You can choose your friends and your employees, but you can’t choose your family. Yet often the best employees you can choose are family. Several area businesses have been launched and passed down to the next generation. The following are profiles of a few local...
Movers. Shakers. International travelers. Working behind the scenes. Our 7Over70 honorees have been and done all these things and more. And they continue to do things, ordinary and extraordinary. While perhaps reluctant to take credit, their achievements speak for themselves. Here are this year’s 7Over70. Steve Constantin How...
It's one thing to launch a product. The next is finding somewhere to sell it. For many entrepreneurs, Meijer is the big catch. Getting product on the shelves of the 246-store Midwest supermarket chain is steeped in bureaucracy, but well worth the time and effort, they...
[caption id="attachment_23372" align="alignleft" width="533"] Casey Cowell, Turner Booth, George Cochran, Lowell Gruman, Cori Chekhovskiy and Keith Nielson.[/caption] Traverse City titans George Cochran, Casey Cowell and Lowell Gruman – all long-time leaders in their respective fields of finance, technology and investment banking – are launching a new bank. The...
The U.S. divorce rate began falling in the early 1990s and has since continued on an overall downward trend. In 1992, there were 4.8 divorces per 1,000 people. By 2016, it had dropped to 3.2. According to the World Economic Forum, that’s due in large part...
When eFulfillment Service opened its doors in Grawn in 2001, the e-commerce industry was in its early days. The industry has since grown by leaps and bounds, and the same is true of eFulfillment, which moved to a larger facility in Traverse City less than a...
Everyone knows the big players on the real estate scene that boast 10, 20 or more Realtors in each office. But smaller operations abound in northern Michigan – boutique brokerages with a handful of agents. These smaller outfits say that they are not only surviving, but...
As anyone who has looked into building a home in the past couple years has found out, building costs have increased. While escalating home costs have made it difficult to find a three-bedroom, two-bath home for less than $200,000, it’s still easier than trying to...
From Elk Rapids to Charlevoix, Petoskey and Harbor Springs, the business climate looks pretty rosy up north. The anticipation of a busy summer – potentially the busiest ever, according to some – along with a strong economy bodes well for private and nonprofit businesses. For starters,...
Sometimes entrepreneurship grows out of a person’s desire to better the world. For Stacey Feeley, it was just about being a better mom. When she found out that some plastic baby bottles were leaching a potentially toxic chemical (bisphenol A, or BPA) into the contents of...
