Ribbon cutting ceremony celebrates North Carolina's vibrant, powerful small businesses
Kris Sterrie and Janice Cummings beamed with pride at the ribbon cutting ceremony for their custom picture framing business. As the ribbon came ceremoniously down, the crowd cheered and cameras flashed, and in that moment all their hard work - years of long hours, big struggles and small sacrifices - was on display as a testament to what they'd accomplished. Little matter that the ceremony came 11 years after their business officially opened in Sterrie's Franklin basement, or that the two were in fact sharing a stage in north Raleigh with 22 other small business owners from across the state.
"As a small business owner, you just kind of go about running your business and you really don't realize how important you are, how significant what you're doing is to your community, to the state," Sterrie said at the Oct. 1 event, which capped off the center's 2004 Rural Partners Forum at the North Raleigh Hilton. "Before we came today we felt mostly anonymous, but we feel pretty special right now."
The ribbon cutting ceremony cast a spotlight on North Carolina's job-creating small business sector, which in recent years has significantly outperformed large and medium-sized businesses. Despite their importance to the state and to their own communities, entrepreneurs and small business owners generally receive little if any attention for the jobs they create, overlooked most often in favor of the big-industry recruitments that garner front-page attention.
"It's not real hard to get important people to come out for a ribbon cutting if 60 new jobs are created in a rural community, but the truth of the matter is that the men and women who own and operate small businesses are even more important and they never get that recognition," said Scott Daugherty, executive director of the N.C. Small Business & Technology Development Center. "The business owners here today are just a handful of the men and women keeping our state's economy going."
The entrepreneurs representing these thriving ventures include: Duplin County, Servicios Latinos, owner Jorge Garcia; Dare County, Paul Mann Custom Boats, owners Paul and Robin Mann, Northampton County, Anderson Brothers Trucking, owner Burns Anderson; Rockingham County, Hydro Groom Mobile Pet Wash, owners Jim and Terresia Scoble; Northampton County, Tequila Sunrise Recordings, owners Kenny, Linda and Lonnie Barker; Haywood County, Mud Dabber's, owners Brad and John Dodson; Macon County, Creative Framing, Inc., owners Kris Sterrie and Janice Cummings; Lenoir County, ALLCO Electric, Inc., owners Eddy Long and Tim Leonard; McDowell County, Albright's Drapery Solutions, owners Audrey and Tom Albright; Lenoir County, Burnestine Environmental Services, Inc., owner Burnestine Greene; Robeson County, Porter Scientific, owner Freda Porter; Craven County, Our Children Child Care, owner Lisa Wetherington Crawford; Harnett County, Myers' Security Company, owner Fred Myers; Columbus County, Quality Thermoplastics, owners Stefan and Monroe Jacobs; Chatham County, Mellow Marsh Farm, owner Sharon Day; Watauga County, Cheap Joe's, owner Joe Miller; Burke County, Toner Machining Technologies, owner Jim Toner.
