Capital at Play March 2018

Brendan Sherar Biblio p.18

Jim Oliver and Mike Proffit AvL Technologies p.78

Western North Carolina's Free Spirit of Enterprise g e t e xc l u s i v e r e a d e r o n ly s p e c i a l s w i t h

p. 60

FITNESS@PLAY March Passcode

l e i s u r e & l i b at i o n

colu m ns

The Garden Column: Garden Retro p.36 Spring On the Brain p.70 Volume VIII - Edition III complimentary edition

capitalatplay.com

Boutique

Fitness Local Businesses Shaking up Your Workout Routine.

p. 61

March 2018

Ranked #4 of Top 25 Commercial Real Estate Brands - by Lipsey Company

Jay Olshonsky

President, NAI Global

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“Our NAI Global affiliation broadens our reach to fellow commercial real estate professionals to a global scale, giving us an unmatched ability to target prospects beyond North Carolina.�

- W. Neal Hanks Jr. -

Beverly-Hanks

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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NAI

Q&A with Jay Olshonsky WHO IS NAI GLOBAL? We are a global commercial real estate brokerage firm whose local offices are leaders in their markets; each working in unison to serve their clients. With more than 400 offices located throughout the world, we provide clients with exceptional solutions to their commercial real estate needs.

WHAT MAKES YOU UNIQUE FROM OTHER COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE BROKERAGES? Our strength is built on local leadership, yet we have the power of over 400 offices all working together. With time-proven success across market cycles, offices like NAI Beverly-Hanks have unusually deep insight beyond the commoditized data found elsewhere.

HOW DO CLIENTS BENEFIT FROM THE NAI BEVERLY-HANKS AND NAI GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP? NAI Beverly-Hanks takes immense pride in their client relationships whether they’re a small independent or a national chain leasing a pad. As soon as you meet them, you’re confident that your needs will be their top priority—not just their next assignment. Now imagine over 7,000 professionals around the world, all fully committed to your success.

HOW WILL NAI BE VERLY- HANKS HELP CLIENTS ADAPT TO THE MASSIVE SHIFTS OCCURRING IN COMMERCIAL RE AL ESTATE? A recent MIT study on the future of real estate identified housing affordability as one of the fundamental trends to understand in the next ten years. As the affordability crisis intensifies in coveted markets like Asheville, solutions will be driven by adapting real estate to more intensive residential uses. Firms like NAI Beverly-Hanks, with decades of experience representing residential development, will be uniquely equipped to help CRE partners navigate the convergence of policy and demographics.

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More About NAI Beverly-Hanks Owners, tenants, and investors all choose us for the results-oriented service that has been our hallmark since 1976. Our strength lies in the ability to provide the services of highly trained local experts in our communities.

Whether you’re investing in Western North Carolina or around the world, we can help you on a global basis. NAI Global’s 400 independent commercial real estate firms manage more than 425 million square feet of property. You want to be sure you choose the best for commercial real estate services, and in Western North Carolina that choice is NAI Beverly-Hanks.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 101

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| March 2018

PLAYING IS FOR THE YOUNG AND YOUNG AT HEART. STAY THAT WAY.

Never stop playing.

It’s always play time in Abingdon. visitabingdonvirginia.com • 888.489.4144

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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Attorney Tips on Employee Law

Editor’s Thoughts

KEEP DOCUMENTS Keep copies of important documents, such as handbooks/policies, disciplinary actions, etc., at home. You may not have access to them if you are terminated.

IS THE NON-COMPETE AGREEMENT I SIGNED ENFORCEABLE? • It must be supported by valid consideration – did you get something of value for signing the agreement?

• The limitations must be reasonable as to scope, duration and geographical extent – the courts have helped define what is reasonable.

John C. Hunter Attorney at Law

Providing experienced employee representation for over 30 years One North Pack Square | Ste 421 Asheville, NC 28801 828.281.1940 | jchlawfirm.com

MY HANDBOOK STATES THAT I AM AN “AT-WILL” EMPLOYEE. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN ?

1. Most employment relationships in NC are ‘”at-will” 2. This means that you can be terminated for any reason as long as it's lawful 3. It is not lawful if the real reason for your termination is prohibited discrimination, a violation of the public policy of the State, or in retaliation for doing something that is protected by certain state or federal laws.

4.There are other exceptions to the “at-will” status.

WHEN SHOULD I CONTACT AN EMPLOYMENT ATTORNEY •You have concerns about how you are being treated in the workplace or whether your termination is lawful.

•You are not being paid your promised wages, including accrued vacation pay after your termination.

•You are being asked to sign an employment contract, a non-compete agreement or a severance agreement.

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• You have been denied unemployment benefits. | March 2018

W

hen was your first experience with the internet? Was it revelatory? Did it live up to the hype? Did you keep logging on then logging off and then back on again because you wanted to hear that strangely seductive sound of the dial-up modem connecting? How long was it before you were obsessively forwarding—to at least five friends—those moldy jokes and patently ridiculous urban legends that showed up at your in-box because it was bad luck to break the email chain? (And, a year later, when your parents and your Aunt Minnie finally got online as well, did you roll your eyes and hit “delete” each time they obsessively forwarded you those same moldy jokes and patently ridiculous urban legends?)

This issue’s Local Industry feature, “Weaving A Web,” takes us all the way back to the early ‘90s when the internet was still young and was rightly viewed as a digital Wild West; raise your hand if you know what “56kbs data rate” mean, or if you found a vintage AOL disc last weekend stuffed in the back of your desk drawer. Nowadays, that Wild West has mostly been tamed—hold that thought; isn’t cyber crime just a digital iteration of cattle rustling?—but for some here in Western North Carolina, “tamed” is a relative term, given how there are huge chunks of our region that, due to the rugged mountainous topography and low population density, still don’t have internet connectivity at the federally defined broadband minimum of 25 megabits per second, nearly 450 times the data rate of those early dial-up connections.

Our report, then, details where we’ve been, internet-wise, and where things stand in 2018, additionally looking at the potential for the future, thanks to the efforts of a number of people who are working tirelessly at bringing high-speed connectivity to all corners of the 18-county region.

These people, and the Internet Service Providers they operate, aren’t doing this just so we’ll be able to play video games, download pornography, update our Facebook pages, and forward urban legends around to our family members, all at reliably zippy speeds. Increasingly, businesses, small and large alike, rely on the internet to operate smoothly and efficiently (translation: profitably); and it should go without saying that our children’s educational advancement hinges more and more on being able to get online to do research and complete homework assignments. (Did you realize that in some rural school districts, teachers have to prepare two sets of homework, one for the kids who have broadband at home, and one for those who don’t?) *** The March issue also marks the second in our new “Capital Co-Op: Play Like a Local” series in which we partner with several area businesses to offer our readership unique premiums, discounts, and deals. This time around the theme is Indoor Fitness, so we want to give you a chance to try out some of our favorite boutique fitness centers. Those of you who have signed up for our monthly email newsletter will be eligible to win one of six lesson packages, and all of our readers can take advantage of a free session at one of those centers simply by using the password “Fitness@Play.”

Sincerely,

Fred Mills

ASHEVILLE:

Historic Biltmore Village 9 Kitchin Place 828-274-2630

STORE HOURS:

Mon. - Fri. 9:30am-7pm Sat. 9:30am-6pm Sun. 12pm-5pm

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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frugalframer Western North Carolina's Free Spirit of Enterprise

publisher

Oby Morgan

craft

associate publisher

Jeffrey Green managing editor

service

Fred Mills briefs and events editor

value

est. 1975

Leslee Kulba

What would you like to frame?

Asheville 95 Cherry Street North Asheville, NC 28801 828.258.2435

Arden 2145 Hendersonville Rd Arden, NC 28704 828.687.8533

www.frugalframer.com

copy editors

contributing writers & photogr aphers

Jennifer Fitzgerald, Emily Glaser, Anthony Harden, Janey & John Kelly, Cinthia Milner, Shawndra Russell, Daniel Walton art director

Bonnie Roberson social media editor

Emily Glaser

Dasha O. Morgan, Brenda Murphy

Information & Inquiries Capital at Play is Western North Carolina’s business lifestyle magazine. It embodies the idea that capitalism thrives with creativity—that work requires an element of play. Exploring everything from local industry to the great outdoors, Capital at Play is inspiration for the modern entrepreneur.

In every edition we profile those who take the risk, those who share that risk, and those who support them—telling the untold story of how capitalists are driven by their ideas and passions.

We cater to those who see the world with curiosity, wonderment, and a thirst for knowledge.

We present information and entertainment that capitalists want, all in one location. We are the free spirit of enterprise.

gener al advertising inquiries

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e-mail advertising@capitalatplay.com or call 828.274.7305

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marketing & advertising

Editorial content is selected and produced because of its interest to our readership. Editorial content is not for sale and cannot be bought. Capital at Play is financially sustained by advertisers who find value in exposure alongside our unique content and to the readers who follow it.

This magazine is printed with soy based ink on recycled paper. Please recycle.

Copyright © 2018, Capital At Play, Inc. All rights reserved.

Capital at Play is a trademark of Capital At Play, Inc. Published by Capital At Play, Inc. PO Box 5615, Asheville, NC. 28813

Capital at Play is protec ted through Tr ademar k Regis tr ation in the United States. The content found within this publication does not necessar ily ref lec t the views of Capital At Play, Inc. and its companies. Capital At Play, Inc. and its employees are not liable for any adver tising or editor ial content found in Capital at Play. The ar ticles, photogr aphy, and illus tr ations found in Capital at Play may not be reproduced or used in any fashion without express wr it ten consent by Capital At Play, Inc.

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Your Guide To Asheville’s Finest Properties

1451 acres

$25 M

PISGAH VIEW RANCH 70 Pisgah View Ranch Road Mike Davis | 828.301.6773 Reed Jackson | 704.713.3623

90 acres

$6.495 M

$2.899 M

LONESOME RIDGE 52 Lonesome Road John Kent | 864.784.9918 John@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

STATESVILLE ROAD 9259 Statesville Road Reed Jackson | 704.713.3623 Reed@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

$2.495 M

$2.1 M

$1.75 M

MOUNTAIN AND LAKE VIEW 18243 Joe Brown Highway John Kent | 864.784.9918 John@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

CLIFFS AT WALNUT COVE ESTATE 204 Folkestone Lane Vicky Wynn | 828.242.1171 Vicky@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

$1.395 M

$680 K

HISTORIC BUNCOMBE ESTATE

ANGLER TRAIL CRAFTSMAN

185 Kimberly Avenue Laura Browne Livadauis | 828.301.3330 laura@IJBproperties.com

16 Angler Trail Mike Davis | 828.301.6773 Mike@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

LAMBETH WALK 488 Lambeth Walk Kim Gentry Justus | 828.301.3330 Kim@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

$587 K GROVE PARK- HISTORIC LONGCHAMPS

185 Macon Avenue #A5 Mike Davis | 828.301.6773 Mike@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

$2.55 M MONTFORD AVENUE 288 Montford Avenue Mike Davis | 828.301.6773 288MontfordAvenue.com

$1.675 M HICKORY SPRINGS 2061 Hickory Springs Mike Davis | 828.301.6773 Mike@ivesterjacksonblackstream.com

$550 K HISTORIC GROVE PARK HOME

5 Howland Road Kim Gentry Justus | 828.301.3330 Kim@ivesterjackson.com

IvesterJacksonBlackstream.com | 828.367.9001 Asheville | Highlands | Greenville | Charlotte | Lake Norman

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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Capital at Play has partnered with Bclip Productions to bring the pages of each edition to life, just for you. Featured at Capitalatplay.com and our Facebook page, we give you exclusive interviews and insider info on the people, places, and faces of Capital at Play has partnered with Bclip Productions to bring the pages of each edition to life, just for you. Featuring a new enterprise throughout Western North Carolina. Visit us on social media or at our website to see the latest 60 Seconds at Play.

second video every two weeks, we give you exclusive interviews and insider info on the people, places, and faces of enterp throughout Western North Carolina. Visit us on social media or at capitalatplay.com to see the latest 60 Seconds at Play NOVEMBER VIDEO

RYOBI QUIET STRIKE PULSE DRIVER AVL TECHNOLOGIES DISASTER RELIEF PRODUCT VIDEO p roduct l aunch video

COCONUT BAY BEACH r esort p romotional video

VOLVO CE C USTOMER STORY TESTIMONIAL VIDEO

MARKETING AND TRAINING VIDEOS FOR BUSINESS At Bclip we do more than tell your story. Our business-first mentality and combustible creativity set us apart from other video production companies.

It’s our mission to help our customers sell their products, train their staff, and entertainINcustomers with video.

We strive to eat, sleep,p and think like the FOX HUNTING WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA wonderful companies we work with. photo by DonWestPhotos.com at Tryon Hounds

( .76)

www.bclip.com MARKETING AND TRAINING VIDEOS FOR BUSINESS 10

| March 2018

At Bclip we do more than tell your story. Our business-first mentality and creativity set us apart from other video production companies. It’s our mis help our customers sell their products, train their staff, and entertain custo video. We strive to eat, sleep, and think like the wonderful companies we

thi s page : JOHN THOMASON of Avl Technologies assembles an antenna positioner. photo by Anthony Harden

w 60 prise y.

combustible ssion to omers with work with.

F E AT U R E D vol. viii

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ONE FOR THE BOOKS BRENDAN SHERAR

ed. iii

78 TILTING AT SATELLITES JIM OLIVER AND MIKE PROFFITT

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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C ON T E N T S m a r c h 2 018

CYCLING STUDIO See how you can win free classes here on p. 60! photo courtesy Joyryder Asheville

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61 Fitness at Play

l e i s u r e & l i b at i o n

lo c a l i n d u s t r y

Weaving a Web

Independent Internet Service Providers in Western North Carolina

Boutique Fitness Centers: The Capital at Play Giveaway

colu m ns

insight

14 I vory Road Café & Kitchen

Jill Wasilewski

Security Camera Warehouse Matthew Nederlanden

36 The Garden Column: Garden Retro

Written by Cinthia Milner

70 Spring On the Brain

Written by Janey Kelly, R.D., & Johnny J. Kelly, M.D.

events

90 It’s Conference Month! HEAL, Organic Growers School,

briefs

32 Carolina in the West 56 The Old North State 74 National & World News g e t e xc l u s i v e r e a d e r o n ly ac c e s s w i t h

ClimateCoN, MO Summit, & more.

p. 60 12

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HEALTHCARE STAFFING

As a medical professional, you focus on providing excellent care to your patients. From how they’re greeted at the reception desk to the thoroughness of their exams, your patients expect only the best. As employment professionals, Express focuses on providing qualified and available licensed clinical staff to support your needs.

SERVICE THAT COUNTS We ensure our candidates have the credentials you require.

• Verified certifications / licenses • Current immunizations • Adjudicated drug and background checks, based on job necessity • Skill competency testing

PROFESSIONAL SOLUTIONS Express places people in a variety of medical professions, including: • Registered Nurse • Licensed Practical Nurse • Certified Nursing Assistant

• Certified Medical Assistant • Allied Staff

ADMINISTRATIVE SOLUTIONS We can also help with the administrative side of your office, including: • Office Managers • Receptionists

• Medical Billers and Coders

Contact Express today.

828-654-8101 1979 Hendersonville Rd. Suite B Asheville, NC 28803 ExpressHealthcare.com

Source: DHI Group, Inc. ©2017 Express Services, Inc. All rights reserved. 10/17

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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photos by Derek DiLuzio nsight

Sweet Tea Jill Wasilewski opened Arden’s Ivory Road Café & Kitchen in order to share her favorite things: great food, great dessert, and great conversation.

N

estled comfortably in a woodsy section of Arden, on Brevard Road, is Ivory Road Café & Kitchen. This intimate, casual drop-in of a restaurant serves breakfast (all-day) and lunch—and also boasts a secret weapon in the form of Saturday afternoon teatime, which has steadily grown in popularity to the point that, due to space limitations, reservations are required.

The venture has proven immensely gratifying to owner Jill Wasilewski, who opened it in August of 2016 following stints at kitchens in New Orleans, Melbourne (Australia), Guatemala, and Washington, D.C., among others. Wasilewski grew up in Maryland, going on to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America in 2011 with a Bachelor’s Degree in baking/pastry arts and business management. “Upon graduation,” she recalls now, “I traveled as much as possible in an attempt to learn about and expose myself to as many different culinary perspectives and techniques as possible.”

“Another aspect of our business that I believe sets us apart is our Afternoon Tea service. As far as we know, we’re the only place serving real Afternoon Tea in Asheville besides The Biltmore.”

One glance at the mouth-watering photos of dishes and pastries on the Ivory Road website, Facebook page, or Instagram feed (@ Ivoryroadavl), should be sufficient to convince you that Wasilewski’s earlier quest was successful. And she doesn’t take the overall dining experience for granted, either. “I opened Ivory Road in order to share my favorite things with others,” she says. “Nothing makes me happier than sharing great food, great dessert, and great conversation with people. What I hope sets us apart is how we make people feel when they come to visit us. We try very hard to make everyone feel at home, relaxed and comfortable. There is a lot 14

| March 2018

of great food in Asheville, but I think it’s the whole package that makes a food experience truly great.”

Wasilewski also brings a personal, familial quality to her café that customers have noticed and commented on. “Many of our menu items are tributes to friends, family, or random food memories of mine. Ivory Road itself is the name of the street I grew up on as a kid. We have a cookie in our pastry case called an alfajore. I learned the recipe from an Argentinean girl I worked with in Ecuador. It was her grandmother’s recipe. It has sparked some fantastic conversations with local customers whose family may be from South America—their eyes just light up and they can’t believe we make alfajores!

“Another aspect of our business that I believe sets us apart is our Afternoon Tea service. As far as we know, we’re the only place serving real Afternoon Tea in Asheville besides The Biltmore. We take the traditional, Englishstyle Afternoon Tea service and add our own Southern twist—we serve Appalachian-Inspired finger sandwiches and desserts, tea that’s been blended using ingredients grown in the immediate area surrounding Asheville, and we provide Southern hospitality in place of the fancy, formal stereotypical tea service.”

In February Ivory Road hosted two special tea times.

February 10 was a “Self Love Tea Talk,” and the $10 ticket included tea and snacks plus talks and interactive demos from area health and wellness professionals. Then on Valentine’s Day evening they held a “Candlelight Valentine's Tea + Tasting,” the $27.95 ticket including full tea service, a tasting of seasonal tea blends from Asheville Tea Company, and live classical guitar music. (Wasilewski’s big on partnering with as many local businesses as possible; in addition to Asheville Tea Company, they work with Whisperholler Farms, Mountain Foods, Annie’s Bakery, Mountain City Coffee Roasters, Gourmet Chip Company, Sunburst Chef & Farmer, and Mills River Creamery.) She says she’s also hoping to expand to offer a few dinner services each week: “There seems to be a demand for it in the area, seeing as we are surrounded by numerous chain restaurants and so few locally-owned places down here in South Asheville. We would love to organize regular chef collaboration dinners—family-style and festive.”

Wasilewski notes, however, that the restaurant business remains a difficult and tricky—and frequently all-consuming— industry. “The greatest hurdle I have overcome is surviving, thus far, as a truly independent business owner. Without ever having investors or a business partner, managing stress and balancing a personal life has demanded a serious learning curve. I used to feel guilty for taking a day off or scheduling a late morning to catch up on sleep, but I have learned how important those self-investment days are.

