and this is not only resulting in beneficial electrification, but it is providing a positive boost to economic activity in our communities.” ■ — Teri Saylor is a freelance writer from Raleigh.

SPONSORED SECTION

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 66

1/21/22 11:19 AM

N O V E M B E R

PoweringNC_Feb2022.indd 67

2 0 2 1

67

1/19/22 2:37 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

THE TRIAD

68

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 68

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 9:37 PM

CENTER OF ATTENTION

Greensboro

Toyota Motor Corp. chose the Triad for its $1.3 billion electric-vehicle battery factory.

The move shines a light on the greater Carolina Core’s opportunities, connections, workforce and quality of life.

The Triad is a 12-county patch in North Carolina’s middle, where highways, interstates, rails and flight paths crisscross. It was the center of attention late last year, when Toyota Motor Corp. announced it was building a $1.29 billion factory at the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite. It will bring 1,750 jobs, whose annual payroll is projected at $100 million, and produce batteries for electric vehicles starting in 2025.

Toyota expects electric vehicles to make up 40% of its new vehicle sales by 2025, growing to 70% by 2030. “They were convinced that we could get them up and running in

the shortest amount of time,” says Greensboro Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Brent Christensen.

“Time is money.”

Grading on the nearly 1,900-acre site began in January. “It’s been kind of a whirlwind,” says Randolph County Economic Development Corp.

President Kevin Franklin. “[Toyota] moved very quickly. Fortunately, the company was already familiar with our region from their search several years ago [when it opted for a production site in Alabama], so it was more them picking up where they left off and filling them in on what had been done in the meantime.”

Getting Toyota reacquainted and committed was a team effort. “There were no egos, political parties, boundaries — nothing got in the way,” Christensen says. “We had a team of folks who made sure everything would be successful. This whole project has been a collaboration.

People across the country can look and say, that’s how you get a project done. Kevin (Franklin) and I got a lot of pats on the back on announcement day, but that’s when the real work starts. You don’t announce and walk away. You have to make sure they get what they want, and that’s what’s on our plate now.”

F E B R U A R Y

Triad_Feb2022.indd 69

2 0 2 2

69

1/19/22 9:38 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

THE TRIAD

ROOM AND REASONS

Children’s clothing manufacturer LT Apparel Group, for example, announced a $57 million investment at Greensboro’s Reedy Fork Corporate Park in mid-December. It includes a $200,000 One NC grant and $500,000 grant from the city. The company says it will create 116 jobs. Nature’s Value will create 183 jobs and invest $19 million at its new headquarters and vitamin factory in Winston-Salem.

Commercial equipment provider Altec is expanding near Mount Airy, investing $9 million and creating 100 jobs. And in September, flooring manufacturer Mohawk Industries announced it’s investing $87 million in an expansion that will create 87 jobs in Davidson County over the next three years.

Fox says Toyota’s choice is an endorsement of Carolina Core.

“Having a brand like Toyota nearby is sure to raise the visibility of both the Chatham-Siler City Advanced Manufacturing Site and Triangle Innovation Point in neighboring Chatham County,” he says. The 1,800-acre Chatham-Siler City site, for example, is zoned heavy industrial, only 35 miles from Research

PHOTO CREDIT: NCCAROLINACORE.COM

The Triad’s counties are Surry, Stokes, Rockingham and Caswell along the Virginia line, and Forsyth and Guilford at the center, surrounded by Yadkin, Davie, Davidson, Randolph, Montgomery and Alamance. About three years ago, local economic booster Piedmont Triad Partnership made it the foundation of Carolina Core, where low tax rates, 2 million workers and 7,200 acres of certified land are attracting businesses, small and large. Threaded together by a 120-mile stretch of U.S. 421 from Dunn to Yadkinville, it adds five counties — Chatham, Cumberland, Harnett, Lee and Moore. It’s North Carolina’s third economic engine, joining the Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte regions.

Carolina Core is more than a new name and geographic reorganization.

“When the Carolina Core initiative was announced in August 2018, the Piedmont Triad Partnership proclaimed that one of the measures of our success would be to create 50,000 jobs in the Carolina Core in 20 years,” Piedmont Triad Partnership President

Mike Fox says. “Since that declaration just short of three years ago, companies’ confidence in our region, along with the work of our economic developers and allies, has led to more than 22,600 announced jobs in the Carolina Core as of Dec. 21, 2021.

We’ve attained more than 45% of the goal in just 15% of the time, so clearly the Carolina Core is well on its way to impressively surpass that 50,000job goal.”

