Introducing Jennifer Swank, the visionary behind Sparta Candle Company. From a small town to a global empire, Jennifer's candles ignite hearts worldwide. Discover her inspiring journey that started in heartbreak and ended in triumph.

Over the past decade, Hivetracks has grown into a full-blown Venture Startup, raising over $1MM in investment capital and securing Government Funding worth over half a million dollars. Its software has globally significant potential around topics of colony collapse, food security, climate change, and biodiversity decline.

Using bees at biosensors, Hivetracks is unlocking an urgently needed source of environmental intelligence and data that’s natural, scalable, and available.

Today we are preaching the gospel of entrepreneurship with President and CEO of NC IDEA, Tom Ruhe.

Tom Ruhe grew up in Northeast Ohio, but came to North Carolina when he was offered the position of second CEO of NC IDEA, who's mission is to foster entrepreneurism for the entire state. He has been working fiercely ever since to make North Carolina the best state in the nation for people of all backgrounds to start and grow companies.

After spending twenty years in the electronics payment industry, Tim Herdklotz decided to leave it all and start making beer.

Tim is now President and Co-Owner of Booneshine Brewing Company, the wildly popular microbrewery, tasting room, and restaurant located in East Boone.  Along with his co-owner Carson Coatney, Tim saw a microbrewery trend happening across the country and decided to jump on that movement to fill a gap within the High Country’s gastronomical ecosystem.

Prior to the 1980s, most Point of Sale interactions consisted of cash or check exchanges at clunky checkout machines that were limited to a single store’s accounting information. But with the invention of the microprocessor, slowly, cash registers evolved into much more complex machines that allowed Point of Sale transactions to become quicker, more accurate, more connected, and more helpful for companies trying to track their financials.

One of the people who saw the potential of this was Pete Catoe. And in 1987 he decided to start a company that specialized in POS transactions utilizing electronic cash registers. He called this business ECRS, or Electronic Cash Register Services. And today, it’s known as one of the most sustainable employers of the High Country.

Today on our show, you'll hear how an organization called NC Tech Paths is on a mission to turn WNC into a Nationally recognized hub for rural tech workers. Former NC Tech Path's director Zach Barrickulow talks about how they are achieving this mission and the origins of this broad-reaching, mission-driven program .

Getting started in Startups isn’t always black and white. It takes grit to find your way through the grey. Today’s guest, Sam Glovers, knows exactly what it takes to carve out your place in the Startup world and shares with us his Startup origin story, plus tips for those aspiring to join this exciting ecosystem.

Today's guest, Chris Grasinger, is one of Startup High Country's original founding members and has an impressively long wrap-sheet of entrepreneurism for his age. Today you'll learn about Chris' surprisingly deviant youth experiences, advice on lending options for entrepreneurs, and the intersection between privilege, abundance, and caution when it comes to starting or growing your business.

For someone who dropped out of college five times, it is amazing to see how much Jeffrey Scott has accomplished in his career and in our community. From a very early age, Jeffrey pushed back against what he called the "Societal Treadmill." His dissatisfaction for what he saw as society’s constraints and expectations eventually led him into becoming an entrepreneur. Because, it was through the entrepreneurial world that he felt empowered to sink his teeth into actually SOLVING the big problems that he saw with the world.

Learn how local digital marketing genius, and co-founder of Startup High County, James Bance, started out as just another dreamy-eyed, Silicon Valley Tech Wannabe at the turn of the millennium, launched and failed his first startup and eventually made the High Country his home.