“While it can be a struggle at times, I wouldn’t change a thing about it!”

Visit Ivory Road Café & Kitchen Monday-Saturday, 9AM-4PM, at 1854 Brevard Road in Arden.(www.ivoryroadavl.com).

We are committed to conscious sexuality, body positivity & self-care!

57 Broadway St, in the Heart of Downtown Asheville VaVaVooom.com 828.254.6329 March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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insight

Eye In The Sky Who you gonna call when your property needs protecting? Asheville’s Security Camera Warehouse, that’s who!

W

ith digital hacking and lax cybersecurity currently the international bogeyman du jour, it can be easy to forget that criminal intrusions in the real world remain an ongoing concern for the government, businesses, and private citizens alike. What are your prevention options?

Hire a security guard, of course, or a professional security company to install and set up motion sensors and/or cameras, then subsequently monitor the property around the clock. But have you looked lately at the going rates for licensed/bonded security guards or contracts with monitoring agencies?

Security Camera Warehouse (SCW), then, at your service.

The Asheville-based company sells high-quality cameras designed to withstand all weather elements, provide such standard features as Line Crossing, Intrusion Detection, and Face Detection, and be scheduled for 24/7 continuous, motion, or event recording. The cameras have video content analysis software designed to automatically upload images to your FTP server or send them to you via an email alert whenever a potentially suspicious event does occur. And Security Camera Warehouse also sells its products direct to the customer, providing easy, intuitive set-up instructions that do not automatically require a professional installer, thereby cutting out the middleman and significantly reducing the overall cost of the system.

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“Our security camera systems have innovative features, can be watched remotely, are built tougher, and warrantied longer,” says the company’s CEO, Matthew Nederlanden. “The security camera industry is currently in a race to the bottom, with production quality and cybersecurity often being sacrificed in pursuit of lower cost products. Most other companies in our field view their service teams as an area to cut costs: outsourcing labor and paying low wages, but this usually means talking with someone who doesn’t know the products.”

Nederlanden, who is also a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council, originally started with SCW as an independent marketing consultant to help market the company’s website.

Then, after about six months, he learned that the original founder of the still-young business (it started in 2010) had been engaged in some very questionable practices—essentially

“By focusing on product quality over making the cheapest product... SCW has earned an immense amount of respect within the security industry.” taking clients’ money for product that was never delivered.

Explains Nederlanden, “He emptied the bank accounts, abruptly quit, and moved to another state. Later on the FBI even got involved. The company was in debt, its customers were angry, and I really didn’t know much about security cameras at the time. But I had a firm commitment to what had to be done:

I refunded everyone’s money who was a victim and also sent them the products they were trying to order free of charge.”

Since then, by focusing on product quality over making the cheapest product, and offering the kind of customer service that brings people back and gets them to spread the word, SCW has earned an immense amount of respect within the security industry along with the loyalty of its customers, ultimately scaling to a multi-million-dollar e-commerce company more rapidly than anticipated.

Along the way, SCW took part in the Discovery Channel show Garage Rehab, bought a building in Asheville’s River Arts District, introduced a new product line, and, in 2017, launched a new local installation service for the Western North Carolina region. Nederlanden is quick to point out that one of SCW’s ongoing goals is to “improve the employees’ lives. Each month, each employee gets a portion of the profit that the company

Karen Washington

Sobande Moss Greer

Dan Kittredge

Russell Hedrick

MAT THEW NEDERL ANDEN

generates as a bonus. Our commitment to profit sharing, and to a salary you can actually buy a home with, means that we pay salaries one-and-a-half to three times that of the average full-time WNC wage. We’ve recently launched some new innovative benefit packages, like taking the traditional 401k matching program and saying that if you have debt, you can use that same matching percentage for debt repayment. We also launched company wide financial counseling and budgeting classes through OnTrack (a WNC nonprofit).”

Going forward, Security Camera Warehouse is preparing to launch a new line of cameras and a new alarm product, putting the final touches on their first in-house software solution (currently, the software is leased), and expand the services that their local installation branch offers—possibly even going into a second city.

“Our core identity is in doing the right thing,” says Nederlanden, proudly. “We like to say internally that we don’t sell security cameras, we sell support—what we bring to the table is expertise and customer service.”

Visit Security Camera Warehouse online: www.security-camera-warehouse.com.

Beth and Shawn Dougherty

Celebrating 25 Years of Education March 9–11, 2018 • Asheville, NC 150+ classes on growing • Trade Show • Seed Exchange OrganicGrowersSchool.org March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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ONE

FOR THE

BOOKS written by emily gl aser photos by anthony harden

With independent bookshops on the endangered species list and Amazon’s monopolistic presence in the marketplace a constant threat to them, Brendan Sherar’s online marketplace, Biblio, has become a significant lifeline for the booksellers.

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(L-R) BIBLIO CTO Michael Tracey, CEO Brendan Sherar, and COO Allen Singleton March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 19

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T

raditionalists may rail against the commoditization and digitization of books, classicists may decry the evolution of e-books and Amazon, but the truth is this: Books have long been big business.

Since Gilgamesh took his first, typewritten steps across the page, books have been monetized. The earliest book collectors, iconic intelligentsia like Aristotle and Plato, paid good money for their scrolls. (Plato purportedly paid a whopping 100 minae for three small treatises of Philolaus the Pythagorean.) At the height of the Roman Republic, personal libraries came in vogue, and the taberna librarii that stocked them did a booming business.

As empires rose and fell, and their missives with them, books transitioned from costly paraphernalia of the educated aristocracy into commonplace commodities. Spurred by early edicts of free speech like the Magna Carta, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of the publishing profession, a veritable industry rose from the papyrus prints of yore.

There’s a simple equation to business: Price is driven by supply and demand. Over the course of centuries, the supply of books burgeoned, and prices dropped. But industry loves scarcity, and a new trade arose to fill the void: rare books.

One of 48 Gutenberg Bibles (the first books printed on movable type) sold at Christie’s New York in 1987 for a then-record $4.9 million. Classics like Shakespeare and Chaucer have sold for upwards of $6 million, while copies of James Audubon’s Birds of America regularly auction in the $8 to $11 million range. And in 1994 Bill Gates himself paid an unfathomable $30.8 million for one of da Vinci’s scientific journals, The Codex Leicester (and shared it with the world as screen savers for Windows 95).

These may represent the apex of rare book collecting, but it’s a broad and profitable enterprise. Rare books (also called antiquarian books) are bought, sold, auctioned, and traded every day, with prices ranging from the hundreds to the thousands and, occasionally, even millions. But booksellers and book collectors are scattered across the globe; connecting them and facilitating their transactions necessitates an astute and nimble marketplace. And that is where our own rare narrative begins.

Brendan Sherar’s personal history with the business of books is multifaceted and extensive, culminating (and continuing today) with the founding of Biblio, an online marketplace that connects booksellers to book buyers, dealing largely in antiquarian finds.

That is a gross simplification of a very complex pursuit. “Rare books” alone are a bit knotty, evading conclusive definition. “Sometimes they’re old, sometimes they’re new and they’re signed, but the way we define [rare books] is as books that people want for more than just their intrinsic value,” Sherar explains. “There’s something that’s tangible about them that people want to have and hold and collect. And then when you talk about the more general books, we think about those as books that people want for the intrinsic value of the book themselves.” So a book is never collectible or rare by definition; it’s a designation assigned to it by an individual need. Again: supply, demand, price.

The community that’s arisen around this enigmatic trade is one of tight-knit traditionalists, certainly, but with the rise of digital marketing and social media, it’s also increasingly one of millennials and aesthetic collectors. With indie bookshops on the endangered species list and Amazon a plague-like monopoly, Sherar and Biblio act as mediators between bookseller and collector, as well as between one millennia of book collecting and the next.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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CHAPTER ONE Now, back to Sherar’s multifaceted and extensive experience in the business of books.

It began when Sherar was at Park University in Kansas City, studying English and dreaming of writing the proverbial Great American Novel. Most college students are strapped for cash, and, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. While his fellow students whiled away their hours in beer cans, the self-professed bibliophile found a way to turn a profit off his hobby in the form of book scouting.

The premise of this earliest venture was simple. “I figured out books that people wanted in Kansas City were different than books people wanted here in Asheville,” Sherar remembers. “A lot of the time you’re talking about local authors. So if I’m in Kansas City, for example, I’m looking for John Parris. He was a columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times for years, and all of his books were out of print. So they actually went for a pretty fair penny here in Asheville, but nobody out in Kansas City cared. I’d stumble across them every now and then for like two bucks, and then come here and get $80 for them.”

It’s the kind of thrifty scheming that’s a hallmark of university-age entrepreneurs: quick flip, quick money. But unlike most collegiate money-making ploys, Sherar’s book scouting evolved into much more. Buried in inventory, the student curtailed his English degree in favor of the book business. (Sherar did recently earn a degree in economics from UNC Asheville, and says “I’ve found I’m a better data analyst than would-be novelist!”) He opened a brick-andmortar bookstore in Waynesville, Sherar & Paige—named after himself and his wife, Tracy Paige—which operated successfully for a few years. And then the internet arrived.

To say the dot-com era affected the longstanding bookselling business is a glaring understatement. Over the past 20 years,

SHER AR

Rather than slip his neck willingly into the digital noose, Sherar used the rope to climb.

In 1998, the same year Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks turned the synthesized, chirpy “You’ve got mail” into a love line, and “the web” became a household phrase, Sherar purchased the domain name “Biblio.” As he recalls now, “I kind of knew what

Biblio serves as a marketplace for approximately 5,500 booksellers (from large textbook sellers to single smalltown shops to avid collectors). In 2017 Biblio processed, on average, north of 26,000 transactions per month. we’ve watched giants like Borders Books topple under the deft tugs of the online vanguard of Amazon and Google. The digital behemoths dealt even harsher, swifter blows to the mom ‘n’ pop bookshops that once populated America’s Main Street—shops much like Sherar’s own early venture.

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I wanted to do with it, having sort of toyed with the idea for a couple of years at that point. Once I had that domain name in hand, I knew I was going to go for it, although with my first child on the way, I had to resist the very real temptation to flip the name quickly for a hefty profit.”

The bookish entrepreneur had no programming skills, but aided by a friend, Michael Tracey (who remains Biblio’s CTO today), and, fittingly, books, he was able to set up the metasearch engine Biblio. “It took me a year or so to learn and master— according to my own estimation at the time—Perl, Linux, HTML, and MySQL before I could do anything. Fortunately, running an antiquarian bookstore in Waynesville affords one ample time between paying customers, and therefore ample time to pour over tech books. With Michael’s help, who will always be my senior in all things tech even though we went to the same high school parties, we launched the site—as a metasearch—in October 2000.”

Though a metasearch engine was valuable, it wasn’t Sherar’s truest vision for Biblio. Over the course of the next two years, he shifted the metasearch engine to SearchBiblio, repurposing the Biblio name for a new venture and his long-term goal. In February 2003, Biblio launched as a marketplace.

A marketplace is distinctly different from a metasearch engine, though both facilitate transactions between buyer and seller. A metasearch engine aggregates listings from sites like Biblio and its competitors, whereas a marketplace (as Biblio is today, and has been since 2003) connects the bookseller and customer directly. They’re still the middleman, but a much more conspicuous and appreciable one.

With characteristic volubility, Sherar speedily dictates his laymen’s explanation: “As a marketplace, you have a direct relationship with both the customer and the bookseller (the supplier). So [Biblio’s] relationship with the supplier is [they’re] sending us their list of books for sale, and we’re doing customer service for them and collecting payments that we remit to them, so there’s an ongoing relationship there. And on the customer end, you know customers are actually conducting a transaction on our site and paying for the books right there. Whereas in a metasearch that’s kind of abstracted: Somebody comes, they do a search, and they go off to another site that basically coordinates that transaction.”

Sherar may have been among the first entrepreneurs to digitize the book market with both early iterations of Biblio, but he was certainly not the only one, and his predecessors and contemporaries, in some ways, compromised the marketplace.

“It’s taken us a long time to find a place in the bookseller community because of some moves that were made early in the dot-com era in the book industry that really sort of marginalized a lot of sellers and left them pretty disaffected and distrustful of sites like ours,” Sherar says.

Over the past 15 years, the Biblio team has intentionally cultivated positive relationships with booksellers the world over, amending some of those reservations. “One of the things that’s kind of a hallmark of our business is we’ve been very bookseller-centric, in terms of keeping that relationship positive and productive for the booksellers; whereas I think a lot of the markets they work in, it’s kind of the opposite. They’re always the ones who are squeezed by policies or commissions

TR ACEY

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If You Build the Library, They Will Come (and Read): BiblioWorks Though books may sell for thousands of dollars on Biblio.com, the business is involved in a very different kind of bookish enterprise, one where the books are free: libraries.

BiblioWorks is the charitable arm of Biblio.

The idea arose from Megan Sherar’s (Brendan Sherar’s sister) experience with the Peace Corps in Bolivia. The local community of Morado K’asa desperately wanted a library, and in 2005 the Sherars helped them realize their vision.

To date, BiblioWorks has helped establish 15 libraries in Bolivia. The local government provides the electricity, internet, water, the land, and the building; BiblioWorks contributes the training, development, and resources.

The impact of the projects is profound. “When we first started, literacy rates in Bolivia were really low in rural areas; I want to say they were somewhere around 81 percent,” Sherar says. “Now, in those same rural areas, that’s approaching 92 percent. The communities we work in are even higher, and we’ve been able to demonstrate impact there.”

Though they considered expanding into other countries, Sherar has decided to instead focus BiblioWorks in Bolivia, increasing their impact locally—growing vertically, rather than horizontally. “What we’re sort of in the process now of envisioning is: How do we pivot that and maybe address some of the other needs using our libraries as kind of community development platforms?” Whether that’s sanitation, reproductive health, domestic violence, or something else entirely, the libraries can be a home base for all kinds of change. “We have a pretty good operation going there, and I think we can do a lot of work.”

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or something like that. That’s generated a pretty significant amount of goodwill for us over the years.”

Since finding their niche and building their customer base through trust and transparency, Biblio’s path has remained fairly straight and narrow—though Sherar and his now seven-person team did make the occasional detour; a mid-2000s venture in direct bookselling found them with a warehouse on Riverside Drive stocked with deaccessioned materials from the Brooklyn Public Library’s special collections, like hefty, 16th century elephant folios. “It was pretty clear to us that we really needed to drop back and focus on what we were really good at, and trust booksellers to be good at what they do,” Sherar concludes.

THE TRILOGY As noted above, Biblio is a marketplace, and within that marketplace there are three distinct sectors: reading copies, textbooks, and rare books. Combining all three sectors, Biblio serves as a marketplace for approximately 5,500 booksellers (from large textbook sellers to single small-town shops to avid collectors),

moving some 80 to 100 million books at any given time. The price of those books can range from a humble dollar bill to a small (or, by most standards, large) fortune. In 2017 Biblio processed, on average, north of 26,000 transactions per month.

Like most similar marketplaces, Biblio pays its bills through commission. The commission schedule adjusts slightly to different scenarios and sales, but averages at about 19 percent. That being said, Biblio also adheres to a self-instituted $40 cap—so even if they facilitate the sale of a million-dollar book (which is unlikely, but a good example for the sake of this argument), their commission would be roughly the same as with the sale of a book priced at $200.

Though they are all books, each segment of Biblio’s marketplace is unique and necessitates a different approach. As Sherar noted earlier, a regular book is desired for its intrinsic value. With reading copies, buyers generally want a decent copy at a decent price.

The rise of the internet and digitization—and their byproducts, like self-publishing and e-books—has undoubtedly affected the market for regular books, but even so, it is a notable part of Biblio’s business today, with thousands of books listed on the site for less than $2.

The textbook market is another one that’s shifting rapidly with the advent of modern technological conveniences. Despite competition in the form of March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 25

THE BIBLIO OFFICE overlooks downtown Asheville

other used textbook sellers (like Amazon and CampusBooks) and rental companies (like Chegg), as well as the edacious innovations of the textbook industry itself (more on that later), Biblio remains a familiar name on the textbook circuit. “I think that is driven largely by the prices we charge to sellers,” Sherar points out. “The people who are selling textbooks are pretty sophisticated when it comes to playing to margins, so they look at it and they realize that there’s a marginal advantage to selling a book on Biblio, because they pay a little less. So they cut their prices a little bit to encourage more sales here and fewer on Amazon. Obviously it doesn’t displace Amazon—they’re still the major marketplace—but I think it does help carve out a little niche for us.”

Compared to regular and textbook sales on Biblio, which are dictated by seasonal whims and have generally declined over the past decade, the antiquarian book market on the site has actually swelled. It’s to that market that Biblio owes its comprehensive growth, with profits steadily ticking upwards on the dog-eared pages of collectibles.

As Sherar pointed out earlier, it is impossible to actually define a rare book by any measurable standards, but nonetheless it’s a profitable business. Allen Singleton, COO, notes that there is a “sweet spot” for rare books on Biblio. “It’s pretty unusual for us to sell a book that’s over $10,000,” he says. “That kind of jumps out. It’s fairly common to see sales that are in that 26

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$500 to $2,000 or $3,000 range for rare books.” And though he can’t allocate a percentage of the 80 million books on the site that are “rare,” it is safe to say that the profits from those sales make up the majority of profits for the company.

In addition to being lucrative, the rare book market is also, simply put, cool. They may not have a warehouse full of elephant folios, but they do house the digital listings of thousands of really unique tomes. Each of Biblio’s employees can cite a half dozen memorable sales. For Marketing Director Amber Shehan, one that stands out is a $10,000 signed copy of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that sold through the site shortly after she was hired. One-of-a-kind manuscripts, ancient illuminated prayer books, and the signatures of acclaimed novelists arrive in their inboxes daily (digitally, at least).

Both Biblio’s rare and regular/textbook markets take on a formidable rival in the form of Amazon. “Our biggest competitor is AbeBooks. They’ve been owned by Amazon since 2008, so our biggest competitors in the book market are Amazon and Amazon,” Shehan points out, with a laugh. Like Biblio, AbeBooks deals in a variety of book sectors. Other competitors include Alibris (a site that also hocks now-archaic “music and movies”), and another powerhouse: eBay. While the model is different from Biblio’s, eBay is nonetheless a striking adversary.

Though Biblio performs primarily as a marketplace, they do extend into auxiliary ventures. For example, the metasearch

engine BookGilt acts as the modern day offspring of SearchBiblio’s earliest iteration, and Biblio also serves as a kind of foster parent, hosting, developing, and maintaining white label sites for professional trade organizations like

As independent bookshops were pushed to the brink of extinction by the internet, Biblio turned the adversary into its own weapon, using the new tools provided by the internet to defeat it. the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America and the Independent Online Booksellers Association.

It’s a simple yet complex web that Biblio has weaved. At its core, the system is the same one Plato purchased those Pythagorean scripts through centuries ago, just hastened by the advent and manipulation of the digital age.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 27

A NEW EDITION Since its inception, Biblio has capitalized on the fundamental incongruities between the archaic business of books and the thoroughly modern digital marketplace, landing the venture in the midst of a mess of juxtapositions. As independent bookshops were pushed to the brink of extinction by the internet, Biblio turned the adversary into its own weapon, using the new tools provided by the internet to defeat it.

