ROSS NORTON PROFILE

Coping with COVID SC Biz News is speaking with small businesses and community leaders about the impact of the new coronavirus on business and industry, and how this is changing how they operate. Contact Ross Norton, rnorton@scbi... Read More

Michelin North America Inc. has begun a temporary “phased” shutdown of some it its tire production plants in the United States and Canada in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Michelin said in a late Friday announcement th... Read More

BMW Manufacturing will shut down production at Plant Spartanburg on April 3. The company said in an announcement late today that it would stop producing X models for at least 16 days, with plans to resume April 19. Volvo Car Corp.&nbs... Read More

The production line at BMW Manufacturing continues to operate “as of today,” according to a company spokesman who said the German automaker is monitoring local conditions regarding the spread of COVID-19, the new coronavirus.... Read More

After coming together slower than company officials originally predicted, a new Electrolux assembly plant in Anderson is ready to hire. Through Greenville-based Human Technologies Inc., the company intends to hire more than 500 worker... Read More

Ten at the Top launched an initiative this week aimed at putting good ideas to work sooner. The Ignition Fund is a financial reserve that will enable the organization to skip over the fund-raising stage of putting ideas into action, E... Read More

The eighth CEO Build campaign for Habitat for Humanity of Greenville County kicked off Wednesday morning with a breakfast at the Commerce Club. Thirty-four CEOs have pledged company support, staff volunteers and personal involvement t... Read More

Deciding whether to own or rent, stay or go, was a long and complex conversation that took place among Greenville Chamber of Commerce board members for more than two years before the move to new offices at Riverplace, 550 S. Main St. ... Read More

Almost 125 years after the act to incorporate Converse College, the administrators responsible for carrying out those directives are leaning on the original documents to guide them through a couple of major changes. For the first time... Read More

The shrinking labor pool has frustrated hiring managers across economic sectors, but the hard-hit construction industry is being hammered by a number of factors that keep the worker supply low. An initiative is underway now to bolster th... Read More

The Greenville City Council on Wednesday evening voted 6-1 to approve a zoning change that allows a proposed redevelopment project for County Square to move forward. A major change to the original plan is a height limit of 12 floors i... Read More

Greenville’s business community is encouraging the City Council to create “paths forward to completing” what it called transformative projects in the city. A resolution passed by the Greenville Chamber board cites a pro... Read More

A lot of communities are trying to attract business. In Powdersville, a lot of businesses are trying to build community. The Powdersville Business Council is planning Rhythm on the River at Dolly Cooper Park on May 2 and the plan got ... Read More

Bahrain’s ambassador to the United States toured the Greenville Lockheed Martin site on Tuesday to see where his country’s next fleet of fighter jets is being built. The Middle East kingdom was the first of three countries... Read More

The slow pace of expansion for Electrolux in Anderson is having a significant negative impact on the international company, causing more than half of a $70 million hit on its operating income for the fourth quarter. Jonas Samuelson, p... Read More

It didn’t seem like a revolutionary question. “What are you hauling?” Truck drivers get that question all the time. The answer, this time, was amusing to the driver and the asker. The driver was the great-grandson... Read More

A lot of communities are trying to attract business. In Powdersville, a lot of businesses are trying to build community. The Powdersville Business Council is planning Rhythm on the River at Dolly Cooper Park on May 2 and the plan got a ... Read More

CEOs of well-run firms get there because they’re good at taking care of companies. But they’re not always as adept at taking care of themselves. Robert DeHollander, managing partner of DeHollander & Janse Financial Gro... Read More

Four organizations will share $567,775 raised through the 2019 BMW Charity Pro-Am presented by Synnex Corp.  South Carolina Charities Inc., the non-profit foundation of the golf tournament, announced the final tally at an event i... Read More

Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport officials have known for some time that it would be a record-setting year for passenger traffic, but they didn’t expect to break the record with nearly six weeks left in 2019. Passeng... Read More

