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Good morning,
Today we unveil Business North Carolina’s annual Power 100 list of the state’s most influential business leaders. It’s among our publication’s most fun, challenging and time-consuming projects of the year.
This year we feature two dozen stories and Q&As with people on the list, including a profile of Raleigh’s John Kane, who persisted through lots of challenges over many years before striking gold with his innovative North Hills development. About a third of the Power 100 is made up of people who weren’t on last year’s list, reflecting the natural ebb and flow of the business world.
Even long-term Tar Heel State residents familiar with many on the list should be able to learn a lot about some fascinating people who are having a big impact. My colleagues Taylor Wanbaugh, Harrison Miller, Ed Martin, Alyssa Pressler and Ralph Voltz did a great job gathering the information and art for the section.
Our focus is on people who, in most instances, have a major impact on both their individual enterprises and communities. The project showed that our state is extremely fortunate to have so many terrific leaders.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the Power 100.
David Mildenberg
dailydigest@businessnc.com
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Startup Triad bank raises $51M, mostly locally
Triad Business Bank appears a month or so away from opening in Greensboro as one of the nation's biggest new community bank startups since the 2007-09 recession. Organizers have collected $51 million as of Friday, mostly from Triad and N.C. residents, CEO Ramsey Hamadi says.
Investors paying $10 for initial shares probably don't expect Hamadi to repeat his previous experience at NewBridge Bank, where shares soared 1,000% during his tenure. (To learn about that, and more about Triad Business Bank, read this story.)
But 15 directors and four executives have invested about $10 million, reasoning that the sale of eight Triad-based banks in the last six years represents an opening for a new entry totally focused on the market.

Final approval from regulators is pending. The plan is to have three offices — initially Greensboro, followed later this year in High Point and Winston-Salem — filled by veteran bankers calling on the 10,200 Triad businesses that have annual revenue of $1 million to $100 million.
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Buffett papers' sale spurs trip down memory lane
My first journalism job after college was at the Quad-City Times in beautifu Davenport, Iowa, a gritty Mississippi River community across from Rock Island and Moline, Ill. An early assignment for the flagship paper of Lee Enterprises was watching first-responders pull a deceased body out of the river. That made me want to focus on more virtuous topics, such as business news.
I learned that the general decency of Iowans makes them a good choice for helping decide who becomes president — a task they will perform at tonight's caucuses.
But I also realized the South offered great advantages, so it was easy to jump for a job offer in North Carolina.
Since then, many media companies have sold out or gone bust as Facebook, Google and others stripped away ad dollars. Amazingly, Lee has survived, barely. Last week, Warren Buffett agreed to sell his newspapers to the Davenport-based company, which saw its stock-market value double to $122 million. Buffett has owned five N.C. papers since 2013, including the Greensboro News & Record and Winston-Salem Journal.
Hope that Buffett would use his wealth to invest to make the Triad papers distinctive faded in a hurry. As former News & Record columnist Jeri Rowe noted on Facebook last week, "Any optimism in our newsroom fizzled quick, and we all realized it was going to get worse, not better. We had to do less with ... less." He and many other talented journalists departed.
Lee joins five other companies that own most of North Carolina’s daily newspapers. The Wilson Daily Times and The Daily Record of Dunn are still owned by in-state groups. The five chains' properties are listed here.
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Today’s number: 176 Triangle tweeners
Promising tech companies based in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metro area as identified by entrepreneur Scot Wingo. The startup kingpin last week issued his fifth annual list of such companies that have at least $1 million in annual revenue or 10 employees. Companies that top $80 million in sales or 500 employees graduate from the list.
Triangle Tweeners is a must-read that gives perhaps the best annual capsule look at the region's tech economy. Wingo notes that only five companies from the 2018 list made "exits" last year, down from 17 in the previous year. But the amount invested in the Tweeners expanded to $436 million from $160 million.
Wingo's conclusion is cheery: "We have tons of capital flowing into the category, we have lots of great new startups coming in the top of the funnel. I think we’re setting up for an amazing 2020’s decade for Triangle Tweeners and our overall Triangle entrepreneurial ecosystem."
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Continuum Global Solutions to lay off 383 in Charlotte
(Charlotte Business Journal)
Continuum Global Solutions is laying off 383 workers and closing its Charlotte call center at the end of April. Continuum was formed in February 2019 after Los Angeles-based private-investment firm Skyview Capital acquired Conduent's customer-care assets, which spun out of Xerox in 2017.
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Wilmington film productions spent $137M last year
(Wilmington Business Journal)
Television and movie film productions in the Wilmington area contributed nearly $137 million in direct spending in the state, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce. The state received a total of $167 million from spending on film projects across the state, which generated 11,820 jobs — the most in the last five years. Some of Wilmington's biggest movie projects from the last year include Halloween Kills, The Georgetown Project, and DC's Swamp Thing, which was not picked up for a second season.
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Particleboard manufacturer to lay off 75 in Chatham County
(Triangle Business Journal)
Arauco Panels USA, a particleboard manufacturer, will close its plant in Moncure in Chatham County and lay off 75 workers, effective April 1. The company called the plant closure a "result of an economic imbalance in the U.S. particleboard market" and said it would continue to operate its separate fiberboard plant in Moncure.
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Highwoods Properties sells Triad properties for more than $193M
(Triad Business Journal)
Raleigh-based Highwoods Properties has netted $193.4 million while in the process of exiting the Greensboro market. The company recently closed on the sale of 2.8 million-square-foot of industrial flex space, and several former properties are no longer listed on the company's website. The publicly traded real estate investment trust also says it's close to a $40 million deal for its Knollwood property in Winston-Salem, which is anchored by Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' corporate headquarters. Highwoods is exiting the Greensboro and Memphis markets to pay for the $436 million purchase of Bank of America Tower at Legacy Union in Charlotte.
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Mecklenburg County cuts value of Panthers stadium by $257 million
(The Charlotte Observer)
Mecklenburg County officials voted to cut Bank of America Stadium's assessed value by more than half, slashing it from $472 million to $215 million. The Panthers' tax bill will now come out to $2.15 million under 2019 tax rates, which will save owner David Tepper $3.55 million on his bill. Under the stadium's original valuation of $572 million, the team would have paid $5.7 million.
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Precision Plastics company to invest $18.5M, create 68 jobs in Buncombe County
(Asheville Citizen Times)
Nypro, a precision-plastics manufacturer for the health care industry, is investing $18.5 million to expand its facility in Vista Industrial Park in Buncombe County. The company says it will create 68 jobs to help meet the market's growing demand for pharmaceutical-delivery devices. Nypro currently employs 325 at the site and will be adding jobs in engineering, production, quality control and management.
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North Carolina's family farm bankruptcies jump 33%
(The Charlotte Observer)
North Carolina saw 16 family farms file for Chapter 12 bankruptcy last year, up 33% from the previous year, according to a study by the American Farm Bureau Federation. The state's $87 billion agriculture industry employs 17% of North Carolina's workforce. Nationally, there was a 20% jump in bankruptcy filings and a 48% jump in the Southeast.
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Research group says Asheville hotel tax should benefit community
(Asheville Citizen Times)
Nonprofit Urban Land Institute, which was hired by Asheville as a consultant, says Asheville's hotel tax, which generates $25 million annually, should be spent on projects with large community benefits rather than tourism-marketing projects. Asheville is trying to determine how it will handle the end of a yearlong ban on new hotels and residents' complaints about the booming tourism industry. The ULI also recommended that Asheville implement a new food and beverage tax, restrict new hotels to a specified district, and require hotel developers to provide amenities and community benefits for building permissions.
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