Biblio uses a host of modern techniques to sell old things, a profitable contradiction in itself. For example, it is from Google that Biblio currently earns some 95 percent of its customers.

But Google also nearly induced the downfall of Biblio.

Shehan refers to it as “The Great and Powerful Google” because the search engine and its algorithms have the ability to grant sites like Biblio prosperity, pardon, or failure, seemingly arbitrarily. Though Biblio sailed through the Great Recession, their own slump came just a few years later, spurred entirely by the fickle mood of Google. “We were heavily reliant on organic traffic, and you have no control over that,” Sherar remembers.

“So one day you can be making bank, and Google is sending you all the traffic, and then for whatever capricious reason, you just disappear. And that happened for us in 2010.” They managed to right the ship and return to Google’s good graces, but then Sherar and his team faced the same situation again in 2013. “[Google] completely lacks any transparency over the ‘why,’ or what really goes into it,” he adds.

When their hits and click-throughs take an inexplicable hit, Sherar and Singleton frantically alter aspects of their site to try to make amends to the Great and Powerful Google. “During those periods, we’ll get together and we’ll go, ‘Maybe they’re doing this,’ and then you burn the chicken bones and we make the changes, and then you just kind of bite your nails and wait three days to see if anything will change,” Singleton jokes. Still, it is a serious situation, and one that was nigh-on impossible to combat.

Recently, Google changed its system to prioritize paid placement over organic—which Biblio has turned to its advantage. “It sounds like we would hate that, because now we have to pay for stuff, but it actually gives us more control over it, so it’s not something that just hits us for no apparent reason,” Sherar says.

Biblio has learned to play the Google game in other ways, too, as they constantly refine their site to be more SEO savvy, like with their rare book guide. “We have had a blog for a good long time,” Shehan says, noting that the blog was always a valuable resource for readers—but not necessarily for Biblio. “We realized the most popular blog posts that we had were some of the ones written on book care, book conservation, book value—so people were Googling and searching and finding those resources, but 28

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SINGLETON

never going from the blog onto the site.” By migrating those popular articles to the Biblio website into a comprehensive book collecting guide, Shehan ensured that traffic was capitalized on.

A pool of freelance writers, including experienced booksellers, collectors, conservators, and librarians, regularly adds to the guide, establishing Biblio as an expert in the field and simultaneously promoting their SEO ranking.

Google is not the only technological tool in their arsenal.

Biblio is also actively invested in social media. Like most businesses, Biblio’s social media accounts establish and promote their brand, but they do much more than that, too, fostering connection with old and new collectors. Biblio’s community of buyers and sellers use platforms like Twitter and Facebook to communicate directly: “A lot of our followers help each other find books they’re looking for, just because they enjoy that sort of thing,” Shehan says. And with an emerging network of #bookstagrams and #shelfies, Biblio is able to tap into a new generation of bibliophiles on Instagram. Though many of these millennial book collectors (and booksellers) are more interested in aesthetics, the business is the same: They want to buy books, and Biblio can help facilitate that sale.

Even as Biblio deftly employs modern technology to bolster their business, the foundations of the enterprise remain wholly vested in old fashioned convictions like great service.

Multiple employees dedicate themselves to the customer service sector of Biblio, answering the questions and qualms of book collectors and booksellers alike and serving as mediator when problems arise. They also help booksellers navigate unfamiliar technological territory: “There’s a good portion of the antiquarian bookseller world that is not”—Shehan pauses, carefully selecting the words—“technologically savvy.”

And, always, the Biblio staff pays due respect to both parties involved. “We don’t just brute-force-policy the booksellers. It’s their business that they’ve been running for a long time; they’re trusting us to represent them in a way. So we want to have rules that protect the customers, but also allow [booksellers] their autonomy because they’re the experts,” Shehan says. As Sherar mentioned, booksellers have been hoodwinked and swindled by the web for decades, and Biblio deliberately offers them a different experience. The site even offers the bookseller’s contact information, effectively facilitating transactions off-site.

“You can browse their inventory on Biblio, but we provide all the information necessary, their hours and address if they’re a brick-and-mortar, and encourage people to go there.”

It is not necessarily an old-fashioned concept, but Biblio’s structure is also strikingly equitable, and its employees are invested in the company, both literally and figuratively. Though founder and CEO Sherar is still a majority shareholder, owning two-thirds of the business, COO Singleton and CTO Tracey, both of whom have long histories as employees of the enterprise, are both shareholder/partners in Biblio. Most of the rest of the staff are also shareholders or have vested stock options.

“I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for the rest of my team, and I’m really proud to work with them and that they also have a stake in our success along the way,” Sherar, who dubs himself the “reluctant frontman,” adds, “If you’ll permit me a moment of reflection, the savviest business moves I believe I’ve ever made have been in investing shares of my company in really smart, really good people. That’s something that founders are often loathe to do, and I think that’s often to their own detriment.”

The Biblio model is soundly modern, but also wholesome in the vein of old-school, small-town shops.

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THE SEQUEL “The challenge of this business is you’re constantly having to evolve, and so you don’t get a whole lot of chances to say, ‘Wow, I found a formula that works, so now I’ll just ride that,’ which is a downside. I was complaining this morning about just why can’t things be stable for 10 minutes and, like, coast,” Sherar’s palms land tensely on the table before he sits back with a sigh.

“But at the same time, stagnancy’s not really fun either, so it’s fun to be involved in a dynamic business.”

As Sherar points out, being a digital business necessitates constant, swift change and evolution. The Biblio of today is decidedly different from the Biblio of 2003—for example, there are now Biblio sites for the overseas English, Australian, and New Zealand markets (Biblio.co.uk, Biblio.com.au, Biblio.co.nz)—and perhaps even more different from the Biblio of the future.

Though the majority of those impending changes are largely unpredictable, there are a few on the horizon that

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the Biblio team is already preparing for. One? “The end of textbooks,” Shehan posits. Textbook manufacturers are shifting their industry into e-books and online education, as expected, but they’re also making it impossible for students to cheaply recycle used textbooks. They change

“There’s a pretty big barrier to entry, in terms of the cost to get into the business we’re in… It just doesn’t make as much sense for new interest to come in and try to take some market.” the editions every year, forcing professors to assign new books annually. Even from one semester to another, used textbooks lose a large portion of their value because the access code for online materials is applicable for one student only.

The expiration of the textbook sector is one change Biblio’s long anticipated, though, and built into their business model.

“We’ve made a really deliberate decision over the years to not take that money for granted or really build it into our thinking for budgeting and how we spend, because it could just be gone tomorrow,” he adds.

What intimidates Sherar is the new, younger emerging market. “I think the demographic shift is probably one of the biggest challenges we have ahead of us, as that traditional collector begins to age out and along with them the booksellers that serve that market. You have new people coming in, and some of them are kind of coming in that traditionalist vein… but I’m not sure all the people coming in have the same sort of expectations for this type of business or model or type of thing they collect, and I think that’s the big challenge for us.”

This new generation of collectors—those interested in aesthetics or nostalgia over content—is a new, complex puzzle for Biblio, but certainly not an impassable one. “That nostalgia thing is real, and people are looking specifically for exact copies that they remember,” Shehan counters. “I think as long as that exists, there will be a market for antiques and collectibles, specifically in the world of books.”

EPILOGUE If one thing’s for certain, it’s that the book market will continue to change and, most likely, wane—but even that may be an advantage for Biblio. “A narrowing of the market advantages us, because that’s going to make it a whole lot less interesting for a large player like Amazon to really devote a whole lot of energy and resources to it as a segment,” Sherar shrewdly predicts. “There’s a pretty big barrier to entry, in terms of the cost to get into the business we’re in… It just doesn’t make as much sense for new interest to come in and try to take some market. So I think for us, in a way, paradoxically, if that market narrows a little bit, it may actually help us.”

2017 was the best year for Biblio to date: more sales, more money, more success. Biblio’s adaption to and mining of the unavoidable shift of their markets proves, as the great, early book collector Aristotle once said, “Change in all things is sweet.”

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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CAROLINA in the

WEST [

news briefs

A Horse in the Cabinet rutherford county

United Cabinet Holdings announced the closing of its Touchstone Fine Cabinetry business factory in Rutherfordton.

Touchstone had been manufacturing a wide array of fine kitchen cabinetry as well as customized pieces. The closing would cost 67 people their jobs. But not even three days after the announcement, Mark Bellissimo, CEO of the Tryon International Equestrian Center (TIEC), forged a deal to take over the company.

All employees would be retained, with no disruption in labor and their existing benefits packages intact. In addition to running the TIEC, Bellissimo is CEO of United States Precision Construction, the company handling the modular construction of hotels to accommodate guests for the upcoming FEI World Equestrian

]

Games, hosted by the TIEC. The 13-day event, expects 500,000 people from 70 countries to attend. Word came to Bellissimo about the closing through Precision’s COO, Jason Hunsinger, who knew the accommodations would need a lot of cabinets. A series of whirlwind meetings were held, and, before the day was over, Bellissimo had struck a deal, the jobs card weighing heavily in winning consent.

Hospital Change, STAT!

and 400 employees; manage and own the facilities; and be the governing authority, retaining a local board solely in an advisory capacity. The complete takeover was deemed necessary following Erlanger’s failed attempt to turn around Hutcheson Medical Center. The deal has been two years in the making, with Erlanger expanding helicopter service into North Carolina and Murphy Medical selling off its 134-bed nursing home last year. Murphy turned a profit in 2017 and is now in-the-black, but CEO J. Michael Stevenson believes merging with a larger hospital was the inevitable fate for a rural hospital in the South. Small hospitals don’t have the resources to keep up with regulatory compliance, and Murphy has had difficulty recruiting doctors for years. In the interest of patient welfare for the 45,000 residents Murphy serves in Cherokee, Graham, and Clay counties, Stevenson prefers to see a smooth transition when the hospital changes hands April 1.

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Erlanger Health System, Chattanooga’s largest hospital network, will be acquiring Murphy Medical Center. As part of the terms of the deal, Erlanger will acquire all assets and liabilities, including the 25-bed hospital, five office buildings,

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Charlotte, $19.8 million to $8.7 million.

The income was generated from 160,700 bookings. Statewide, Airbnb’s hosted 778,000 bookings, collecting $96.8 million in income. The news comes as the city continues to research ways to regulate short-term rentals. While homeowners argue the income helps them stay in their homes and keep things in good repair, members of city council fear renting space to tourists cuts into available housing stock, exacerbating the affordable housing crisis. Other complaints are: added traffic and noise and unknown people wandering around disrupting the neighborhoods. Another worry is that if short-term rentals are a use-by-right, developers will buy up blocks of homes, and Asheville will become like a tourist town on the coast. Currently, it is legal to rent rooms in private homes short-term if a permit is secured. To rent self-sufficient accessory apartments short-term, homeowners in residential districts must apply for a rezoning before a city council strongly opposed to their creation.

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ordering diabetic shoes. While current industry changes have providers stressing over paperwork and compliance, Softgait can free up time for providers to care for patients. Suess’ concept leverages scale.

Instead of leaving each provider to engage in his own competitive bidding processes, Softgait has built a nationwide network of certified shoe fitters with whom it has already negotiated prices. Once a prescription is entered in Softgait, the patient is connected with a shoe fitter who schedules a home visit. Once the shoes ship, the durable medical equipment provider will have all the paperwork needed to bill the patient’s insurance company in one place, properly filled out and ready to send. Typical reimbursements run around $350. Softgait handles all the compliance headaches, tracking and documenting the process as required.

Charging no membership fees providers only pay when shoes are sold. The process not only proves profitable for the provider, it reduces turnaround time for the patient.

to the only other career choice she had considered: running a coffee shop. She couldn’t leave her first love, so she named her Burnsville restaurant the Rescue Dog Café, deciding to donate 5% of coffee sales to animal welfare. She encourages customers to donate what they would otherwise leave as a tip. To date, she has donated to the humane societies of Yancey, Madison, and Mitchell counties, Fifi’s Friends and Rescue, May Wildlife Rehabilitation, and the Appalachian Therapeutic Riding Center. The atmosphere at the restaurant is described as laid-back. The menu consists of coffee sourced from Dynamite Roasting Company in Black Mountain, breakfast sandwiches, pastries, and homemade dog treats. As if that weren’t enough, shortly after opening, Abare welcomed Doug Mellinger’s Burnsville Donut Company to open a doughnut cart in her lot. Mellinger offers three types of cake doughnuts with thirty toppings for personalization. Abare also recently obtained an alcohol permit, with which she plans to extend hours.

Coffee and Dog Biscuits

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A Mall Change

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Marcus Suess is marketing cloud-based software to streamline the process of

When the business of running an animal rescue organization became too overwhelming, Pam Abare turned

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Changes in retail preferences have hit the Asheville Mall. Nationally, Kmart and

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March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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Sears have been among the hardest-hit brick-and-mortar establishments, with store closings being an ongoing process for the last two years. Asheville’s Sears is expected to either close or scale down considerably. Seritage Growth Properties of New York introduced plans to the city’s design review process that would demolish Sears, and construct four commercial buildings, a 10-screen movie theater, and a six-story apartment building in its place. The project, pitched as replacing Sears with walkable live-work-play space, is estimated to cost about $45 million. The plans were well-received in preliminary neighborhood meetings. Should the plans be approved at all levels of the process, permits could be issued as early as March or April. Analysts are estimating 25% of retail malls will close in the country by 2022, so local leaders are offering incentives for construction of more housing units. Expect to see more conversions of retail space to residential development in the future.

As Opposed to Old Bats henderson county

Young Bat Company (YBC) has reopened. After a 12-year run, the company closed in 2005 because principal Chris Young, according to his son Thomas, is an inventor who had mastered the art and got bored. Back in the day, YBC was one of 40 manufacturers of baseball bats, and its products were used

by Major League greats like Barry Bonds and Javier Lopez. Thomas was seven when the business closed, and recently he and his friend, Cody Siniard, started probing into the business. The friends compiled a lot of market research on 94 bat companies, collecting data on pricing and advertising. They crunched some numbers and decided they could launch a profitable venture. Chris had sold all the manufacturing equipment, but he hadn’t sold the business. While he’s technically the CEO, he says he’s just the janitor, and he does things like sourcing wood from development 34

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projects. Thomas and Cody want to run a small, artisan business. They’re currently selling wooden baseball swag and taking orders for high-school and college players. One of their favorite products is an “unbreakable” wooden bat they say is well worth the investment. In a couple years, they hope to enter negotiations with Major League Baseball.

Marion’s Earth and Soul mcdowell county

A new business opened in downtown Marion called Earth and Soul Studio.

It’s not unlike the shops in downtown Asheville, but it is a first of its kind for Marion. The shop is a gallery for Bobby Stiers’ art. He paints in vibrant colors, both realism and abstracts, forms, and symbols. The whole store is lit in black light so passersby can even see the art at night. Stiers started painting 2 ½ years ago, and now he sells his paintings for $30-$300 each and his shadowboxes for up to $800. He thought he might have to move to somewhere like Asheville, but he wanted to share his work in his hometown. His collaborator is Nikki Chester, who handcrafts skincare items from all-natural ingredients. Her line is called Nikki’s Nourished by Nature, and it includes soaps, lip balm, exfoliators, and insect spray. To round out the inventory, the two also sell crystals, handmade jewelry, and tie-died T-shirts from Travis Spears and Katie Spades of Atlantic Beach. Stiers and Chester want their business to give back to the community, planning to raise funds for first responders and Brother Wolf of McDowell County.

Hotel Hostility buncombe county

Developer Parks Hospitality Group (PHG) had once aimed to complete a $24 million Embassy Suites hotel by March 1. Eight stories high, it would be a gateway to Asheville’s central business district, offering a pool, a rooftop bar, meeting space, and a 200-car parking

facility, all within walking distance of the US Cellular Center. PHG applied for a conditional-use permit, and having done well throughout the design review process, the plans were defeated last minute by the city council. They wanted the hoteliers to build 60 additional public parking spaces and donate $250,000 to the city’s affordable housing trust fund before they would grant the permit.

PHG sued, saying it had met the seven standards for a permit, and Superior Court Judge William H. Coward agreed, ordering the permit to be issued. The city then notified the applicant it intended to appeal the decision. Estimating to lose $4 million from what would now be two years of delays, and believing the case would stand up in court, PHG President Shaunak Patel filed for a demolition permit to remove the existing building on site. The city responded by asking for a stay on his permit.

Valuable Tips watauga county

A collection of over 250,000 Native American arrowheads was the subject of an episode of Strange Inheritance with Jamie Colby, in January. The artifacts were scrounged from 20 states over a period of 55 years by Randy “Moon” Mullins and his wife, Irene. When Irene died in 1982, friend Jerry Williams and his wife moved in with Moon so he wouldn’t have to go into a nursing home.

Moon died five years later, and Williams acquired the collection. Estimated at $1 million if sold piecemeal, Williams wanted to honor Moon’s wishes to keep it together. Wayne Underwood wanted to buy the collection, and the two agreed Underwood would take control of the collection and pay Williams, for the rest of his life, $1 from each admission ticket sold for Mystery Hill, Underwood’s museum in Blowing Rock, where the collection is now on display. The deal has worked well for both parties, with Williams receiving about $400,000 to date. Underwood is working on getting a larger building for the collection.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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Garden Retro

Old plants are becoming new again, so if your gardening knowledge and budget are still growing, why not make it easy on yourself?

B

C

cinthia milner

is a garden coach at B.B. Barns Garden Center & Landscaping Services in Arden, North Carolina

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OM B C YC L ON E S , F R IGID

temperatures, heating bills, cabin fever, it’s almost over.

Spring arrives on the 20th of this month. For the gardeners, gardener wannabes, and everyone in between, that’s the best 2018 news so far.

So yes, go ahead: Get excited. If you haven’t been doodling sketches for additional beds, scouring catalogs for new plants, or watching home gardening shows, do so now. Some advice? A few plant suggestions? Go retro. Old plants are becoming new again.

Plants are trendy. For years, gladiolas were passé.

Thankfully, they’re popular again. The showy, summer bulbs make fabulous cut flowers and perennial border additions. Boxwoods, azaleas, roses—all plants that flourished under my grandmother’s green thumb, were spurned in recent decades.

As a garden coach, it’s my job to advise suitable plants for a client’s landscape. If I mention boxwoods, clients roll their eyes. Their memories of green shrubs pruned tightly into round balls is still fresh.

If I suggest roses, I may be shown the proverbial garden gate. Boxwoods are out; dwarf conifers are in. Roses are out; hydrangeas are in. It’s not just the iPhone that tempts us to the latest and newest.

As a plant geek, I’m guilty of walking past the tried and true to the trendy and tempting. Lately,

| March 2018

though, I’m reminiscing about the plants of my childhood. The good news? Some plant breeders are reminiscing, too. Slowly, some of the old favorites are returning, and they’re disease resistant, don’t require shaping into tidy balls, and are better suited in size to small, urban gardens.

*** Take roses. Roses are like babies; they often come with a lot of stuff. Rose fertilizer, rose pruners, and rose gloves—and there’s an intimidation factor when growing roses. Aren’t roses just for rosarians?

