Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country | Founded 05-05-05

110 and Counting: Sam Calhoun’s Weekly Business Spotlights

Story by Kathleen McFadden

Coming up with a great idea isn’t all that hard. What’s hard is finding a way to implement that great idea. What’s even harder is sustaining the implementation and making it fresh and interesting week after week.

But that’s exactly what Associate Editor Sam Calhoun has done for the past two years with High Country Press’s weekly Business Spotlight.

This week’s Business Spotlight—featuring The Pet Place in Boone—is a milestone of sorts. It’s the 110th Business Spotlight featured in the paper since the series began on May 26, 2006. Sam Calhoun has written all but four of them.

Every week, Sam visits a locally owned High Country business—alternating among Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk and Newland—to go beyond the storefront and introduce readers to the person—or persons—who conceived the idea, put in the hard work to get the enterprise off the ground and continues that hard work to ensure the business’s success.

While he was still in school at Appalachian, Sam said, he heard again and again that he would have to leave the High Country after graduation to find a job. Through the Business Spotlight, he said, “I get to talk to people and find out how they’ve made a living here. The secret of the High Country is finding a way to stay here.”

Sam has explored the ins and outs of businesses as diverse as women’s clothing and building contractors, cab companies and flea markets.

“I’ve learned about stuff I thought I’d never know,” he said, “and get the backstage tour that most people don’t see.” Sam has thrown clay on a potter’s wheel, ridden throughout a new residential development in a Hummer, learned about the German influence on bedding, tasted gourmet food, and always comes back from his adventures with an appreciation for the business, with stories to tell and with enthusiasm for the extraordinary creativity and diversity in the local business community.

“The towns have become more real to me,” Sam said, through meeting and getting to know the people behind the businesses and their challenges, as well as discovering the many connections that exist among the business owners in the area.

He tailors his questions “to give people an identity. I’ve found that no one is just a business owner. They’re also avid hobbyists, conservationists or volunteers. I always come back amazed.”

Even though Sam writes a Business Spotlight every week, “I don’t take it lightly,” he said. “I still get a little nervous, because my job—to introduce a business owner to the wider community—is daunting.”

The Business Spotlight is a free service High Country Press provides to both advertisers and non-advertisers. The impetus behind the initial idea—that idea we came up with two years ago—was to celebrate and personalize the local people who are the core of the local economy.

And readers—especially business owners—really like the column. On his end, Sam really likes it when people talk frankly and openly about their “business secrets” because their answers, he said, provide a tool for others to gain insight into how to be successful.

“The High Country is in large measure defined by our local business people. I like having the opportunity to showcase them,” he said.