Toyota chose its site because of the availability of renewable energy — North Carolina was fourth in the nation for solar generation in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — and support from local governments, utilities, partners and others, according to a company statement. Toyota North America Chief Administrative Officer Chris Reynolds added five more reasons: highways and railways, airports and seaports access, being consistently chosen as a top state for doing business, a world-renowned education system, and its outstanding and diverse workforce.

Toyota leads a series of recent investments in Carolina Core.

Greensboro-Randolph Megasite

70

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 70

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 9:38 PM

F E B R U A R Y

Triad_Feb2022.indd 71

2 0 2 2

71

1/19/22 9:39 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

Above: Whitaker Park is located two miles north of downtown Winston-Salem and directly adjacent to Wake Forest University.

Right: The main entrance to R.J. Reynolds at Whitaker Park in the 1960s.

72

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 72

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

Triangle Park and has rail access and U.S. 64 frontage. And 2,150-acre Triangle Innovation Point, billed as a life sciences and advanced manufacturing park with sites available from 10 to 1,000 acres, is 30 minutes from Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Economic developers have pushed thousands of vacant and shovel-ready acres onto radars of large-scale manufacturers, hoping to land the big deal. “We’ve been grading sites and making sites available for any company for three or four years, because we don’t know where [in the country] any project might go until we start negotiating with them,” says Kevin Baker, executive director of the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority.

Whitaker Park is between downtown Winston-Salem and Wake Forest University. RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. built a cigarette manufacturing plant — the world’s largest at one time — there in 1961 and closed it in 2010, relocating its 580 employees to the company’s plant in Tobaccoville, which is on the line between Forsyth and Stokes counties.

Since 2017, Whitaker Park has been reinvented, welcoming several companies and drafting plans to complete residential and retail development and adding a hotel. Piedmont Triad Partnership calls it an “economic driver.”

Whitaker Park Development Authority President and CEO Bob Leak saw his plans for the property stall in early 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in full force. Now its 120 acres and 12 buildings are nearly full, transformed into a business park that reflects his original forecast for a manufacturing, retail and residential center. “It’s like a megasite on a smaller scale,” he says. “It’s a place

PHOTO CREDIT: WHITAKERPARKNC.COM

THE TRIAD

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 9:39 PM

that is creating jobs in the community, and that ripples through the whole region. We’re taking an old manufacturing campus and bringing it back and making it vibrant.”

RJ Reynolds still has a presence in the heart of Whitaker Park, where it runs a small factory that’s surrounded by new development. Cook Medical, for example, opened an 850,000-square-foot factory in the park, where it makes medical devices, in January 2019. Leak says every piece of property at Whitaker is sold or under contract. “We’ve gone from 12 buildings available to nothing,” he says. “We still have a couple months of due diligence, and we have contracts to do spec buildings and hope somebody will rent them. The lab building was the last building, and it was put under contract [in late December] to lease wet lab space, anything a company might want to do with testing. So, it’s been a pretty good year and a half.”

Leak says the next phase is retail and a mid-rise hotel. Whitaker Park

Lofts apartments could be available as soon as later this year. When the entire park project is complete, WPDA will focus on a community opportunity development fund, tentatively called the Whitaker Park Economic Development Fund, which will offer economic development grants. “The fund and grants will be decided [this year],” he says. “For the fund itself, we don’t know the total value yet. It will be several million, but we don’t know.”

WELL CONNECTED Toyota’s site abuts 1.5 miles of U.S. 421 and 1 mile along the Norfolk Southern Railway line on the north side of the park. N.C. Department of Transportation will prepare a study and application for federal review this year, and construction will begin on two interstate-quality interchanges to provide access to Toyota’s site from U.S. 421 soon. “One of our big industries is logistics, and there’s been a feeding frenzy on industrial property

and new spec buildings erected in anticipation of what is to come in 2022 and beyond as industries across the country look to bring their supply chains closer to home,” says Greensboro Chamber’s Christensen.

The move is partially in response to the pandemic, which has made sourcing raw materials and moving goods to market difficult.

The $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, which President Biden signed in November, brings hopes of accelerating U.S. 421’s journey toward becoming Interstate 685, though money has yet to be designated.