Step in David Austin roses, or, as they’re called, the English rose. David Austin, an English rose breeder (since 1950, so he knows a thing or two about roses) has a collection of over 160 shrubs and climbing roses. Combining the best of the modern rose (repeat blooming, extensive range of colors) and the old roses (cabbage head, fragrant, disease resistant), Austin roses are shrubs that stay in the 4’ x 3’ size, or are climbers that don’t typically go over

C 10’ tall. They are repeat bloomers, but don’t expect a ‘Knock Out’ rose that blooms all season and gets a little tiresome in the process. The English roses have two to three bloom cycles a season: early spring, summer, and fall.

I once interviewed David Austin's senior rosarian, Michael Marriott. I asked what criteria was used for a rose to be successful in their breeding program. His response?

“The rose must be beautiful” he said. “If a plant isn’t beautiful, then there’s no reason to have it in your garden, is there?”

He went on to say that we Americans make it all so hard.

“Growing roses,” Marriott explained, “is like growing any other plant. There’s no need to complicate it.”

He was referring to the inevitable black spot, rust, powdery mildew, and more that plague roses, causing many gardeners (“we Americans”) to avoid them. Or, to head in the opposite extreme of turning roses into divas by pruning them just so, adhering to a strict fertilizing schedule, and maintaining a spraying regime that requires a hazmat suit to keep leaves whistle-clean. In other words: We look for perfection and miss the rose.

Mr. Marriott has grown roses organically for over 20 years in his garden, so his statement that we “make it all so hard” comes from his experience of treating roses like the plants

THAT MEANS ROSES GET THE LEAST AT TENTION BECAUSE THEY ’RE FARTHEST FROM THE GARDEN SHED AND MY CHAIR. they are. My English roses are planted (for the benefit of my neighbors and myself) on the west side of my house. That means they get the least attention because they’re farthest from the garden shed and my chair. I do little to help them along. I occasionally fertilize. I water when the 10-day forecast shows no rain in sight. I deadhead if I’m on that side of the house with snips in hand. I rarely prune though, which can end up a mess, but no fewer roses. The roses thrive, despite my neglect, and these last few seasons have proven them somewhat drought tolerant. No, their leaves are not spotless, but their blooms are full, and neighbors walking by are delighted with fragrant roses leaning over a picket fence.

Roses require full sun and planting space to allow for air and sunlight penetration. Roses, like all blooming plants, do benefit from a monthly fertilizer, and if the spotty leaves bother you, prune them off. Rose canes grow quickly, and fresh, new leaves are always coming on. Remember, roses are just shrubs that bloom.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 37

column

A few favorites you may want to try: ‘Claire Austin’

‘Munstead Wood’

‘Gertrude Jekyll’

‘Old Wollerton Hall’

‘Graham Thomas’

‘Teasing Georgia’

‘Lady of Shallot’

*** Onward to boxwoods. Yes, I know. Eye-rolls. Still, they are becoming the darlings of the garden, again. One excellent reason is deer—as in “deer in the headlights” deer. Modern homeowners wanting to garden face a severe deer dilemma.

Their numbers are increasing rapidly and finding plants that deer won’t eat isn’t easy.

Enter the boxwood. Deer resistant, it can grow in a fair amount of shade (up to a half a day), the cost is reasonable, and every garden needs evergreen for accents, structure, and winter enjoyment. The pruning? No rule says boxwoods must be pruned into tight, round balls unless that’s your preference.

In fact, pruning them so creates health issues for the plant, as it limits air and sunlight penetration. Instead, prune once or twice a year to manage the size and keep air flowing

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through the shrub, while allowing it to grow openly and loosely.

Boxwoods are naturally attractive plants when not sheared into submission.

When looking for evergreen for the garden, be it a hedge, edger, foundation plant, or accent plant, boxwoods are a good choice. Their sizes vary, depending on cultivar, ranging from 5’ x 5’ to 2’ x 2.’ There is a boxwood size for every need. I enjoy using them in varying heights, planted closely together on corners, or to mark pathways. The smaller ones like ‘Wee Willy’ I use in window boxes. Their main requirement is good drainage. They don’t like wet feet or heavy, clay soils. Avoid the problem with proper planting (plant “up”) and amendments.

Here are a few of my favorites: ‘Baby Gem’

‘Morris Midget’

‘Baby Jade’

‘Wee Willy’

‘Graham Blandy’

‘Winter Gem’

‘Green Velvet’

*** And finally: to the azaleas. Tried and true in the garden isn’t complete without adding azaleas to the list. For those whose

prom pictures are in front of a bank of blooming azaleas, and who can’t remember a spring without a profusion of blooms in literally every color, welcome to the South. Azaleas are as Southern as biscuits, and while biscuits are still popular, azaleas are no longer in favor.

Before we skip adding them to the garden, take those prom pictures out for a second look. Azaleas are a lot of color without a lot of work. Azaleas are easy maintenance, tolerate quite a bit of shade (hello, Western North Carolina), and generally bloom before the trees leaf out, allowing for some trickery in the garden.

They benefit from rejuvenation pruning, i.e., pruned back to 12” to 18” when starting to look shabby, thereby creating a new, healthy shrub. That can be a significant budget saver if your new home has azaleas eating the foundation with mostly dead twigs in the interior. Landscape plants don’t last forever, to the surprise of many homeowners, but azaleas give you a second chance. (Rejuvenation pruning is done immediately after the azaleas have bloomed.)

Add reblooming azaleas to the mix, and it’s hard to say no. I was not a proponent of reblooming azaleas. “Azaleas bloom in the spring,” I said, with an air of horticulture snobbery, until I moved into a home with a large grouping of purple ‘Encore’ azaleas surrounding a flowering cherry tree. I admit it’s fun

to cut stems of azaleas for my October (and some years, even Thanksgiving) table. As daylight shortens in the fall of the year, gardeners are often tired and ready to lay down their shovels.

Reblooming azaleas give a second wind with little effort.

Azaleas require afternoon shade, except for the rebloomers that thrive in full sun. Excellent drainage is a plus. Pruning is done after they bloom because azaleas bloom on old wood.

Rebloomers bloom on old and new wood, and should be pruned after spring blooming. Give plenty of space when planting, as azaleas typically grow to 4’ x 4.’

Reblooming azaleas are: ‘Encore’ ‘Bloom-a-Thon’ ‘ReBLOOM’ We homeowners and renters have limited real estate. Choices are necessary, and just like trying out new recipes for company is risky, experimenting with new plants is, too. If your gardening knowledge and budget are still growing, perhaps skip the up and coming and go for the proven and worthy.

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local industry

Weaving a Web Independent Internet Service Providers in Western North Carolina Capital at Play talks to area internet pioneers, elected officials, and ISP operators about the challenges related to bringing reliable, high speed internet to our mountains. written by daniel walton March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 41

local industry

ne day in 1994, Bill Fishburne was making the rounds of his employees at The Electronic Office, an information technology provider based in South Asheville. Everyone appeared to be hard at work on the usual challenges of Microsoft MS-DOS and Apple PowerMac computers—with the notable exception of the printer technician, Carlos Ramirez.

“Carlos was doing something I didn’t recognize, so I walked over and asked him what it was,” remembers Fishburne. “He said, ‘The Internet!’ and I said, ‘The what?’”

After a few minutes of explanation, Fishburne realized that Ramirez could connect almost instantaneously with other computer users from all over the world. He immediately got up from the technician’s demonstration and turned the corner to visit the founder of The Electronic Office, Kemper Brown. “I sat down in his office and said, ‘Kemper, I just saw the future,’” Fishburne recalls.

From that conversation was born Internet of Asheville (IOA), the very first internet service provider (ISP) in Western North Carolina. By early 1995, customers were paying $49.95 per month to call into IOA’s Portmaster, a machine that could connect 24 computers to the internet simultaneously at 56 kilobits per second.

In those pre-Google days, IOA’s customers learned about the possibilities of cyberspace through an email newsletter, hand-compiled by Fishburne every Saturday night and sent out on Sunday mornings. “To find some new place on the internet was kind of a pain in the ass,” he says, “so I put together this list of interesting free things to do and places to visit.” Clients shared their own discoveries through email as well, creating a type of ersatz social media.

The newsletter also helped IOA distinguish itself through customer service from its main competitor, the national provider America Online. “As sure as the sun was going to come up, I’d get two or ten really pissed-off clients respond to my email, saying how they were going to come in and either give me their computer or murder me, whichever came first,” Fishburne says.

Those customers went to the top of IOA’s list for service calls the following morning.

Despite the internet’s slow speed, limited size, and technical difficulties, Fishburne says his salespeople literally couldn’t leave their desks—their phones rang off the hook with interested 42

| March 2018

clients. “If somebody had a dinner party and happened to have an internet connection, everybody there would call us the next day to get connected,” he explains. “Like me, nobody knew what it was, but once they realized what was going on, the lightbulb lit up.”

Is the Future Here?

More than 20 years onward, the collective light of those internet realizations has illuminated a future beyond Fishburne’s wildest dreams. In 2015 AT&T announced plans to extend its GigaPower service to the city of Asheville, offering speeds of up to one gigabit per second (Gbps)—roughly 20,000 times faster than IOA’s original dialup. Even standard broadband internet, classified by the Federal Communications Commission as 25 megabits per second (Mbps), is nearly 450 times faster than the first connections.

With rapid, reliable internet connections have come new possibilities for economic development in North Carolina.

According to a 2010 study by the Strategic Networks Group, 18 percent of all new jobs in the state were generated as a direct result of broadband access. Small businesses in particular benefitted from broadband: 28 percent of jobs at companies with fewer than 20 employees arose from internet access, while 85 percent of home-based businesses saw broadband as essential to their functioning.

However, for many residents in the western part of the state, that bright future remains somewhere over the horizon. A map of available internet speeds from the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office paints large swaths of counties such as Jackson, Swain, and Graham in a sickly pink, indicating no availability at the federally defined broadband minimum.

According to Brian Turner, Democratic representative for Buncombe County’s District 116 in the North Carolina General Assembly, and a longtime advocate for rural broadband, the

ArcGIS Web Map North Carolina Geodetic Survey, North Carolina Department of Transportation | Esri, HERE, Garmin, NGA, USGS, NPS |

Broadband above 100 mbps Broadband between 25 and 100 mbps Broadband between 1 and 24 mbps

Broadband between 1 and 24 mbps

0 0

15 15

1:1,925,969 30

30

60 mi

60 km

Sources: Esri, HERE, DeLorme, USGS, Intermap, INCREMENT P, NRCan, Esri Japan, METI, Esri China (Hong Kong), Esri Korea, Esri (Thailand),

mbps

Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS North Carolina Geodetic Survey, North Carolina Department of Transportation | Esri, HERE, Garmin, NGA, USGS, NPS |

Purpose and Practice

rough geography and low population density of Western North Carolina make the area an unattractive prospect for many All ISPs play essentially the same role: gatekeeper to the large ISPs. County Boundary wider internet. When users subscribe to an ISP, they become “The Verizons and AT&Ts of the world are for-profit business, Broadband between and 24 mbps directly connected to1that company’s servers, which are in turn and they’re looking expand their service area where they Broadb and to abo ve 100 mbps connected to the data routes of the internet “backbone.” The can make money,” Turner says. “When you’re talking about ISP assigns its users unique internet protocol (IP) addresses, single-digit people square the density just isn’t there Broadb Sources: andper bet weenmile, 25 and 100 mb ps making them valid sources of and destinations for internet data. Esri Japan for them.”

Don Davis, founder and president of Skyrunner Internet in But some ISPs are choosing to take the challenge of Asheville, explains that fulfilling this function can look very Western North Carolina head on. Through attentive cusNorth Carolina Geodetic Survey, North Carolina Dep different from day to day. “It can be as simple as just cross-contomer service, cutting-edge technology, and collaborative necting an existing cable in a multi-tenant building to give a partnerships with government and nonprofit agencies, as connection to a single apartment,” he says.

“Or it can be as well as the regional business community—the Asheville complex as installing a tower with 15–20 antennas and lighting Area Chamber of Commerce has made supporting “increased it up to provide wireless internet up to 25 miles away.” funding for access to broadband and fiber optic networks” in Different ISPs employ different types of technology to the region one of its infrastructure-related state legislative deliver broadband internet, the catchall term for an always-on priorities for 2018— these providers are working to weave connection faster than traditional dial-up service. Digital a more inclusive web.

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March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 43

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subscriber lines (DSL), for example, use complex processing to send more data over standard telephone wires. Other approaches include coaxial cable (the same technology used for cable TV), wireless transmission to local towers or orbiting satellites, and fiber-optic communication, in which data signals are converted to pulses of light.

Beyond the tech, ISPs are also responsible for the financial and customer service details of internet connection.

Fishburne, who eventually sold IOA to a company that would become EarthLink, remembers that these aspects were just as difficult as hooking customers up in the first place.

“The problem you had with internet service was the billing,” Fishburne says.

“How do you add new clients, make sure you charge everybody at the end of the month, and tie it all in technically with the computers? Customer management was a big issue.”

When trying to expand broadband service to new customers, ISPs are often confronted with the need for expensive infrastructure. The United States Department of Transportation estimates the average installation cost per mile of fiber-optic cable, the current gold-standard technology, at $27,000.

That price only increases with challenging topography, as is the case in much of Western North Carolina. Without a strong base of potential customers, ISPs are deterred from rolling out high-speed access by this steep initial investment.

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Gaps in high-speed internet accessibility can emerge sur prising ly close to major population centers, as Representative Turner points out. “It’s amazing to me that even in Buncombe County, 15 minutes outside the city of Asheville, you can be in places like Sandy Mush where you can’t get a cell phone signal,” he says. “You really can’t get anything much more than dial-up.”

Many of these gaps aren’t apparent on government maps of broadband

connectivity due to the process by which those maps are constructed. If one person in a census tract has high-speed access, then the entire tract is assumed to have access. In Western North Carolina’s rugged terrain, this approach means that one person with wireless internet on top of a mountain can hide the lack of broadband in the valley below.

For Turner, the broadband access gap raises educational concerns as well as economic issues. Although all K–12 schools in the state have high-speed internet access, that availability is of little help for students completing projects away from the classroom. On visits to many rural school districts, he observed how teachers prepare two variations of homework assignments: one for students with broadband access at home, and one for the unconnected.

“Kids are being told more and more that they need to do research online, and they need access to streaming speeds for things like [online nonprofit educational organization] Khan Academy,” Turner says. “It’s a utility—it’s not a luxury anymore.”

Turner sees parallels between the New Deal–era electrification of rural America and current possibilities for expanding

“The leaders on this can’t even fathom what it’s like to not have internet connectivity.”

photo courtesy PANGAEA Internet

broadband access. State and federal governments, he says, could bring telecommunications companies together with rural development organizations and existing utilities to create financially realistic strategies. “I don’t think it’s the role of government to step in and do the whole thing, but we need to get the ball rolling,” he clarifies.

One such successful partnership evolved in Rutherford County through the Foothills Connect Business and Technology Center. Former Executive Director Timothy Will explains how initial state funding brought fiber-optic cable to a central location in Rutherfordton, then $1.4 million from the Golden LEAF Foundation expanded that network to area schools, fire departments, and police stations. The president of the local water authority even offered the town’s water towers as ready-made antennas for wireless internet broadcasting.

“At that point, it was doable for a wireless entrepreneur, in this case Skyrunner, to come in and make a business case,” says Will. “These things don’t happen without subsidies, and that’s just a fact of life.”

Will adds that it is often difficult to impress the broadband needs of rural communities on urban lawmakers. “I went to Washington, D.C., to talk to some of the bureaucrats up there, March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 45

local industry

photo courtesy PANGAEA Internet

and I saw a commercial advertising 320 Mbps—I’m in a county where you’re in high cotton if you have 10 Mbps,” he says. “The leaders on this can’t even fathom what it’s like to not have internet connectivity.”

In some cases, the law actively prevents North Carolina communities from developing solutions for internet access. The city of Wilson, approximately 50 miles to the east of Raleigh, created its own municipal broadband service in 2008 after existing commercial providers failed to take the city up on partnership opportunities. Known as Greenlight, Wilson’s fiber-optic network offered speeds of up to 1 Gbps with affordable subscription and prepaid options.

Inspired by Wilson’s success, residents of neighboring counties began signing up for Greenlight service. “That shook up the telcos so much, their lobbyists went crazy and wrote a law making it illegal for municipalities to go into the broadband business,” says Will. The resulting legislation, HB 129, was sponsored by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers who had received over $50,000 in campaign donations from Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and CenturyLink.

Stanford University legal scholar and open-internet activist Lawrence Lessig penned a lengthy “open letter” to then-governor Bev Purdue urging her to veto the legislation, writing, in part, 46

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“Commercial broadband providers are not happy with this new [local government] competition… Opponents of community broadband argue that it is ‘unfair’ for broadband companies to have to compete against community-supported networks. But the same might be said of companies that would like to provide private roads. Or private fire protection. Or private police protection. Or private street lights. These companies, too, would face real competition from communities that choose to provide these services themselves. But no one would say that we should close down public fire departments just to be ‘fair’ to potential private first-responders.” In public statements Perdue voiced her concern over citizens’ need to “have access to efficient and affordable broadband services,” but facing a likely override if she did veto the bill, she ultimately decided to neither veto nor sign it, and HB 129 became law.

Although the city of Wilson fought the law up to the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, it was eventually upheld, forcing Greenlight to go dark outside the city’s limits. Those who lost access included residents of Pinetops, a majority AfricanAmerican town in Edgecombe County with over 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line.

“Wilson was offering service in a sense of inclusivity, because they knew how you’re never going to prosper if you don’t get

broadband,” notes Will. “But I’ve worked for the big telcos, and they don’t like competition.”

Creativity and flexibility are thus critical for making broadband internet access a reality in Western North Carolina—the following six ISPs are each taking on the challenge in a unique way.

Making it Work: The Local Providers Skyrunner Internet Asheville-based Skyrunner Internet knows what it’s like to be a champion for expanding broadband access. In fact, the company’s first big promotional effort was taken straight out of the superhero playbook, remembers former CEO Jane Hatley.

“We went to an ISP conference in Philadelphia, and we had a seamstress in town make [founder and current Skyrunner president, Don Davis] a silver lamé suit: Skyrunner Man,” Hatley says. “Then, for our booth, we made a diorama out of children’s toys where Skyrunner Man was fighting this big dinosaur, and on its back, the dinosaur said AT&T.” It was a bold statement for an upstart company. Davis had founded Skyrunner with several technically-minded friends in 1997 as New Era Technologies, offering wireless high-speed internet to area institutions such as Buncombe County Schools and the Omni Grove Park Inn. Their efforts attracted the interest of community investors Julian Price and Pat Whalen’s Public Interest Projects, for which Hatley had done marketing work.

“From my perspective, New Era was kind of loosey-goosey and wasn’t really being run like a business,” Hatley recalls. “I told Pat that they really needed somebody to get in there and run it, not expecting him to say what he said, which was, ‘Why don’t you do it?’”

As CEO, Hatley rebranded the company to Skyrunner, established new payment and billing systems, and brokered expansions to cities such as Greensboro, Greenville, South Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. One of the first wireless ISPs in the country, Skyrunner also created innovative approaches for internet access in public spaces such as cafes and airports. Public Interest Projects sold the company to outside investors in 2000, but Davis purchased it back after the dot-com bubble prevented an initial public offering.