Officially, Wednesday was groundbreaking day for Auden Upstate, a $28 million off-campus housing complex built specifically to accommodate USC Upstate students and their lifestyles. Even as university, county and development company repr... Read More

Sometimes a blueblood is just a startup. The S.C. Technical College System is accustomed to treating one like the other, according to the system president. When industry giants like Boeing, BMW and Michelin bring decades of experience... Read More

A hundred years ago, about 400 homes were built outside Woodside Mill to supply the Woodside brothers with workers. Now Woodside homes are under construction again, but this time inside the mill. A number of plans for the old mill hav... Read More

For about 2,000 employees of Adidas and Reebok, one of the company perks just got a little better. Adidas, which owns Reebok, opened a store this month that is almost exclusively for employees of the company’s 2.4 million-square... Read More

Borrowers in Greenville County are approved for mortgage loans at a higher rate than in any other county in South Carolina. Four Upstate counties are in the top 10, according to a report compiled by SmartAsset. Lee County had the lowe... Read More

One of Gaffney’s largest industrial employers will reduce its workforce from about 550 to about 400 over the next several months. Timken Co. announced upcoming workforce reductions last week. “While we haven’t yet... Read More

Pat and Mary Lou Hartness are excited about what’s about to happen to their home. But they aren’t sure they can stand to watch. They gathered under a temporary canopy on their front lawn recently to unveil plans for what h... Read More

The incorporated offspring of Eugenia Duke are feuding. Maybe we don’t know which came first — the sandwich or the mayonnaise that made them special — but according to the Duke’s Mayonnaise website, the progeny... Read More

Manufacturing jobs have been on the decline for the past few months in the Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin metropolitan statistical area. Hiring is up in the sector that includes temporary workers. Meanwhile, exports are down. It’s ... Read More

With vehicles rolling off the assembly line at a rate of about one per minute, most of the 11,000 workers building BMWs at Plant Spartanburg couldn’t pause even to celebrate 25 years of production. But a few of them did stop to ... Read More

The Greenville Chamber will host its Diversity and Inclusion Summit at the Greenville Convention Center on Tuesday, Oct. 8, featuring a keynote address from the diversity officer of a national company that experienced a high-profile cris... Read More

Fluor announced results this week from a strategic review and operational review that could mean selling some of its business lines and real estate, including property in Greenville. The company made the announcement from its home o... Read More

Spartanburg Community College President Henry Giles was presented the Order of the Palmetto this month. A few days before that the Upstate SC Alliance honored Ronnie Booth, the recently retired president of Tri-County Technical College. ... Read More

Manufacturing jobs have been on the decline for the last few months in the Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin metropolitan statistical area. Hiring is up in the sector that includes temporary workers. Meanwhile, exports are down. It’s ... Read More

The Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport celebrated the opening of a $33 million air cargo facility on Monday, making room for a significant increase in cargo traffic and tripling the number of jumbo cargo planes that can load an... Read More

Editor's note: A previous version of this story misspelled Cerulean Aviation. Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport will cut a ribbon on Sept. 9, but President and CEO Dave Edwards feels like he’s kicking down a wall.... Read More

Spartanburg Community College President Henry C. Giles Jr. was honored for 50 years of service to the college, community and state last week when he was awarded the Order of the Palmetto on behalf of Gov. Henry McMaster at a general meet... Read More

The U.S. State Department has approved another international deal to sell Greenville-made F-16s to a foreign government. This $8 billion deal with Taiwan was approved by the State Department and delivered to Congress on Tuesday t... Read More

ScanSource Inc. today announced that it will sell some of its businesses outside of the United States, Canada and Brazil. ScanSource will continue to operate and invest in its digital distribution business internationally, including its ... Read More

Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System expanded its reach a little farther into Greenville County in late July, opening a 31,000-square-foot medical office building on Woodruff Road. Spartanburg regional COO Mark Aycock said the new f... Read More

With a long career as a marketing executive under his belt, Joe Erwin knows a lot of ways to measure success. For his latest entrepreneurial endeavor, owning and operating the Greenville Triumph professional soccer team, some of the o... Read More