“Connecting two of North Carolina’s most active interstate corridors — I-85 and I-95 — will mean that Future 685 can offer alternative and redundant access for goods and people moving through the center of our state in the event of storms and weather disruptions,” says Piedmont Triad Partnership’s Fox. “Oftentimes, companies looking to locate a new project want to be close to an interstate highway and may rule out a site that

F E B R U A R Y

Triad_Feb2022.indd 73

2 0 2 2

73

1/19/22 9:39 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

THE TRIAD

is not within a certain distance of the interstate. Designating the U.S. 421 corridor not only makes the Chatham County megasites more desirable in many consultants’ eyes but also brings interstate access to industrial sites in Lee, Harnett and Randolph counties.”

Interstate 685 would move more than goods. It would connect people to jobs, too. “It’s kind of obvious that if we have an interstate-level road that runs east and west, it does nothing but help us to access employees who would want to work at the airport,” Baker says. “Highway 421 is good, but it has its downfalls, like the occasional traffic signal, and having a full interstate would certainly be beneficial. There are a lot of growing communities [southeast of PTI], and especially given the news of the Greensboro-Randolph site, a whole lot of people are going to need a place to live. They are going to need housing, and they will need a place to fly.”

The interstate designation has a military component, too. U.S. 421 is a few miles from Fort Bragg, the U.S. Army’s largest installation by

74

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 74

N O R T H

population and home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division and Special Operations Command. “It would be a huge advantage from a military readiness perspective as well as continuity of services and so forth,” says Kevin Lacy, a N.C. Department of Transportation traffic engineer.

LIVE AND LEARN Greensboro Chamber’s Christensen believes Toyota considered more than numbers. “I think one of the reasons Toyota is coming to the GreensboroRandolph site is that they saw the incredible quality of life, which we’re always working to improve,” he says.

“On one of their visits to the city, we took them to the North Carolina Zoo [in Randolph County], to the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts [in Greensboro], and they were interested in housing options.”

Leak agrees. “One of the reasons these companies are picking the Triad is that we are family friendly,” he says.

“We’re close to the mountains and the beaches. We have good restaurants, C A R O L I N A

and obviously you want all the amenities in one place. So, we market that.

That’s part of the pitch.” Educational and workforce development opportunities are highlighted, too.

The Triad is home to 21 colleges and universities, which enrolled nearly 100,000 students in 2017, according to the Piedmont Triad Regional Council.

Their offerings are varied, but many are part of workforce development initiatives. That’s especially true at the region’s community colleges, which can customize training to individual needs of businesses. They support many industries, including advanced manufacturing, aviation and aerospace, automotive, biomedical and life sciences, technology, entrepreneurship, and logistics.

Jamestown-based Guilford Technical Community College offers more than 70 workforce training programs, including several in medical fields. It has three in aviation manufacturing, including a structures assembly program. It also offers students routes for transferring to universities, where they can apply credits earned toward

PHOTO CREDIT: PIEDMONTTRIADNC.COM

Designating part of Highway U.S. 421 as a future interstate will further spur economic growth and make the region even more competitive on a global stage.

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 9:53 PM

Q&A with Michael S. Fox President Piedmont Triad Partnership

Q: WHAT IS THE CAROLINA CORE?

A: The Carolina Core is North Carolina’s third economic engine. Bridging the urban crescent between Charlotte and the Research Triangle in central North Carolina, the Carolina Core is defined by diverse assets connected along future Interstate 685 – from megasites to Class A office space, from bustling metros to rural communities. In the Core, businesses and people can access North Carolina’s fastest growing metros, while still benefitting from the perks and quality of life of mid-sized cities and small towns.

From our companies to our people to our deep investments in our communities, the Carolina Core is a future-ready region brimming with opportunity set to transform North Carolina.

Q: WHY SHOULD COMPANIES MAKE THE CAROLINA CORE THEIR NEXT BIG MOVE? A: Toyota recently announced that it will invest $1.29 billion and add 1,750 new jobs in the Carolina Core for its first US battery plant. Toyota cites the state’s strong infrastructure, high-quality education systems, skilled and diverse

workforce, and welcoming business environment as reasons for selecting the Carolina Core.

The Carolina Core is a 120+ mile stretch of central North Carolina from west of Winston-Salem to Fayetteville defined by assets that make the region a globally competitive market – a smart and growing talent pool of more than 2 million people, access to 30+ colleges and universities, multiple airports, four megasites totaling 7,200 acres of certified land, industrial and urban research parks and more. Companies also benefit from North Carolina’s corporate tax climate, which includes the lowest corporate tax rate in the United States, and competitive incentive programs.

Q: WHAT IS IT LIKE TO LIVE IN THE CAROLINA CORE?