Skyrunner now provides service for approximately 5,000 business and residential customers over roughly 6,000 acres of Western North Carolina. Through wireless technology, the company can reach remote locations without installing miles of costly cable. By hooking its nearly 150 broadcast points to existing fiber-optic networks, Skyrunner joins the speed of wired connections with the flexibility of radio waves.

“We have a group of customers out in Cashiers who get service directly off of the Daniels Building in downtown Greenville, which is over 37 miles to the east,” Davis says. “I think our model of combining wireless with fiber is where you get the maximum bang for your buck, and it has a lot of applications throughout our region.”

As an example, Davis shares the story of some isolated customers living on Hurricane Ridge northwest of Clyde. Although far from existing infrastructure, they had a clear line of sight to Chambers Mountain. Just eight homes committing to Skyrunner service made

SK YRUNNER PRESIDENT Don Davis by antennas, photo courtesy Skyrunner Internet

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 47

it possible for Davis to install a wireless relay on the mountain and make high-speed internet available.

“If someone’s in a location where they don’t have good access, they’re the best ones to reach out and propose a relay site where we can get to them,” Davis says. “Being responsive to our customers’ needs is a top priority.”

Western North Carolina, with its winding mountain roads and comparatively less-developed infrastructure, poses a challenge.

SkyLine/SkyBest The challenges of broadband access mirror the original issue that SkyLine Membership Corporation was formed to address: big providers choosing not to extend their telephone service to rural areas. The people of Alleghany, Ashe, and Watauga counties banded together in 1951 for a solution—in 1995, their decades-old cooperative entered the internet age.

Beginning with dial-up service, SkyLine/SkyBest (the latter a wholly-owned subsidiary of the former, created in 1998 to control its deregulated competitive local exchange carrier services) moved on to a fiber-optic network in 2004. More than 1,800 miles of fiber were installed over 12 years throughout the company’s service footprint, which also includes Avery County and Johnson County, Tennessee.

More than 98 percent of its 20,000+ customers now have access to fiber-based broadband internet at speeds of up to 1 Gbps.

“SkyLine has been proactive in deploying fiber connectivity throughout our service area and was among the first rural companies nationwide to offer Gig-capable internet service.” says Karen Powell, public relations administrator with SkyLine. “Our fiber initiative mirrors that of our company’s efforts, historically, to offer the latest in technology to our members and customers.”

Although SkyLine/SkyBest was recognized in 2017 with a Smart Rural Community national award from NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association, the company isn’t finished with its broadband plans.

Powell says that SkyBest is pursuing grant opportunities to expand service into even remoter areas of Watauga and Avery, as well as Grayson County, Virginia. Current customers with copper connections, limited to 12 Mbps, can also expect a transition to a speedier fiber-optic infrastructure.

PANGAEA Internet In Polk and Rutherford counties, PANGAEA Internet is taking a nonprofit approach to high-speed internet. Using a combination of 48

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FIXING A Lake Lure line af ter a tree took it down in 2017 photo courtesy PANGAEA Internet

state, private, and philanthropic funding, the ISP has grown since 2003 to supply fiber-optic connections for over 160 business customers in communities such as Tryon, Columbus, Lake Lure, and Rutherfordton.

Ron Walters, PANGAEA’s executive director, points to the Rural Internet Access Authority (now the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office) as the seed from which his organization sprung. “The underlying foundation of the network is the infrastructure they initially funded to connect all the elementary, middle, and high schools with fiber-optic cable,” he explains.

PANGAEA’s first iteration, e-Polk, Inc., was formed in 2003 to operate and further build on that network. The nonprofit received its current name in 2007; since then, the organization has received over $4 million in grants from sources including the Golden LEAF Foundation, AdvantageWest Economic Development Group, and even Facebook, which provided funding after building a data center in Forest City, Rutherford County.

The nonprofit currently focuses on providing access for education, government, healthcare, and economic development.

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Walters adds that another priority is establishing partnerships with residential service providers, offering PANGAEA’s infrastructure at affordable rates as a springboard for increasing rural broadband penetration.

“Without some kind of subsidy program, internet service providers simply cannot make any money and have a positive return on their business providing internet into rural areas,” Walters says. “Our partners are using wireless internet, which is a more economical way to deliver what’s called the ‘last mile’ of internet to homes.”

Customers in PANGAEA’s area say that fiber-optic access has been a game-changing development. Brent Washburn, president of Washburn Realty in Rutherfordton, explains that the service has given his employees greater flexibility and improved their productivity.

“I can send and receive files without any concern for having to wait, and my staff can finally work remotely and be just as effective as they are being in one of our offices,” Washburn says. “Having this bandwidth is helping me to transform my business.”

Windstream Communications Stacy Hale, president of operations for Windstream Communications, has a personal understanding of how important internet access can be for rural customers. “I started my career right outside of Birmingham, Alabama, climbing poles as a technician,” he says. “I know what it’s like to stand in the living rooms of our customers and hear why they need the extra speed.”

As a successor of the incumbent local exchange carrier Alltel, which held a regional monopoly on telephone service in North Carolina before regulatory changes in 1982, Windstream is the largest ISP Capital at Play spoke with for this article. However, Hale says, his company still strives to provide small-company attention for its customers.

“When customers complain about their speed because they live in rural areas, I take that call,” Hale explains. “What sets us apart is our accessibility to top decision makers and commitment to getting those customers the highest speed possible.”

Windstream uses internal mapping applications to zero in on pockets of rural customers with slower speeds, thus maximizing the impact of its infrastructure investments. One of the company’s current experiments to boost speeds, known as Project Lunar, joins less expensive copper wiring to fiber-optic connections using advanced networking equipment known as digital subscriber line access multiplexers, or DSLAMs. Thanks to Project Lunar and similar efforts, Hale says that 45 percent of Windstream’s customers in Tryon can get speeds of 25 Mbps, with 20 percent of customers getting 50 Mbps or better. By comparison, 86 percent of customers in the Charlotte suburb of Matthews can get 25 Mbps service, with 40 percent access to connections of 50 Mbps or better.

Hale admits that Western North Carolina, with its winding mountain roads and comparatively less-developed infrastructure, poses a challenge. “You’re always going to have that guy that lives on top of a mountain who you may not be able to reach,” he says. “But we certainly focus on trying to reach as many customers as possible using technology.”

Morris Broadband For Tony Carter, general manager of Morris Broadband in Hendersonville, expanding access is all about controlled growth. Since taking over operations from Mediacom in 2008, Morris has invested $40 million in internet infrastructure upgrades, with a focus on improving speeds for its existing customer base.

“We had to take care of our current infrastructure first so we could even begin offering high-speed internet; when we first took over, the best available speed was 20 Mbps,” Carter explains. “Now, a residential customer can get up to 100 Mbps via their cable modem.”

The company began by adding new fiber-optic nodes throughout its coverage areas, which allowed it to offer business fiber services. For residential clients, Morris rolled out new cable modem termination systems (CMTSs), the switches that join coaxial cable lines to the internet.

“The latest CMTSs have DOCSIS 3.1, which allows operations to reach up to 1 Gbps on a cable modem,” Carter says. “We’re not going to go that fast yet to keep service at an attractive cost for customers, but we’ll have the infrastructure in place for when demand increases.”

Morris currently serves over 20,000 total clients in Ashe, Henderson, Macon, McDowell, and Jackson counties. Because of the company’s exclusive focus on Western North Carolina, it has been able to reinvest its profits back into the community’s internet backbone—Carter himself is a reinvestment, having attended college at the University of North Carolina Asheville and started his career with the cable system in Hendersonville.

Now that Morris’s infrastructure is prepared, Carter says the next step is to expand into rural areas, a process the company has already begun. “In March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

51

Inspired teaching

Debbie Ashe, Admission Director dashe@carolinaday.org

CarolinaDay.org 828.407.4442

for deeper learning

Welcome to a school where the journey is just as important as the destination. Guided by highly qualified and dedicated teachers, your child will learn to independently navigate the world equipped with the characteristics and skills of problem-solving, communication, self-advocacy, and intellectual agility. Our small class sizes, inspired teaching, and innovative program create the ideal environment for curiosity, mastery, and deeper learning to thrive. The result is an education that inspires and brings out the best in your child. Begin the journey with a tour this spring.

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| March 2018

Drop-in to experience our Pre-K/5 faculty and students in action. Choose the classes you will “attend” and talk with current parents and teachers.

local industry

the past two years, we’ve expanded to approximately 400 homes in each county,” he notes. “We’re looking at a lot of projects right now to see what we can make work.”

PANGAEA INTERNET technicians install f iber optic cable along a highway in Polk County, NC , photo courtesy PANGAEA Internet

Viasat The farthest-flung of Western North Carolina residents can still see the sky. That simple fact makes satellite ISPs such as Viasat a possibility for those without other forms of internet service. Satellite customers send and receive signals roughly 22,300 miles each way, connecting with an orbiting platform that relays internet access from a wired location.

Keven Lippert, president of broadband services at Viasat, says that the company’s new technology makes its service competitive with more down-to-Earth forms of broadband. “Powered by out latest satellite, ViaSat-2, we’re the only satellite internet player to offer unlimited data plans, with speeds that can go up to 100 Mbps,” he explains.

That capability is a recent development—before February, Viasat’s customers were reliant on the ViaSat-1 satellite, which maxed out at 25 Mbps. Even with increased internet speed,

Latency is of less importance than bandwidth for most internet users. “Our internet service enables fast streaming of video, music, and more across multiple devices working in the house simultaneously...” the speed of light poses an insurmountable handicap for the service: the more than half-second latency, or response time, caused by the travel of data to and from the satellite.

Lippert counters that latency is of less importance than bandwidth for most internet users. “Our internet service enables fast streaming of video, music, and more across multiple devices working in the house simultaneously,” he says. “However, some video games, such as first-person shooter video games, may not work as desired by the gamer.”

Barring Star Trek transporters, latency will never be solved, but Viasat has plans to boost its bandwidth even higher. Each satellite in the three-unit constellation known as ViaSat-3, currently under construction, will offer a total capacity of 1 terabit per second (Tbps).

See pages 54-55 listings of ISPs available in Western North Carolina.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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local industry

WIRED TO THE

HILLS

The Western North Carolina region is served by a number of Internet Service Providers, some of them based in our region and others having a national presence. Readers wanting to examine their internet options should consult the ISPs’ websites to determine which companies offer service to a specific address.

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REGIONAL BalsamWest FiberNET balsamwest.net 828 -339-2900 52 Colonial Square Sylva, NC 28779 Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation brmemc.com 828 - 837-1017 875 Main Street E Young Harris, GA 30582 Carolina Mountain Cablevision cbvnol.com 866-571-8671 4930 Jonathan Creek Road Waynesville, NC 28785 Comporium Communications comporium.com 1-888-403-2667 331 E Main Street, Suite 101 Rock Hill, SC 29730

Country Cablevision ccvn.com 1-800-722-4074 9449 State Highway 197 South Burnsville, NC 28714 ERC ercwnc.org 828-350-2415 151 Patton Avenue Asheville, NC 28801 ETC etcnow.com 706 -946 -271 2835 Scenic Dirve Blue Ridge, GA 30513 North Carolina Wireless lightleap.net 828-322-1505 1985 Tate Boulevard 43 Hickory, NC 28602 MCNC mcnc.org 919-248-1900 3021 E Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Morris Broadband morrisbroadband.com 828-692-3278 719 S Grove Street Hendersonville, NC 28792

RidgeComms ridgecomms.com 828-649-7680 702 Sapling Mountain Road Marshall, NC 28753 RiverStreet Networks myriverstreet.net 844-238-0131 1400 River Street Wilkesboro, NC 28697 SkyBest Communications skybest.com 1-800-759-2226 1200 NC Highway 194 N West Jefferson, NC 28694 Skyrunner Internet skyrunner.net 828-258-8562 5 Ravenscroft Drive, Suite 207 Asheville, NC 28801 Skywave wncskywave.com 828-788-2929 2123 Herron Branch Road Whittier, NC 28789 WestNet westnetwireless.net 828-339-2999 189 E Palmer Street Franklin, NC 28734

Murphy Cable TV cabletvoniline.net 828-837-7118 46 Creekside Drive Murphy, NC 28906 PANGAEA Internet pangaea.us 828-859-3702 75 S Trade Street, Suite C Tryon, NC 28782

Birch Communications birch.com 1-866-424-5100 320 Interstate North Parkway, SE Atlanta, GA 30339

Northland Communications yournorthland.com 1-844-695-8485 101 Stewart Street Seattle, WA 98101

CenturyLink centurylink.com 1-800-244-1111 100 CenturyLink Drive Monroe, LA 71203

Spectrum (Charter Communications) spectrum.com 1-800-892-4357 400 Atlantic Street Stamford, CT 06901

dishNET dish.com 1-888-965-9226 9601 South Meridian Boulevard Englewood, CO 80112 EarthLink earthlink.net 1-888-327-8454 1170 Peachtree Street NE Atlanta, GA 30309

Viasat Internet viasat.com 855-393-3302 6155 El Camino Real Carlsbad, CA 92009

Frontier Communications frontier.com 1-800-921-8101 3 High Ridge Park Stamford, CT 06905

Verizon verizon.com 1-888-680-7266 1095 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10013

GTT Communications gtt.net 1-703-442-5500 7900 Tysons One Place, Suite 1450 McLean, VA 22102 HughesNet hughesnet.com 844-737-2700 11717 Exploration Lane Germantown, MD 20876

NATIONAL AT&T att.com 866-861-6075 208 S Akard Street Dallas, TX 75202

TDS Telecom tdstelecom.com 1-866-571-6662 525 Junction Road Madison, WI 53717

King Street Wireless kingstreetwireless.com 703-518-9902 526 King Street, Suite 209 Alexandria, VA 22314

Windstream Windstream.com 866-445-8084 4001 N Rodney Param Road Little Rock, AR 72212 Zito zitomedia.net 800-365-6988 102 South Main Street Coudersport, PA 16915

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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THE OLD

NORTH

STATE [

news briefs

Liftgate Isn't a Scandal high point

Mickey Truck Bodies will be hiring for up to 50 openings through March. Mickey is a manufacturer of a variety of truck styles, from box trucks to emergency vehicles, and truck equipment. It also runs a nationwide network of full-service centers and a parts store. Most of the job openings are for welders, installers, and assemblers, and many are for Mickey’s new facility in High Point. Mickey was founded in High Point in 1904, and the facility that opened in October is its fourth in that city. It features 15 bays for liftgate installation and chassis preparation. Liftgates are hydraulicallyor pneumatically-controlled platforms permanently installed on van bodies.

Mickey expects to install 5,000 liftgates this year and triple van body production

]

over the next two years. President Dean Sink notes over 40% of the company’s 400 full-time employees have been with the company over five years; and 30%, over ten. One reason is competitive wages with a generous benefits package that includes incentives rewarding safety, quality, and attendance.

Revolution Growing kings mountain

While the closure of textile plants has been a part of life in North Carolina for several decades, STI Fabric is going against the grain. Upholstery manufacturer STI has constructed a new manufacturing facility with 150,000 square feet that will be the company’s manufactory in Kings Mountain. The building will start out as a

distribution center for the other facilities, but as equipment is moved on-location, it will increase production capacity from 500,000 to 750,000 yards per week.

Corporate President John Kay says the new facility was needed to keep up with demand for STI’s Revolution Performance Fabrics. Products in the Revolution line are stain-resistant and easy to clean, and they don’t fade in sunlight. The company employs over 350 employees locally, and the new building is expected to add about 100 positions, 65 of which have already been filled with hires training in other facilities. STI has been manufacturing upholstery in Kings Mountain since 1964.

Teach a Man How to Get a License wrightsville beach

The North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission was to consider recommendations for changes to eligibility requirements for commercial fishing licenses at its February meeting. The changes, drafted by the commission’s Standard Commercial Fishing License Criteria Committee, would require license holders to demonstrate at least 50% of their income comes from

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documented commercial fishing trips and that they make at least 36 trips a year. Furthermore, any crew members working for a licensed commercial fisher will have to verify at least $10,000 of their annual income is generated in the commercial fishing business. If somebody holds a license but doesn’t fish, he will compete on a par with new applicants for a renewal in the state’s lottery for a limited number of licenses. The changes are supported by the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina, which is trying to “reduce stress” on sea life by preventing people from using commercial licenses for personal use or recreational purposes. Passage of the measures, which commercial fishermen find invasive and randomly restrictive, would require legislative action.

Disposability Problem cary

Ty Sopko, a cofounder of Shift Sight, is building durable electronic devices with parts designed for automobiles or industrial machinery. He says components for high-tech gadgets typically have short lives because they’re built for speed. They also don’t have to last long

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national & world

the old north state

because of current rates of technological obsolescence. Sopko finds this wasteful and environmentally insensitive, so he is building durable technology for applications that don’t require instant gratification. His first product, called Jade, is a device for teaching STEM lessons with programmed learning.

Sopko says it has the processing speed of a personal computer from 1993, but it doesn’t have to go faster. He hopes to make it available for household use in 2020 and then market it to schools. He says when school systems feel compelled to constantly upgrade to the latest tech gadgets, “children are accidentally learning disposability.” In the meantime, Jade is being focus-grouped.

later this year; more are reportedly in advanced negotiations. Based in St. Augustine, Florida, NTE’s mission is to bring low-cost, reliable, and environmentally-conscious power to residents. NTE’s first North Carolina power plant was the 500MW, combined-cycle Kings Mountain Energy Center. A second 500MW, combined-cycle plant is under construction in Rockingham County, and plans are progressing for a 30MW solar project in Fayetteville. Combined-cycle power plants are greener than conventional generators because they combust conventional fuel to turn two turbines, and the heat from the combustion, instead of being dissipated, is recycled to boil steam to turn a third turbine.

Duke Losing Power

Analytics for Dummies

statewide

cary

The towns of Winterville, Black Creek, Lucama, Sharpsburg, and Stantonsburg were the first in the state to receive power from NTE Energy. The towns now have long-term power purchase agreements for wholesale power, having switched from Duke Energy Carolinas January 1.

Four more towns in the Carolinas have similar contracts and will transition

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Fiberactive Organics is now selling the strongest Global Organic Textile Standard cotton thread on the market.

Fiberactive claims sustainability is not just a marketing greenwash; taking care of the Earth and textile workers is its reason for existence. The manufacturer and distributor of organic cotton thread demonstrates its values by using only recyclable, recycled-content, or compostable materials in its packaging.

The new thread, Sewpure, was designed intentionally to address the lack of interest in organic cotton thread due to the weakness of available brands.

Spun in India, Sewpure is 3-ply, and it will be marketed in a multipurpose weight thin enough for home sewing machines and a heavy-duty weight for denim and canvas. Organically grown, its only “treatment” is being washed. It will first be offered in a limited palette of earth tones, but custom colors can be made to match Pantone numbers or swatches provided. Fiberactive has been in the organic cotton business for twenty years, offering products spun in Peru and the Netherlands.