Training programs for the technicians who fix and repair cars at BMW and Mini dealerships are delivered through BMW Group University’s Service Technician Education Program. Gary Uyematsu, national technical training manager for ... Read More

Tariffs — even tariff talk — is no good for business, according to several people intimate with industrial development in the area and state. Hundreds of companies had signed up to testify last week before the Office of th... Read More

The hardest part of Saltwater Kitchen’s soft opening was probably the exterior walls, according to the man who installed it. The outside walls of Rick Erwin’s new restaurant at Haywood Mall is one of the state’s firs... Read More

Culture’s rate of return is better than prime, according to a couple of bankers who participated in a recent panel discussion organized by the Risk Management Association. Lynn Harton and Terry Turner talked about what appeared ... Read More

The Michelin Corporate Foundation today announced a $1 million donation to protect and restore a span of the Reedy River that runs through Greenville’s Unity Park. It is the largest contribution to the park project to date. Gree... Read More

Greenville-based ACL Airshop unveiled a new app called FindMyULD Tuesday at the Air Cargo Europe trade show in Munich, Germany. The new mobile app is designed to enhance data requirements in air cargo transactions as they take place a... Read More

Neil Semcheski told members of the Upstate Air Quality Advisory Committee that vanpooling could be one solution to several challenges the region will face as it grows. Air quality in the Upstate is in pretty good shape, and a recent m... Read More

ACL Airshop CEO Steve Townes opened the company’s new factory this month with exuberance and bold predictions. Thirty-two new jobs and $7.2 million invested in the site are just the beginning, he said. “A lot of jobs ar... Read More

Government, military and Lockheed Martin representatives touted the Greenville F-16 workforce as not only another player in the Upstate’s manufacturing scene, but also a key player in world peace. Officials from the White House ... Read More

Venditio LLC is building a small strip center in Greer with the Green Café Lounge as the anchor tenant. Construction on The Palms at Brushy Creek will start in June or July on previously undeveloped land at the intersection of ... Read More

Employees at one of Central’s last large plants have been told their place of work is closing this summer. A Shaw Industries employee who asked not to be identified said the workers were told they would be paid through the end o... Read More

A spokesperson for the South Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association recently told GSA Business Report that Greenville is quickly becoming a “foodie” town. Maybe that’s why the announcement of the size of the 196... Read More

Lockheed Martin will host a ceremony April 23 to celebrate completion of a new line that will bring production of the latest F-16 Fighting Falcon to Greenville. Lockheed Martin announced in June that it had received a $1.2 billion con... Read More

Hotelier Richard Kessler joined Greenville Mayor Knox White and others Wednesday morning to break ground on the Grand Bohemian Hotel Greenville. Kessler is chairman and CEO of The Kessler Collection, a hospitality brand that owns, dev... Read More

Veterans and companies that want to hire them gathered at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport recently for the South Carolina launch of Edge4Vets, a program aimed at helping people hone their military skills into civilian career... Read More

A year after federal law mandated electronic tracking of trucker workdays, the requirement gets mixed reviews from a complex industry. “The quote-unquote ‘trucking industry’ is such a diverse mix of business sectors ... Read More

Chase plans to expand its retail banking services across the country, including a Clemson branch at 1075 Tiger Blvd. as its first foray into what the company identifies as its Greenville market. A company spokesman said the Clemson br... Read More

South Street Partners, developers and operators of residential private club communities, today announced the acquisition of all seven properties known collectively as The Cliffs. With names like The Cliffs at Keowee Falls and The Clif... Read More

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the Feb. 18 issue of GSA Business Report. Spending strategies were simpler before credit cards. Even the wallet was simple, without all of those extra slots. To use: open wallet ... Read More

With the workforce small and the number of people in recovery on the rise, people who treat and coach substance abusers say the time has come for hiring managers to see people in recovery as an opportunity and not a threat. There is f... Read More