A: There’s something for everyone living in the Carolina Core.

Affordable housing and excellent public schools leave more money for the things you like – whether that’s practicing yoga in an urban park, hiking and tubing, or attending the PGA Wyndham Championship. And without traffic congestion, you will have more time to enjoy these activities with your family.

Q: WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CAROLINA CORE? A: To learn more, visit NCCarolinaCore.com.

Triad_Feb2022.indd 75

1/19/22 9:52 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

THE TRIAD

FLYING HIGHER

76

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 76

N O R T H

PHOTO CREDIT: NCCAROLINACORE.COM

completing a four-year degree.

A portion of community college students are hired by the more than 200 aviation and aerospace companies that have landed in the region, particularly at PTI and in Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem.

“Aviation and aerospace are key growth sectors for our region,” Fox says. The Carolina Core’s aerospace workforce numbered 15,600 employees in 2019, up 40% from 2014.

Guilford Technical Community College’s Aviation Campus in Greensboro is one of the Southeast’s best equipped maintenance training facilities. Forsyth Technical Community College’s $16 million Mazie S. Woodruff Aviation Technology Lab opened at Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem last fall. It has a 15,356-square-foot hanger that can house up to eight aircraft. Students learn to work with sheet metal and composites, electronics, paint, and piston and turbine engines in its classrooms and labs.

“Talent in the Carolina Core has a strong work ethic,” says Michimasa Fujino, president and CEO of Honda Aircraft Co., which established its Greensboro headquarters in 2006 and employs 1,500 in research and development, manufacturing and customer service.

Passengers flying from Piedmont Triad International Airport can reach more than 150 destinations with a single stop and 15 destinations, including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., directly.

But many were grounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the airport’s daily operations hard.

“April 18, 2020, was our low-water day,” says Baker, its executive director.

“It was a Saturday, and on a normal Saturday in April, we would have 3,500 passengers getting on planes.

That day we had 75. We were down 97.7%. And that was pretty much the whole industry — no parking, nobody buying drinks or food in the terminal, and no planes flying in. They pay us to land here ... and all that revenue dried up.”

As the pandemic appears to be waning, passengers have returned.

Baker says PTI is back to about 85% of its 2019 numbers. “If we don’t have trouble with this new variant, we’ll be fully back,” he says. But passenger service is only a portion of what happens at PTI. “I think our airport is different from most in that we’re very focused on the economic develop-

ment segment and having good jobs to employ people in our region and right here at our airport,” he says. “To be competitive in that world, we’ve taken a lot of steps to proactively make sure people are available.”

PTI already is home to several businesses, including HondaJet and FedEx. And there’s room for more at its 1,000-acre Aerospace Megasite, which is accessible to aircraft by a taxiway bridge that was built over Interstate 73. “Obviously [megasite tenants] have to be in the aerospace world, and we welcome all sorts of aerospace users,” Baker says. “It could be [original equipment manufacturers], which would be a first target then [maintenance and repair operations], and beyond that it could be cargo companies and airlines, if they need a headquarters. There could be large tenants, like fuselage manufacturers … something like that.”

Baker believes preparation will pay off. “If someone showed up and said, hey, we need 1,000 acres, we don’t have to say go away and come back,” he says. “We are ready right now. So that makes us very attractive.

Plus, we’re in a really good geographic position in the center of the state, the center of the East Coast, the roadway system is second-to-none, and we

Piedmont Triad International Airport’s state-of-the-art facilities and available workforce make PTI a catalyst for commercial and industrial development.

C A R O L I N A

SPONSORED SECTION

1/21/22 11:12 AM

F E B R U A R Y

Triad_Feb2022.indd 77

2 0 2 2

77

1/19/22 9:53 PM

COMMUNITY CLOSE-UP

THE TRIAD

have a low cost of living and doing business and a temperate climate.

It’s a great place to raise a family with good schools. Put that all together, and you have a place that’s attractive and unique for aerospace companies to exist.”

News outlets recently published reports that at least one aviation company has shown interest in PTI’s megasite. Denver-based Boom Supersonic is said to be eyeing it for a factory, where it would build its Overture jet, a 205-foot-long aircraft that can carry 65 passengers, cruise at twice the altitude of most commercial flights — 60,000 feet — and fly at Mach 1.7, 1,304 miles per hour. It resembles a slim rocket, according to the company’s website. Production is expected to start this year and its first flight in 2029. The company says that United Airlines, which has between 15 and 20 daily departures from Charlotte-Douglass International, North Carolina’s largest airport, is the first airline to agree to purchase the aircraft.