Zero for 25 Years greensboro

North Carolina lost out to Alabama in a bid for a $1.6 billion joint venture of Toyota and Mazda. The state had offered an incentives package valued at $1.5 billion that included tax abatement, the 1,900-acre Greensboro-Randolph Megasite, site preparation, infrastructure, and workforce training. Alabama’s offer was valued at only $380 million, but its site was selected for its proximity to the automakers’ suppliers. The assembly plant will manufacture Toyota Corollas and other Mazda vehicles, and both companies are expected to further research on electric and autonomous vehicles as part of their collaboration. The facility should be completed by 2021, and it is expected to employ 4,000 in the manufacture of 300,000 vehicles annually.

Automakers continue to construct plants in the Southeast because weak unionization translates to more affordable labor costs. While North Carolina has been attempting to recruit an automaker for the last twenty-five years, it remains one of the few Southeastern states to fail to do so. Other companies rejecting North Carolina bids include BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

What Not to Eat carolina beach

Wake N Bake Donuts is among many bakeries around the country to spontaneously capitalize on the Tide Pod Challenge craze, by creating doughnuts that look like the brightly colored pods.

Kids are filming themselves eating Tide Pods on social media, and the consequences can include respiratory and digestive burns, respiratory arrest, seizures, and/or death. In the first 15 days of the year, 39 cases of Tide Pod ingestion were reported to poison control centers, compared to 50 total last year.

Wake N Bake’s owner, Danny Tangredi, said the idea in his shop originated with an employee who suggested “teaching

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the youth the difference between what to eat and what not to eat.” The response has been mixed, with some responding to social media posts with scorn for what they perceive as insensitive. While many bakeries were quick to jump on the mania with blue and orange icing, Vinnie’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York, decided to offer Pied Pods, stuffed pizzas with colored cheese. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of Tide Pods, has been working with social media outlets to wipe out videos of the Tide Pod Challenge, as they violate policies against the promotion of self-harm.

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Safety Drugs chapel hill

Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have made an advance in developing a safe alternative to opioids. Opioids typically relieve pain because they indiscriminately bind to numerous receptors on cell surfaces.

Unfortunately, the mass bindings have a host of side effects, including nausea, numbness, constipation, anxiety, addiction, hallucinations, and fatal respiratory failure. Researchers wanted to find a drug that exclusively targets kappa opioid receptors (KORs), because the very few drugs that bind to those receptors don’t lead to addiction, and lethality is rare. They do, however, cause hallucinations and a sense of unease. So, the first step was discovering the structure of an activated KOR. The quest has been elusive because KORs are too small, delicate, and squirmy for normal x-ray crystallography analysis. So, researchers suspended KOR molecules in a waterlipid mixture, slowly drained the water, and used a tiny antibody to prop the molecules up in their opioid-activated state. With assistance from computer modelers at the University of Southern California, the structure was revealed.

The next step was designing a safe drug that activates only KORs, and one tested in-vitro worked as expected.

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March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 59

PRESENTS THE

We are leveraging our extensive network of local businesses to give special access to our hyper-local readership!

How it works – Each month we will give out a new passcode (March is FITNESS@PLAY, used verbally in store, or online when available) granting access to unique offerings and huge deals at businesses throughout Western NC. Each month’s passcode is available in each edition of the

magazine, in our once-a-month email newsletter, and on our Facebook and Instagram pages.

Bonus – We will also be giving away items from those businesses each month (six separate fitness trials in March alone) in a special readers’ contest.

To make sure you get the passcode each month, keep reading the magazine, or follow us on social media, or sign up for our once-amonth e-newsletter. If you want to win one of the giveaway items, we will choose at random from our e-newsletter members. Sign up today!

For more information visit: capitalatplay.com/coop

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| March 2018

leisure & libation

FITNESS@PLAY March Passcode

Boutique Fitness written by shawndr a russell

After a frigid winter, it’s time to get back in the swing of things and get prepared to rock your summer wardrobe.

Luckily for locals, Asheville has a slew of boutique fitness centers offering a variety of unique workouts that will keep you motivated throughout the spring. Whether you want to push yourself to new limits, try a new-to-you class, or get strong for all your favorite summer activities, these local businesses provide a great excuse to shake up your routine.

We connected with six such businesses for our March giveaway, and these owners stepped up to the plate with free classes for six of our lucky readers. Participating businesses include Orangetheory Fitness, Aerial Space, Joyrider Indoor Cycling Studio, Well.Fit Asheville Cycling Studio, Hard Exercise Works, and Asheville Yoga Center, and prizes include a free class or free month of access. Bonus: All six businesses will also be honoring special pricing for readers who use the March passcode FITNESS@PLAY. Use this code for discounted memberships, a block of classes, or reduced rates for your first month of workouts.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 61

leisure & libation

> >or angetheory

fitness

Orangetheory got its start in 2010. Since then, the franchise has exploded with nearly 1,000 franchisees opening locations in nearly every state in the United States, as well as studios in Europe, Australia, and all of North America. Its popularity can be attributed to the one-hour, high-intensity, small-group sessions designed by physiologist Ellen Latham. Every interval workout focuses on spiking students’ heart rates—everyone wears a heart rate monitor during the classes—so that calories continue burning long after they’ve washed off the sweat. The folks behind Orangetheory call this “the afterburn,” and these full body sessions have been scientifically proven to burn calories for up to 36 hours post-workout. One hour of work for 36 hours of calorie burning? Seems like a worthy trade-off, right?

Asheville’s Orangetheory owners, Emily Brause and Natalie Anderson, opened their doors in 2016 with the goal to align with the city’s motto, “Quality of Service, Quality of Life.”

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“That is what Orangetheory Fitness Asheville is all about,” Brause says. Both had personally experienced powerful results when they tried Orangetheory and were truly impressed with the positive, life-changing effects of this technology-based workout that pushes attendees to stay in the orange zone, otherwise known as pushing up one’s heart rate to between 84-91% of their maximum heart rate.

Brause describes an Orangetheory class as being “filled with motivation, music, excitement, and encouragement from our coaches. From the moment someone walks through our door, you feel the positive and energetic atmosphere.” She invites everyone to come in for one complimentary class to see why Orangetheory workouts have been named the best full-body workout in the nation, and results are backed with a 30-day guarantee.

Use the passcode upon arrival &

and get a free class.

FITNESS@PLAY March Passcode

> >joyryder

indoor cycling studio

Like Orangetheory, classes at Joyryder focus on delivering a super-intense workout in less than an hour. It has been dubbed as Asheville’s first rhythm-based indoor cycling studio, and Joyryder owner Dana Marsh says she opened the studio “to create a safe space where people of all backgrounds, spices, and flavors could come together and feel free to be themselves. We put our phones away, sing at the top of our lungs, and let it all hang out.”

Classes run 45 minutes and follow the music instead of assimilating to a road or mountain trail, and instructors are trained in counting music and queuing, but as Marsh notes, “They are also trained in implementing a journey in the Ryde. It feels less like a typical fitness class and more like moving meditation or a live show.”

In order to achieve this vibe, instructors turn down the lights so everyone can switch off their brains and let the music take over. “We don’t have computers on our bikes, so we add resistance that matches the beat of the music instead of speaking in numbers. Joyryder is a place where we can press the reset button and reconnect with that feeling of infinite possibility and joy,” Marsh says. And just like any good song, each class is designed with a clear beginning, middle, and end to keep students motivated from start to finish.

To foster this engaging atmosphere, Marsh looks for instructors who are more dynamic leaders, as opposed to a typical fitness instructor. Everyone auditions and goes through an intense training program before getting the green light to train others. During their evaluation period, Marsh and her staff ask, “Can this instructor move me? Can they make me laugh? Can they see I’ve had a bad day and give me a pat on the back or remember my favorite song?” And with only six months under the company’s belt, Marsh promises that Joyryder is just getting started.

Use the passcode while visiting

and get a free class.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 63

leisure & libation

> >aerial

space

Ever wanted to run away to the circus? Here’s your chance.

Aerial Space offers a place to practice aerial arts, which owner Hazel Willis says benefits folks beyond just physically. “We feel circus arts can offer opportunities for profound self-discovery and personal growth,” she says, “and we offer adults and children an outlet for play, self-expression, and exercise.” Willis and her co-founders certainly took a leap of faith in 2009, as they were the first circus arts studio to open in North Carolina, but the risk has paid off as the studio heads toward its 10th year in business.

Classes include trapeze and lyra, which uses an aerial hoop for inversions, rolls, and turns. Students can also try silks classes, which involves choreography using colorful aerial fabric hanging from the ceiling. Willis shares that Aerial Space continues to expand the curriculum so even more people will give aerial exercise a try. “Aerial arts combine the athleticism of gymnastics with the artistry and self-expression of dance, so our studio is not just a place to become fit, but a place to grow,” she explains. Additionally, strength classes dubbed “Inner Beast” focus on increasing core, upper body, and lower body strength, so students can move on to more advanced aerial moves at increased heights.

Since these types of workouts can be a little intimidating or completely foreign to newbies, Willis hires staff members who are “gentle and inclusive” and work to cultivate six virtues through their programming and coaching: strength (both mental and physical), flexibility, balance, endurance, knowledge, and creativity.

“We don’t want you to tell us how amazing we are; we want you to realize how amazing you are,” Willis says.

Use the passcode while visiting

and get a free class.

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| March 2018

FITNESS@PLAY March Passcode

> >hard

exercise works

For owner Arnaldo Alvarez, his personal results from working out at Hard Exercise Works under the former owner motivated him to purchase the gym. Over the course of four months of working out at the facility, Alvarez lost 40 pounds and shed an additional 20 pounds over the following seven months. “I started out as an overweight and under-motivated member,” he recalls. “Then, I was offered a job as a coach and helped others feel the same change.” Three years later, Alvarez has continued to uphold the gym’s original mission: to help Americans feel strong and confident. “I feel that message is more important now than ever. There are so many of us that feel disenfranchised or persecuted against for whatever reason, and this gym allows a safe space for those who are looking for a welcoming community to belong to.”

Hard Exercise Works is also a franchise, with locations in Florida, Georgia, and just this Asheville location in North Carolina. Everyone can try one workout for free, and those who decide to continue will start with a five-week bootcamp that urges members to commit to working out five days a week. To provide flexibility, the Asheville business offers 11 classes each week and two classes on Saturdays. These classes incorporate weights, rope training, and Navy SEAL-inspired exercises in a high-intensity, interval training format, with movements that mimic everyday life—and a goal of anyone getting his or her first pull-up within the first five weeks.

Their core values center on never turning away a person who is looking to better themselves, whether the goal is to compete in organized sports, shed some weight, or touch their toes for the first time. Members range in age from 9-84, and many are adaptive athletes with disabilities ranging from blindness to prosthetic legs. “We are always able to scale or modify a workout based on that member’s athletic ability,” Alvarez says,

“and my personal goal as the owner is for every member to be the best version of themselves.”

But Alvarez says it’s their community that really makes Hard Exercise Works Asheville special. “Every member of the gym is an integral piece of our support system, encouraging and motivating new and “veteran” members every class. It is an unreal experience to see people cheer each other on with such a positive attitude while they are in the middle of the same tough workout.” Some of these members grow into teachers as every staff member must start out as a member first, just like Alvarez did. And each month, Alvarez and his staff organize one or more events outside of the gym unrelated to working out so that their members can get to know each other and build a deeper bond. “I think this really makes a difference in our gym culture. It provides such a welcoming atmosphere,” he says.

Use the passcode while visiting

and get a free class.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 65

leisure & libation

> >well . fit

asheville cycling studio

For owner Teah Boswell, opening a cycling studio in Asheville was a no-brainer since the city didn’t yet have one in 2011. “I also knew how much this community embraces small local business; the entrepreneur in me felt supported by the spirit Asheville has for the startup!” Boswell says. The move also meant she would be closer to family, and the decision has paid off as Well.Fit heads into its eighth year of operations. In that time Boswell and her staff have stayed in sync with their original mission: to help people “get fit.”

“Breathe deep. Love your life—that’s it in a nutshell,” she says. They aim to help inspire folks to live their lives to the fullest through a dedication to self-care, which Boswell considers the cornerstone to a life well lived. “We prioritize mindfulness and mind-body connection as a means of elevating fitness and wellness,” she adds.

When designing their programming, Boswell incorporated the best aspects of popular cycling styles and inserted her own twists to create a unique riding experience. The studio also offers TRX classes, a type of suspension training bodyweight exercise first developed by Navy SEALs; along with The Gun Club, described as “a one hour, high-intensity bootcamp-style class with kettle bells, fitness ropes, TRX straps, and cardio mix.”

As for the environment, visitors can expect spirited teachers who, in Boswell’s words, “aren’t afraid to show up and wear their passions on their sleeve, whose enthusiasm for the sweat practice is infectious.” She says members frequently comment that they appreciate the judgment-free, supportive community where everyone is welcome “and new friendships are formed all the time.”

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| March 2018

photos by Anthony Harden

FITNESS@PLAY March Passcode

> >asheville

yoga center

Asheville Yoga Center (AYC) was founded under four core values: to inspire, empower, engage, and support. Owners Stephanie and Sunny Keach have been sticking to these foundational values since 1997, when they drove cross-country from California to Asheville because they fell in love with the mountains, the people, and the community here. At the time, there were very few yoga studios in North Carolina, and because of that history, says Sunny, “We’re known as the mothership when it comes to yoga on the East Coast, and we feel very fortunate to have planted so many seeds of yoga love and to see them bloom all over the world.”

Sunny also credits the longevity of AYC to their staff. “Our highly-trained, service-oriented staff are the backbone of AYC. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the amazing teachers we’ve been blessed with. They are the heart-center of our facility.”

Some of their teachers have been with the studio since it opened, and this longevity has certainly provided a consistency to their classes and trainings. Part of the reason the Keaches have enjoyed such a low turnover has been their commitment to maintaining their living wage certification and amazing campus. In fact, AYC is thought to be the only solar-powered, custom-built yoga campus in the world. This eco-friendly space makes attracting top-notch employees that much easier. “We look for a balance of ambition, brightness, organizational skills, and applicable experience for the position,” Sunny explains.

Classes start at 7:15AM most days, with one or more classes happening simultaneously all day through 8:30PM, and yogis can choose from hot and warm power flow classes, gentle restorative or yin classes, or Bhakti classes. No matter which class you attend, Sunny promises they do their best to “inspire by helping each other recognize our greatness. Empower by enhancing our strengths. Engage fully with each other in every interaction. Support each other by creating an environment where we all reach our fullest potential.”

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Spring on the Brain

With this month marking National Nutrition Month, the science of nutrition—and the importance of regular exercise— rings truer than ever for long-term physical and mental health.

A

J& J janey kelly, r . d ., & john j . kelly, m . d

are a registered dietician/ nutritionist and a family physician, respectively, with Ashevillebased Aspire2Health, P.A.

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S W I N T E R L O O SE NS I T S IC Y GR I P on our Western North Carolina landscape, we look forward to the rainbow of colors that spring brings, and the many smells all around that connect us to the inviting warmth of the soil, the budding of the trees, and the many living things, that we will welcome with renewed appreciation.

March is National Nutrition Month, and this makes me think of the mechanisms underlying this grandeur, and how Nature’s wisdom is manifested in our own bodies, which are truly capable of remarkable renewal.

A sprouting seed has the potential for vibrant growth if it is provided with the right nutrients, and a healthy environment. I’ve learned that our bodies, like plants, can perform amazing feats of regeneration, if provided with optimal nutrition and supported by a healthy lifestyle.

These tenets for health became very personal for me in my mid-twenties when I was told I would never have children for medical reasons. Devastated with this news, and as a young woman in college without the necessary funds to follow the medical advice I had been given, I decided to take a different approach and changed my lifestyle and dietary habits instead. I incorporated healthier food choices, which included a macrobiotic diet, and took supplements that I felt would be beneficial. After these changes took effect, a year after being told I would never have children, I gave birth to the first of my two sons.

| March 2018

I have also witnessed dramatic changes in many of the patients I’ve counseled throughout my nutrition practice, and believe wholeheartedly in the science of nutrition and how it can vastly improve health and prevent diseases. I once dealt with a man who had skin like a fish, scaly and dry, and he was also overweight, which is the reason why he came to me.

He was taking medication to control his diabetes and high blood pressure. After we tweaked his diet and provided him with essential fatty acids, which he had been severely lacking, and a multivitamin with absorbable minerals (the mineral zinc is required for the body to properly utilize fatty acids), he lost weight, came off his medications as his previous conditions came under control, and—amazingly to me—his skin became soft and supple like a baby’s skin.

This happened early in my career, and of course then I was totally convinced that nutrition could change lives. There have been many similar cases since, including my youngest son’s, who had a severe skin condition, eczema, in childhood. After I did a little research about what could be causing his

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condition, and with the help of my husband—and brilliant physician that I work with—Johnny Kelly, we changed my son’s diet, getting him off foods containing citric acid. He improved dramatically.

My husband and I met each other in 1995 through an impromptu phone conversation about nutrition. He was as fascinated with advances in nutritional science as I was, and, in particular, we were both very concerned about the adulteration of the American food supply with industrially modified vegetable oils—officially called “Partially Hydrogenated Oils” (PHOs)—containing trans fats. Like weeds in a garden, we wished we could rip these out of the food supply, and repeatedly advised our patients to avoid them, explaining that making trans fats is very similar to making plastic from crude oil, and hardened (i.e., hydrogenated) oils were not at all healthy. Now, as of June 18, 2018, manufacturers must ensure their products no longer contain PHOs, closing the three-year window manufacturers had to comply since being notified by the United States Food & Drug Administration.

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I BELIEVE WHOLEHEARTEDLY IN THE SCIENCE OF NUTRITION AND HOW IT CAN VASTLY IMPROVE HEALTH AND PREVENT DISEASES. This is a cause for celebration for Johnny and me, considering we have talked about this for over thirty years now!

Meanwhile, right now, one of the latest areas of interest that we are most excited about is the breakthrough work being done with Alzheimer’s patients by neurodegenerative disease expert Dr. Dale Bredesen. This is especially significant for me since my mother had this insidious disease. My husband and I both work with patients to incorporate scientific findings about nutrition into their daily lives, and since he has a very hands-on approach, for this column I’ve asked him to detail some of the advances in the field, and how they relate to our work with our own patients.

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*** Dr. Johnny J. Kelly, M.D., Aspire2Heath: As a family physician in this area for 38 years, with a strong science background, I am always looking for new things to help my patients live longer, with better health. Currently, I have a great interest in the rapid advances now being made in the field of neuroscience, and Dr. Bredesen managed to combine many interests that we share into a program that he calls the MEND

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program (Metabolic Enhancement for Neurodegeneration), first reported in 2014 in the free online journal, Aging (www. aging-us.com), and recently updated in 2016. He notes that with each of us having an average 15 percent lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, as many as 45 million of Americans now living may develop it during their lifetime.

Many authorities today still question whether Alzheimer’s can be effectively treated or prevented, and Dr. Bredesen’s pilot program had only 10 patients. But the reported improvements in these cases, which have now been sustained over a four-year period, have been amazing to me, and the regrowth of lost brain volume of an area associated with memory (the hippocampus) in one of the patients is apparently more regrowth than has ever been reported in neurodegenerative conditions. Dr. Bredesen looks at over 30 different factors of diet, lifestyle, supplements, hormones, and toxic exposures, and typically has to address more than 20 of these factors to help his patients so tremendously. It is not truly a cure, since falling off the program can cause memory loss to start coming back, but for those in the program, it has been a way to potentially regain a life worth living. (At a conference in Arizona, Dr. Bredesen showed an inspiring time-lapse video documenting a doctor’s recovery from Alzheimer’s.)