Baker couldn’t comment on the possibility of a Boom deal in early January, citing the airport authority’s stance of not discussing ongoing economic development projects. But PTI’s official statement made it clear that it, or any aviation company, would have local economic developers’ full attention. “We can say that for many decades, PTI has been home to important aerospace employers like Honda, FedEx, HAECO and Cessna,” the statement reads. “Over the last 10 years, the Authority has focused on preparing nearly 1,000 acres to be ready for continued growth in the aerospace industry.” ■

Winston-Salem

— Kathy Blake is a writer from eastern North Carolina.

78

B U S I N E S S

Triad_Feb2022.indd 78

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

SPONSORED SECTION

1/19/22 9:54 PM

F E B R U A R Y

Triad_Feb2022.indd 79

2 0 2 2

79

1/19/22 9:54 PM

GREENSHOOTS

FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION A corporate lawyer shows passion in supporting his Native American tribe.

C

ary resident Joshua Richardson wakes up before sunrise several times a week to head 70 miles to his hometown of Hollister in Halifax County. His workday typically begins when he arrives at his office in the Haliwa-Saponi Tribal Government Building.

Richardson’s day job is as a business and litigation lawyer for Buckley LLP, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm with more than 160 attorneys. He represents clients on a variety of government enforcement, litigation and compliance matters.

But starting about 6 p.m. several days a week, Richardson is working as the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe’s legal counsel on a pro bono basis.

The work sometimes runs until midnight before he heads home to Wake County.

“Attorney Joshua Richardson has provided an invaluable service as a pro bono legal counsel to the Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe. Our tribe is truly grateful for his support,” says chief Brucie Ogletree Green Richardson.

Joshua Richardson, 34, earned a law degree at N.C. Central University. He became licensed in October 2020 but was sworn in the following month in recogni▲ Joshua Richardson tion of Native American History Month. “I chose to be sworn in during the month of November because of the special dedication and meaning of this month celebrating my heritage, my ancestors and sending a strong message that we [Native Americans] are still here.”

He also recently earned a master’s degree in indigenous peoples law from the University of Oklahoma. Much of his work is to help the tribe achieve federal recognition that would create a “governmentto-government relationship” with the United States. North Carolina recognized the tribe in 1965.

The Haliwa-Saponi Tribe settled in an area referred to as “the meadows” in the 1700s, Richardson says. The name “Haliwa” is derived from the counties of Halifax and Warren, where a majority of approximately 4,300 enrolled tribal citizens live. Saponi means “red earth people.” The tribe’s building is in Hollister, a town with a single

80

B U S I N E S S

GreenShoots_Feb 2022.indd 80

N O R T H

traffic light and fewer than 700 residents, most of whom know each other by name, Richardson says.

Gaining federal recognition, which involves the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Federal Acknowledgement, has been a goal of the HaliwaSaponi Tribe since the 1980s. It wants the right to self-governance and to ▲ The Haliwa-Saponi Tribe’s powwow gain eligibility for certain attracts thousands of visitors. federal benefits, services and protections, he says.

“We don’t have a reservation — I have to clarify that for people all the time,” Richardson adds. “But we are working toward achieving federal acknowledgement to be able to ensure that our tribal governance continues to grow.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Richardson says, Zoom and other digital capabilities have enabled him to limit his commute to Hollister two to three trips per week. Along with the recognition work, Richardson assists with information requests, employment issues, investigations, monetary reports and audits. “You name it, I help with all of it on a pro bono basis,” he says.

There are three lawyers in the tribe, one of whom works for the government and the other for another tribe. “I am basically the only one who has the capacity and the ability to be able to help lead, in a sense, from a legal perspective,” he says. An 11-member council governs the Haliwa-Saponi.

During the third weekend in April, the tribe hosts one of the Southeast’s largest annual powwows, attracting thousands of visitors interested in learning about its culture. Various local institutions help the tribe preserve its culture and heritage, including the HaliwaSaponi Tribal School.

“If the native tribe were not there, I do not believe the community would be the same,” Richardson says. ■

PHOTOS COURTESY OF IVAN RICHARDSON

BY JENNINGS COOL

C A R O L I N A

1/20/22 2:29 PM

Back_cover_CV3-4_Feb-2022.indd 1

1/19/22 4:37 PM

Back_cover_CV3-4_Feb-2022.indd 2

1/19/22 4:37 PM