Dr. Bredesen also encourages regular aerobic exercise and has noted that other studies have shown this can help slow brain degeneration. One of my personal heroes has been Dr.

IS YOUR GOAL FOR BETTER HEALTH OVER ALL, OR DO YOU NEED TO TWEAK SOME MINOR FITNESS GOALS? DO YOU NEED A KICK-START TO GET MOTIVATED AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT STARTING A RENEWAL PROGR AM FOR FITNESS AND BODY SHAPING? Kenneth H. Cooper, “the father of aerobics,” who coined the word “aerobics” when his best-selling book Aerobics was published 50 years ago. He recently completed a new study

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showing that four hours of running in a week contributes, on the average, to about 28 hours of added lifespan. Studies have indicated that when runners spend more than 4.25 hours per week, they do not seem to get any additional benefit in terms of longer lifespan, but it does not drop off either; other aerobic exercise is still beneficial to lifespan, but less so. After I ran the first annual Biltmore Estate Marathon (the sixth one happens this month, March 17-18), then the Half Marathon, and, more recently, the Grandfather Mountain Marathon (the 2018 edition is slated for July 14), I was looking to find what long-term program to settle into for maximum benefit for the amount of time invested.

Dr. Cooper’s report makes me believe that a four-hour weekly investment is sufficient. However, a new study reported last month additionally showed that runners may be somewhat more prone to back pain than others if they have weak deep core muscles. Since low back pain is a common problem for my patients, and also a problem that I have had to deal with in the past, I had already developed a new system of training.

This involves running with weights in the form of long steel rods with bicycle hand grips in the middle to exercise all major muscle groups while I am running, and especially strengthen deep core muscles.

*** My husband adds that he occasionally gets puzzled looks when out running with those weights: He tells those inquiring that he is doing “Viking trail running,” aiming for the same benefits the Vikings derived from running around the mountains with their swords and shields. And while we do get some stares, we intend to keep on this path for regeneration of our own minds and bodies.

So, the questions we would ask you now become: How is your garden growing? What nutrients are you lacking or in need of?

What weeds need pulling? Is your goal for better health overall, or do you need to tweak some minor fitness goals? Do you need a kick-start to get motivated and feel good about starting a renewal program for fitness and body shaping? Again, advanced science for delivering optimal results. (For example, there is the most advanced technology available for noninvasive laser body sculpting called SculpSure.)

Better body, better brain; regenerate—you decide.

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UPDATES FOR

&

NATIONAL WORLD [

share price has tripled to $88. Twenty years ago, Hill-Rom earned almost 70% of its income from hospital beds; today, beds account for less than 20% of income. Nationwide, hospital bed counts have fallen, but sales revenues increase as they become increasingly higher-tech.

and cryptocurrency.” The move follows swiftly on the heels of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission freezing the assets of Texas-based AriseBank, which claimed to raise $600 million, and a $500 million hack into Coincheck of Japan. Hundred-million-dollar hacks into cryptocurrency accounts are not at all uncommon. While cryptocurrencies have their merits, they are now a popular medium for money laundering.

United States regulators have clamped down on the industry since scammers have found it easy to launch ICOs with no business behind them. India recently announced intentions to ban cryptocurrencies from the country, referring to them as “Ponzi schemes.”

A Non-Matter of Trust

Knockoffs Win Again

news briefs

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Hill-Rom Holdings has been a leading seller of hospital beds in the United states for almost eighty years. But CEO John Greisch wants to branch out.

Greisch came to Hill-Rom in 2010 from a high-powered position with Baxter International. In the past seven years, he has burdened Hill-Rom with $2.1 billion in debt with seven major acquisitions, which included Welch Allyn for $2.05 billion and Mortara Instrument for $330 million; but the diversification the deals have brought has paid off. While the hospital bed market is growing at only 1% per year, largely due to industry shifts including more outpatient services and people seeking medical attention outside hospitals, Hill-Rom’s revenue has doubled since 2010 to $2.74 billion, and

]

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Facebook announced it will ban all ads for cryptocurrencies and related products, such as wallets and mining software. An official post said the company will reject ads that “promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings,

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Action camera innovator GoPro is scaling back. Fourth-quarter earnings were $340 million, down from the $470 million target. Shares, which peaked shortly after the 2014 IPO at $93.70, were hovering over the $5 mark; and holiday sales were bleak. In response, GoPro cut another 250 from its workforce, which now numbers 1,000, the first 250 being

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cut in March. On the administrative side, contracts were severed with two executives, and CEO Nicholas Woodman has accepted a salary of $1. Most colorfully, GoPro is getting out of the drone business. The release of the drone, Karma, was first delayed, and then Karma had to be recalled after two weeks due to defects including sudden loss of power. Analysts note GoPro’s history is not unlike that of other electronics hardware startups.

The advent of apps, 3D printing, and e-commerce proved conducive to entrepreneurial startups. But to survive, tech businesses need to outcompete companies that will soon dominate the market with cheap knockoffs. Having research, development, and marketing resources on the scale of Apple doesn’t hurt, either.

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mixed-use design on a par with a certain aesthetically-designed parking garage for dump trucks. The exterior consists of vertically-placed concrete slabs averaging 40 feet long. In four shades of gray, they’re uniformly four feet wide and randomly placed in the vertical direction.

Citadel Contractors poured the slabs on-location and tilted them into place to make the design cost-competitive. The building is designed to accommodate modern retail with smaller, flex-space offices and ample storage. The two anchor tenants would be an internet marketer, We Sell Your Stuff, and a UPS Store. Bowling described it as a “Swiss Army knife building” for entrepreneurs.

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Architects of the E-Commerce Center of Hampton succeeded in making no ordinary building. The challenge was to create a 90,000-sq.-ft., three-story, L-shaped storage facility that didn’t look like one. One of the architects, Sam Bowling of PMA Architecture, said he drew his inspiration from New York City buildings; in particular, he wanted a

them “Not a Flamethrower.” The gizmos, after all, could not shoot far enough to come under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. They were sold by Musk’s Boring Company, which is trying to get municipal approval to dig tunnels for automobile traffic between the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and Los Angeles. This round of private fundraising follows the sale of 50,000 baseball caps at $20 apiece.

Now, Musk swag is selling on eBay at triple-digit markups.

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It’s a Musk Thing The Bold & the Beautiful

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Elon Musk raised $10 million, selling out a limited run of 20,000 flamethrowers in 100 hours. Using social media, he marketed them as fun for parties and good at warding off zombies. The flamethrowers were identified as mere roof torches attached to Airsoft rifles, so the profit margins were tremendous.

Mocking concerns of politicians, Musk threw in a complimentary fire extinguisher and tweeted he would name

MedShape announced the first successful implants of its DynaNail XL TTC Fusion System. This is a 260mm and 300mm version of the 220mm DynaNail already widely used. DynaNail is made of a super-elastic nickel-titanium compound surrounded by a rigid titanium alloy shaft. It is inserted in the tibia and secured by a pin that goes through the heel bone and a projection of the super-elastic material. The design recovers quickly from stress and adjusts to changes in the ankle bones. It also distributes impact throughout the ankle

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national & world news

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bones instead of solely to the heel and tibia like traditional designs. DynaNail is used for tibiotalocalcaneal fusions, which realign the ankle bones to alleviate pain, and are usually a surgery of last resort before amputation. These procedures are typically undertaken after multiple surgeries have failed to support a tibia that has been fractured or compromised by screw holes. The release of the DynaNail XL coincides with that of another MedShape product, the Quick Compress Technique, which facilitates implantation of the DynaNail. The new design will help doctors treat more people with larger bodies or worse deformities.

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Declining interest in photocopying has led to the purchase of Xerox by Fujifilm. The new organization will keep its name and operate as a subsidiary of Fujifilm. Since 1962, the companies have been running a joint venture, Fuji Xerox, which sold photocopy products in the Asia-Pacific region and accounted for about half of Fujifilm sales. Fujifilm owned 75% of Fuji Xerox, so in the current deal, Fuji Xerox will use $6.1 billion in bank debt to buy Fujifilm’s interest, and then purchase 50.1% of new Fuji Xerox shares. Dividends totaling $2.5 billion will be distributed among Xerox shareholders as part of the deal. Fuji Xerox has been described as a bright point in both companies’ declining sales.

Crowded out of the market by the lower-priced offerings of Ricoh and Cannon, Xerox had branched out into business services after a failed run in financial services. Fujifilm continues to make film, but its diversified portfolio includes chemicals for the cosmetics and medical equipment industries. The new organization is expected to save $1.7 billion in operating costs by 2022, mainly through consolidating research and development and procurement activities.

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CUSTOM Whole Foods from Human Robots austin, texas

Since being taken over by Amazon, Whole Foods has been experiencing regular stock-outs, and that is the least of its problems. The empty shelves in many stores are attributed to a new digital inventory system called order-toshelf. It cuts down on warehousing, but it can’t handle vicissitudes in purchasing patterns. Another problem: Employees feel overwhelmed by what they consider a confusing and dehumanizing scorecard system. Departments must maintain a 108-point checklist against supervisors who come through with a 17-point list twice a week, corporate representatives who visit once a month, and high-level executives who make random visits.

Employees can receive a demerit if one item is an inch off from specifications.

Be that as it may, stock-outs are so prevalent, employees are having to face holes with the wrong items. Adding to stress, employees receive cash bonuses for reporting faults of coworkers, and managers routinely administer pop quizzes on topics like actual sales and targets. Employees reportedly feel frustrated because they spend more time working point-scales than interacting with customers. Following labor cuts, the load of paperwork has been described by some as “absurd.”

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Walmart is closing 63, or 10%, of its Sam’s Club stores. The announcement came abruptly January 11, when some employees reported to work to find a notice on locked doors. Police were present in some locations. While some closings were immediate, the remaining stores are winding down in weeks following. It is estimated 10,000 will lose their jobs, but twelve of the big-boxes will be converted to e-commerce fulfillment

centers, at which terminated employees may reapply for work. Customers, some of whom had prescriptions to fill, were also hit by surprise. Management explained the chain was getting rid of redundant stores and eliminating others where growth did not follow prospects. In a bad PR calculation, the closings came on the same day Walmart announced it will be raising its minimum entry-level wage to $11/hour and offering bonuses of up to $1,000 for tenured employees. Walmart is closing over 269 stores worldwide, including all 102 of the short-lived Walmart Express stores, but it could open as many as 405 new stores.

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The U.S. Commerce Department has made a “preliminary” decision to impose tariffs averaging 6.5% on imported Canadian newsprint. Rates vary with the type of paper, the highest reaching 10%. This comes as a blow to an industry already struggling against the popularity of digital formats. The petition for the tariff originated with one company, Northern Pacific Paper (NORPAC). Purchased by hedge fund One Rock Capital in November 2016, NORPAC argues Canadian paper companies are propped up by public subsidies, making it more difficult for American companies to compete. Challenging that, over 1,100 American newspapers signed a letter from the News Media Alliance opposing the tariff. Most newspapers in the United States are printed on uncoated groundwood paper from Canada. Rather than saving the 400 jobs at NORPAC, analysts suggest the tariff will put 175,000 American jobs at stake and marginalize minority voices.

Newspapers, big and small, are already getting notices of price increases as suppliers brace for the blow. The move follows tariffs of up to 18% on Canadian lumber imposed last year.

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Jim Oliver and Mike Proffitt love challenges. Case in point: Their company, Asheville’s AvL Technologies, aims to enable communications where communication is not possible.

PSSI GLOBAL SERVICES truck, with has two AvL Technologies antennas, enabling live broadcast. photo courtesy Krystal Dredge of AvL Technologies

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Tilting AT Satellites written by jennifer fitzger ald

|

photos by anthony harden

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 79

JIM OLIVER

im Oliver knew his company’s products impacted the world, but he saw it firsthand last year when he visited Russia.

While at the Kremlin, his tour group was told by their guide it appeared that Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to be there that day. As Oliver walked around Red Square, he saw a news truck ready to broadcast live on Russian television when Putin arrived. On top of the truck was an AvL Technologies’ antenna.

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“Here I am in Red Square, and here is one of my antennas,” says Oliver, the founder, owner, and CEO of the company.

Oliver, an engineer’s engineer who can never stop creating things, founded AvL Technologies (AvL) in 1994 in his garage.

Today, the Asheville-based company has 200 employees and produces satellite antennas and positioner systems for defense and homeland security organizations, news organizations, and disaster relief agencies around the world. AvL Technologies equipped 80 percent of the Army, 100 percent of the Special Forces, and 50 percent of the Marine Corp with transformable antennas. The Department of Defense is one of AvL’s largest customers. The military wants very small, lightweight products they can carry on their backs and use in the field very rapidly. They want to throw it on the ground, plug it in and be connected—anywhere in the world.

Oftentimes when something extreme happens in the world, an AvL Technologies product is used, enabling communications in difficult environments—a natural disaster or a military issue when other methods of communication are unavailable. Or a

REFLECTOR PANELS ready to be assembled.

ANTENNAS FROM AvL Technologies in use during a U.S. Army exercise. photo courtesy Pathfinder Digital

news organization broadcasting live from a location with an AvL antenna on top of their large news truck.

EMPLOYEE Anita Hazelwood in antenna assembly.

Tag Team Mike Proffitt, president and COO, joined AvL in 2001, right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He describes Oliver as “one of the best engineers I have ever worked with because Jim takes the complex and makes it simple. A lot of engineers that struggle to be good engineers end up making things complex. That’s not a good engineer. A good engineer takes the complex problems and makes them simple.”

Oliver describes himself and Proffitt as a tag team. “I design the products then turn them over to Mike to produce,” says Oliver.

“Business is a lot of luck; Mike coming in was very lucky. He knew how to manufacture and never turned down a challenge. He was critical to the success of AvL. He’s Mr. Manufacturing. He can and will get it done. While Mike’s career has been in manufacturing, he has developed a great instinct on good product design. So with Mike’s and our staff’s ability, I no longer need to be intimately involved in product creation.”

TILT TESTING an antenna.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com

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MIKE PROFFIT T

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MARK ZALME uses a Faro tool to measure the sur face accuracy of a prototype ref lector. | March 2018

Originally from Yancey County, Proffitt was previously in charge of new product introduction with Outboard Marine Corporation. As president of AvL, he makes sure he has a “10,000-foot view,” which he explains as management by walking around. He makes at least two or three trips through the AvL shop every day to see what is going on.

Atlanta Roots Jim Oliver grew up in Atlanta, and went to Georgia Tech, which was all his family could afford. He always liked design and making things, so he majored in industrial design, but ultimately came to a realization: “I know how to make them pretty, I know how to make them functional, but I don’t know how to make the inside work.” He subsequently went back to Georgia Tech for a degree in mechanical engineering. During this time, Oliver says he became infatuated with the song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”—so much so, that when he received a job offer in San Francisco, he took it.

This job was with Lockheed Missiles and Space. By sheer luck, Oliver discovered that Lockheed would help pay for their employees to attend nearby Stanford University, where within their mechanical engineering department they had a design division. Oliver worked 30 hours a week and Lockheed helped pay for him to go to Stanford. This turned out to be a real watershed event for Oliver, mainly because they were creating a whole new paradigm about teaching design to engineers rather than keeping them separate.

“There’s a lot of luck in your life and that was luck for me,” says Oliver.

After four years, Oliver and his wife decided to move back to Atlanta. “We had just landed on the moon and engineer jobs had become way over surplused—and an advanced degree in engineering was even worse,” says Oliver. He worked at his dad’s service station for six months before an engineering job opened for him. Oliver worked at Scientific Atlanta, which he describes as the “Granddaddy of Satellite Communications,” where he was responsible for the development of antennas from 3M to 11M (meters) for the company, and later was co-founder of SatCom Technologies, where he developed another complete product line, including the first 2.4M Satellite News Gathering (SNG) antenna system.

By this time, Atlanta had changed drastically from the city that Oliver grew up in. His family visited Asheville and realized that the lifestyle was great. They started contemplating a move, and he now says one of the best things he ever did was move to Asheville.

Oliver was in Asheville for five years before he started AvL Technologies, whose origins can be traced back to when he was doing some consulting work and ran into an old customer who asked him to deliver an antenna for a satellite news gathering truck—a lighter, smaller one for vans in Europe.

At that time, everything was analogue, but Oliver knew the

WADE BAGWELL repairing an antenna that was returned with damage.

3D PRINTER making a prototype par t for a new antenna design.

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 83

ANTENNA going through f inal testing before deliver y to the customer.

direction was towards digital—and when you go digital, you go smaller.

“Technology makes everything smaller,” he notes.

In 2000 when the economy crashed, Oliver decided he needed to do two things. Convinced that satellite would be great for the internet, he created an antenna controller that did all the work and could locate the satellite with the push of one button.

He also designed a fly away application which could be packed up and put in a case. This would become a key component of AvL’s success.

The week after Proffitt joined AvL, 20 Special Forces people from Fort Bragg visited the company, looking for transportable satellite communications. AvL listened to their needs and created the right products—more evidence regarding how having good luck can be key to business success. “We basically had the right product at the right time,” says Oliver. “And Mike could get them made. We went all out and doubled in size, four years in a row. We ended up in four buildings in the River Arts District. It was a real challenge. But Mike and I live off of challenges. We like challenges. When you double in size four years in a row, the intensity is unbelievable. Mike and I worked many long hours—Saturdays, most Sundays. Not only were we busy, but we were supporting people who really depended on us—Special Forces, the Army, the Marine Corps, and the White House.”

President George W. Bush wanted to be able to move around quicker since he had to have reliable communication available for the whole world. Proffitt and Oliver were asked to develop technology to make this possible.

Currently, AvL offers a base of 25 to 30 products, with many derivatives of the products available based on customer requirements.

Competitors make very standardized products while AvL interfaces with the customer to provide them with exactly what they need.

Their basic philosophy is take care of the customer—get them back on the air. Too, systematically over the last 15-16 years, AvL started making all the components needed for their antennas right here in Asheville, rather than buying from a third party. (Proffitt: “That’s one of the reasons you see more cars in the parking lot—more people here.”)

AvL has also impacted the safety of the military in many ways over the company’s history. Proffitt explains that, in the past, when young privates were out in the field and needed supplies, they would burn a supply list onto a CD and then drive a Humvee across the line of fire to deliver the list. Thirty people were killed a year doing this. It was very similar to the process used during the Civil War, but instead of a horse and letter, the privates were using a Humvee and CD. 84

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parking available for our customers

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 85

DOWNDR AF T BOOTH for painting high-tech coatings and coating applications. The team manually painted more than 7,600 par ts in 2017.

WILLIAM JACKSON and Jim Hooks assembling antennas on the f lyaway antenna line.

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“We came up with an antenna simple to put together—hit one button—[and the person] doesn’t have to get out of his secure area to order supplies. Young people can get online and order what they need and have it air-dropped to them.”

Their products also assisted in the disarming of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) in Iraq. Using an AvL Technologies antenna, soldiers were able to send a video of what an IED looked like back to the experts, so they could be given instructions on how to disarm them. Avl Technologies antennas were also used for streaming video for troop training on IEDs. “Our products are very rugged and very dependable,” says AvL Marketing Director Krystal Dredge. “The carbon fiber reflectors are strong enough to take a bullet.”

“Mike and I have a philosophy: We take care of the demand,” says Oliver. “When a customer calls, we help select the right product and tell them a typical lead time, and then say, ‘When do you need it?’”

This was the case in 2004 when they were contacted by the White House Communications Agency. President George W. Bush wanted to be able to move around quicker, and at that point in time it would take technicians one week to get ready for him to visit a location since he had to have reliable communication available for the whole world.

Proffitt and Oliver were asked to develop technology to

REBECCA DOCKERY integrates an antenna control system on a f lyaway antenna.

make this possible. They had eight weeks to deliver the finished product. And deliver they did. “That made us the dominant transformable antenna producer,” says Oliver.

BHAG

ANTENNA CONTROL systems and spectrum analyzers in the lab.

By 2010 the company had outgrown their River Arts District locations, so Oliver and Proffitt began the search for a new building. They needed easy access to the highway and most importantly, a clear view of the southern sky—a necessity for testing of their antennas because satellites are on a geostationary orbit.

They found the old Food Lion building in North Asheville. It was turned in the right direction; compartmentalized enough from the previous occupant to allow for all the different departments that AvL needed; allowed the necessary clear view; and had the needed infrastructure inside of the building. They bought and repurposed the whole building, moving in soon after.

In 2016 Oliver began to think of developing a multi-tenant facility across the street. He describes the idea as his “BHAG”— Big Hairy Audacious Goal, quoting from author Jim Collins’ book Built to Last. “All companies should have a BHAG. Something they really have to stretch for. That building across the street is for cool jobs in Asheville—hoping to attract new manufacturers.”

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With the level of growth, AvL finds itself expanding into the new space but still has room for other tenants. (Both AvL facilities are located in the North Asheville section where Merrimon Avenue meets Weaverville Road.)

What’s in a name?

People sometimes accuse Jim Oliver of being the local chamber of commerce, as he is always promoting Asheville.

In fact, when he started the company and was deciding what to call it, he considered naming it Asheville Technologies. “I love Asheville,” he says. “Everything about it. [But] it sounded a little like an oxymoron because Asheville at that time was noted for our arts and crafts. So I decided to use the call letters of the airport—which is AVL—but I made the ‘v’ lower case to give it character. It gave it a little flair.”

Cool Jobs Oliver and Proffitt are committed to providing good manufacturing jobs in Western North Carolina.

“Both Jim and I want to create good paying manufacturing jobs,” says Proffitt. “We both feel that is something that has

been lost over the years in Asheville. I remember when we had Square D and other large manufacturers that are now gone.

Asheville used to be a manufacturing town; we used to have a huge manufacturing base here in Asheville, and it bothers me that it’s gone. We are trying to bring some of that back at AvL.” Oliver notes that AvL has no minimum wage jobs and is Living Wage Certified. “Design and manufacturing are cool jobs. They are challenging, fun, and they pay well. Thirty years ago, manufacturing was king. Five years ago, it was almost all gone. Now it is starting to come back.”

They work closely with A-B Tech, UNC Asheville, Western Carolina University, and business management consultants WCI. “We use all those resources in the area to do training and bring people in who are qualified,” says Proffitt. AvL has an excellent retention rate of employees and offers bonus programs, including profit-sharing for all employees. (AvL also uses interns from the three colleges.)

AvL is also a privately-owned company, which allows Oliver and Proffitt additional latitude to focus on their products, customers, and employees.

“It gives us a different culture,” say Oliver. “Something we are proud of, and that’s tough when you are growing fast—not to take outside investors.”

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“The nice thing about that is if Jim and I decide it’s a good thing to do, we do it,” adds Proffitt. “I don’t have to go to a board of directors or do a ROI investigation. We have competitors that are owned by large companies. They don’t seem as agile as AvL. We are very entrepreneurial.”

“We’re working on some major breakthrough technology—like going from the automobile to the airplane, [or] the horse to the automobile.”

The Future Oliver and Proffitt describe their growth strategy as “smart aggressive”—staying at the cutting edge of technology. There are other producers, but in terms of sales and market share, AvL leads the industry and sets the bar. It has been that way because of Oliver’s designs and Proffitt’s ability to manufacture at a competitive price with high quality materials and workmanship.

“We’re working on some major breakthrough technology— like going from the automobile to the airplane, [or] the horse to the automobile,” says Oliver. “Or from big bag phones to the iPhone, which might be a better analogy. That’s exciting.

The excitement is something that I love. I like products. I like taking chances. The excitement of pushing yourself motivates me, and Mike, too.

“We work hard and have fun,” he concludes. “We enjoy the intensity.”

Long-term planning is important at AvL and they have a 2020 plan in place. Oliver and Proffitt consider what kinds of people and products they need, what kinds of markets they need to look at, and especially what their customers need.

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events

march

EVENTS march 1

Exhibition Opening Reception

5-8PM Blue Spiral 1 38 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC All new exhibitions will be unveiled for four galleries: Organic Form: Works Inspired by Nature, Still-Life, Dana Brown, & Philip + Matt Moulthrop, John Dickson. Blue Spiral 1 is one of Asheville’s premiere galleries, showcasing a diversity of creations by outstanding artisans on three floors of spacious, well-lit rooms.

> 828-251-0202 > bluespiral1.com march 1 & 15

Entrepreneur’s Workshop: Craft Your Commerce

The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD) 67 Broadway St, Asheville, NC

First in a series hosted by the CCCD, UNC Asheville (UNCA), and MountainBizWorks “to connect, elevate, and advance emerging and established maker/designers.”

Workshops include “Market Positioning” (March 1) and “Capture & Convey” (March 15); they have also been announced for April 10 & 26, and the series will run through May 24. UNCA students are eligible for workshop scholarships.

> 828-785-1357 > craftyourcommerce.com march 2

11th Annual HEAL Conference 90

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8:45AM-4:45PM Ambrose West 312 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC Hosted by T.H.E. Center for Disordered Eating and marking National Eating Disorders Awareness week (2/26-3/4), there will be experts presenting cutting-edge approaches to finding healthy balance around food, exercise, and body image.

> 828-337-4685 > thecenternc.org/heal-conference march 2- 4 , 9 -11, 16 -18

Putting It Together 7:30PM (Fri, Sat), 2:30PM (Sun)

march 4

Riley Baugus

7:30PM

The Jones House 604 West King St, Boone, NC Riley plays authentic bluegrass in a variety of styles and loves to share the stories behind the songs. As a teen he began touring as a professional musician, and has recorded with the likes of Alison Krauss and Willie Nelson.

>Tickets $20 > 828-268-6280 > joneshouse.org march 5

Asheville Community Theatre, 35below 35 East Walnut St, Asheville, NC

Vintage Carolina

Billed as “an evening of drinks, laughs, and love,” a cast of five puts a jumble of songs by Stephen Sondheim into a single production.

Hendersonville Country Club 1860 Hebron Rd, Hendersonville, NC

>Tickets: $22 > 828-254-1320 > ashevilletheatre.org march 3

Randy Siegel “A Question of Identity” 8:30AM-4PM

Trinity Episcopal Church, The Undercroft 60 Church St, Asheville, NC If you’re feeling not good enough or like you’re pretending too much, maybe it’s because you’re rebelling against the glorious existence you were created to enjoy. Author Randy Siegel will address questions of identity in an interactive workshop with discussion, poetry, prayer, music, and journaling.

> Admission: $25 > 828-638-8683 > linktorandy.com

6-9PM

This is a chance for “trendsetting, well-informed, and engaged” citizens to hobnob with community leaders, but it’s the ordinary people who make the party. Food and beverages prepared by local artisans will make the menu.

In the last 12 years, the event has raised $620,000 for the Community Foundation of Henderson County.

>Tickets: $125 > 828-697-6224 > cfhcforever.org march 9 -11

25th Annual Organic Growers School Spring Conference

UNC-Asheville 1 University Heights, Asheville, NC

The weekend is chock-full of workshops and lessons on working the soil, growing organic, and raising bumper crops of certain kinds of foods. Over 150 classes will be taught in seventeen learning

tracks. Courses are sold individually, by the day, or as a total package.

> 828-214-7833 > organicgrowersschool.org march 9

Annual Meeting of the French Broad River Garden Club

10AM The Collider 1 Haywood St, Asheville, NC

Asheville City Councilor Julie Mayfield will discuss the unique collaboration the Rocky Mountain Institute is facilitating among Duke Energy, the City of Asheville, and Buncombe County to prevent construction of a third, peaker generator at its Lake Julian plant.

Members of the public are invited.

> 828-274-1626 > fbrgc.org march 9 -10

Broadway Bootcamp Spring Showcase

7:30PM (Fri), 2:30PM (Sat) Asheville Community Theatre 35 East Walnut Stt, Asheville, NC Area youth have been working hard to assemble a performance of Broadway hits. Songs you know and love performed as solos, duets, trios, and company numbers. Are they as good as the pros?

>Tickets: $7 > 828-254-1320 > ashevilletheatre.org

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march 10

OpenDoors Art Affair

7PM Highland Brewing Event Center

2400 Appalachian Blvd. Arden, NC 28704 828-684-7330 ArdenwoodsRetire.com March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 91

events

12 Old Charlotte Hwy #200, Asheville, NC Events woven into the theme “Imagine Nation” include live and mobile auctions, performing arts, local cuisine, and home brews. Proceeds go toward advocacy, education, and enrichment for local children. The VIP experience begins at 6PM.

> Admission: General $125, VIP $175 > 704-576-3999 > opendoorsasheville.org march 10

3rd Annual Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Day

> 828-257-4530 > dwtheatre.com march 14 -18

Fair Trade Oriental Rug Event

Ten Thousand Villages in Asheville 10 College St, Asheville, NC

A showcase of hundreds of handmade Oriental rugs made by over 850 fairly-paid artisan families in Lahore, Pakistan. A seminar on rug knotting, rug care, and interior design will be held March 15 at 7PM (RSVP requested).

> 828-254-8374 > tenthousandvillages.com/asheville

Various Asheville Locations

Marking the date in 1948 when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife died in a fire at Asheville’s Highland Hospital, there will also be a number of celebrations through the week of March 9-16, including an art opening at Aurora Studio & Gallery, a Roaring ‘20s-themed cocktail party at Pillar Rooftop Bar, and a “Jazz Age Literary Karaoke” at Malaprops. The various events are sponsored by a grant from the Asheville Area Arts Council.

> 919-946-0037 > aurorastudio-gallery.com/events march 10

Graham Nash: “Songs & Stories”

8PM Diana Wortham Theatre 18 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC

“The one with the British accent” will have hits from CSN Y, the Hollies, and his solo career, including “On a Carousel,” “Teach Your Children,” and “Our House.” A variety of VIP packages offer great opportunities, some for a good cause.

>Tickets: $67 and $87 92

| March 2018

MARCH 15

SoMo

9PM Orange Peel 101 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC This kid started in 2011 on YouTube and charted and multiplatinum-ed with his techno-R&B style. Billed as the most successful underground R&B superstar, this should be quite a show. See website for information on VIP experiences.

>Tickets: Advance $20, Door $25 > 828-398-1837 > theorangepeel.net march 16 -18

The Wind In the Willows 7:30PM (3/16), 2:30PM (3/17 & 3/18) Asheville Community Theatre Mainstage 35 East Walnut St, Asheville, NC Directed by Bradshaw Call and performed by ACT’s Youth Production Class (ages 7-12), it’s the classic cautionary tale about Toad, Mole, Badger, and

Water Rat. Watch out for those Ferrets and Weasels, everyone!

>Tickets: $7 > 828-254-1320 > ashevilletheatre.org MARCH 16-25

2018 ClimateCoN

The Collider 1 Haywood St, Asheville, NC President of the Carbon War Room José Maria Figueres has said, “Climate change is the greatest economic opportunity of our generation.” Attendees will network ideas for staving off and surviving the rising tide, and capitalizing off it.

>Tickets: Business Forum $799-$999, Emerging Leader Summit $95 > 828-CLIMATE > climatecon2018.com

march 16

“One Night in Memphis”

7:30PM John A. Walker Center 1328 South Collegiate Dr, Wilkesboro, NC The tribute concert relives the rockabilly night when Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash enjoyed an impromptu jam session at Sun Studios.

>Tickets: Adult $44, Senior (65+) $42 > 336-838-6260 > walkercenteronline.org march 16

Golden Dragon Acrobats

7PM Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts 733 Rivers St, Boone, NC

One can never cease to be amazed by the precision, balance, and grace

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events

If the Shoe Fits...

of Chinese acrobats. And what will they think of next? This presentation integrates tradition with modern art, in costumes and technique.

>Tickets: Adult $20, Student/Youth

$5 > 800-841-2787 > theschaefercenter.org

march 17

St. Patrick’s Day Park Jam

12PM Appalachian Ski Mountain 940 Ski Mountain Rd, Blowing Rock, NC The only green on the snowy hills will be what you must wear to participate.

Prize competitions will run for all skill levels in snowboarding and skiing. Registration is from 9-11:30AM. Participation is included with the purchase of a ski ticket.

> Consult website for pricing. > 828-295-7828 > appskimtn.com

– may 25 Biltmore Blooms march 20

9AM-5PM The Biltmore Estate One Lodge St, Asheville, NC Enjoy the legacy of master landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. If you want to keep coming back every day, there’ll be something new: 200 orchids, 15,000 daffodils, 74,000 tulips, 20 acres of azaleas, 200 varieties of roses, and more.

18 brook st next to fig biltmore village 828.505.1984 94

| March 2018

> 800-411-3812 > biltmore.com march 21

Musicians Jam for Safe Water

7-11PM Grey Eagle 185 Clingman Ave, Asheville, NC Celebrating United Nations’ World Water Day, this is a fundraiser for Asheville nonprofit SAFE Water Now, which provides clean water filtration systems in Tanzania. The “Big Benefit Band” includes Dorsey Parker, Laura Blackley, Ian Harrod, Ian Reardon, Pam Williams, Jaime Dose, Vinnie Corda, and more.

Attendees also receive a raffle ticket for door prizes.

> 404-918-4475 > safewaternow.org march 22-23

MO Summit

8AM (Thu)-6PM (Fri) The Collider 1 Haywood St, Asheville, NC Venture Asheville has invited 150 founders and CEOs of companies that are “doing well and doing good.” Bigname investors like Bain, SJF Ventures, and Builders Fund will also be there.

This is a chance to ask questions, be mentored, and get connected.

> Registration: $549 > 828-258-6137 > momentumavl.com march 23

Johnny Peers and the Muttville Comix

7:30-9:30PM Ashe Arts Center 962 Mt. Jefferson Rd, West Jefferson, NC Johnny leads a troupe of dogs in tricks of skill and humor. The dogs have performed for Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey and David Letterman.

>Tickets: Adult $22, Student $5 > 336-846-2787 > ashecountyarts.org

march 23

St. Lawrence String Quartet

8PM Unitarian Universalist Congregation 1 Edwin Place, Asheville, NC These perfectly-polished musicians and musicologists may be more intense and expressive than your average quartet.

The repertoire includes selections from Beethoven, Sibelius, and Hayden, whom they love and say must be interpreted.

>Tickets: Adult $38, Youth (0-24) FREE > 828-575-7427 > ashevillechambermusic.org

march 24

Naturalist Niche: Ridge Hike

9AM-1PM Chimney Rock State Park 431 Main St, Chimney Rock, NC This is a guided tour off the beaten path at the park at one of the most interesting times of the year. The hike is rated moderately-strenuous. Advance registration is required.

> Admission: Adult $23, Youth $13 > 828-625-9611 > chimneyrockpark.com march 24 -25

20th Annual Asheville Orchid Festival

9AM-5PM North Carolina Arboretum 100 Frederick Law Olmsted Way, Asheville, NC

Orchid breeders are serious people.

Their cultivations can range from bold purple plaid to fragile, delicate weed-like creatures, all representing painstaking investment.

> Parking: Personal Vehicles $14, Motorhomes $50, Buses $100 > Admission: $5 > 828-665-2492 > wncos.org

march 29

AVL Top 100 Realtor Gala

Country Club of Asheville 170 Windsor Road, Asheville, NC Movement Mortgage hosts its first annual event to honor area realtors with leadership awards. Tickets are by invitation only and include dinner.

Guest speaker will be Toby Harris, co-founder of Movement.

> 828-460-1300 > movement.com march 29

Tom Chalmers: “Listen to This”

7:30PM Asheville Community Theatre, 35below 35 East Walnut St, Asheville, NC In a regular event, Tom Chalmers hosts storytelling and song interpreting colorful things that really happened in Asheville and to Asheville’s own. The local actor/ comedian leads the storytelling with a format in the vein of “This American Life.”

Past stories have recounted gluttony and mistaken identity.

>Tickets: $15 > 828-254-1320 > ashevilletheatre.org march 31 – april 8 Spring Break Family Fun

2-2:30PM Chimney Rock State Park 431 Main St, Chimney Rock, NC

March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 95

events

A naturalist will introduce kids to some of the park’s animals in a fun and educational setting. Then run around on the Great Woodland Adventure trail and visit the twelve education stations.

> Admission: Adult $13, Youth $6 > 828-625-9611 > chimneyrockpark.com

WNC Ag Center, Expo Building 1301 Fanning Bridge Rd, Asheville, NC Cars, trucks, and motorcycles compete for cash in categories for best-of. Callouts include hot rods, tuners, imports, and 4x4s. Catherine Bach and the 2018 Mountain Dream Machine will be present, but only one will sign autographs.

>Tickets: Adult $8, Youth (0-12) FREE > 828-687-1414 > the828.com/motor

march 31

Lee Ann Womack

8PM Diana Wortham Theatre 18 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville, NC

march 31

Womack is touring with her latest album, The Lonely, the Lonesome, and the Gone. Expect a hybrid of country, soul, gospel, and blues, drawing from Womack's roots. She hopes you’ll dance.

>Tickets: $37 > 828-257-4530 > dwtheatre.com

F

Dillsboro Easter Hat Parade

c

Easter bunny, egg hunts, and Easter bonnets galore! Come join the Annual Easter Hat Parade. At 10AM egg hunts will be on Webster Street, every half hour by age group. The parade will begin at 2PM at the Dillsboro Town Hall. Prizes for winners of many categories including “the Most Easter-like”, and “Poofiest” hats.

3rd Annual Mountain abric enter Motor Show Largest selection 11AM-4PM

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7AM Chimney Rock State Park 431 Main St, Chimney Rock, NC

Hang out with your brothers and sisters of all stripes and meditate on something greater than self as you see the miracle of the sun rising in resplendent vernal glory. The event attracts over 1,000, so plan on arriving around 5AM. The gates will close at 6AM.

> FREE > 828-625-9611 > chimneyrockpark.com

10AM Dogwood Crafters 90 Webster St, Dillsboro, NC

your complete your complete Fabric center march 31

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sunday brunch 684-0801 and $5

bloody marys and mimosas starting at 10am!

If your organization has any local press releases for our briefs section, or events that you would like to see here, feel free to email us atu n c h kend br events@capitalatplay.com. ing wee v r e s w No Please submit your event at least six weeks in advance. r u n c h

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March 2018 | capitalatplay.com 97

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