Identifying the trends shaping today’s workplace, workforce, and marketplace. Guests bring insight into their business or their business expertise that allows listeners to get a little bit better at whatever it is they do.
What’s Working is currently broadcast weekly in Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Gadsden, and Huntsville.
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Dr Jim Purcell is Alabama’s Commissioner on Higher Education. Each year the state’s colleges and universities send students into the workplace and too many of them find work outside the state. Dr Purcell is trying to get them to stay. Alabama has the jobs available and needs the talent. Additionally, Dr Purcell is working to lure those with roots in the state back to Alabama through targeted campaigns. He fights historic deep-south stereotypes as well as the reputation of low pay. Listen as he explains the challenge, highlights the opportunities, and discusses his strategy. This broadcast in collaboration with Business Alabama magazine.
Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Presenting Sponsor
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
When I first interviewed Lane several years ago he had about 600,000 oysters growing at his oyster farm in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Today it’s about 30 million. His distribution is now far and wide but he’s still going through the back doors of restaurants, shucking his oysters for the chefs, and taking their orders when they’re surprised to learn these tasty delights orginate in the Gulf. Lane’s kindness, generosity and optimism stands out each time I speak to him and I learn that it springs from a wound that, Lane says, he hopes never heals. Check out the Oyster Cook-Off presented by Murder Point on November 19th. (Very cool Murder Point Video!)
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Presenting Sponsor
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Justin Patton leads Auburn’s RFID team and has participated in most of the seminal business case research for RFID in the United States for retailers. His client list is full of national retail brands and major manufactorers. The technology is everywhere, from embedded in the tag the airline puts on your luggage to the wristband you wear at a theme park. This tech is changing the way companies interact with their customers – from spending hours and hours counting inventory and finding things to letting the tech do it (better) and return to serving the customer.
Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Show Sponsor
Angelo DePaola – Coastal Connection Realty
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
James Lomax manages boatloads of office space in and around Huntsville. He tells me who is returing to tradiational office environments and why, who is not, and how some companies are changing their office design to lure employees back. I then talk with friends of What’s Working Johnny Gwinn and Stacy Wellborn who are part owners of a co-working space in Mobile called The Container Yard about the surge of interest in their space since Covid has let up.
Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Presenting Sponsor
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Buddy & Nikki Cummings have grown and sold several businesses of their own and put them in position for an early retirement if they wanted. Instead, they keep at it, getting involved with business that catch their eye and coaching entrepreneurs to grow and spread their own businesses. Theirs is an infectious energy and their lessons come from their own successes and mistakes, not business school texts. Common business problems addressed in common-sense, simple ways.
Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Presenting Sponsor
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
The commercial aviation industry faces a wave of retirements soon and needs new blood. Auburn University has trained college students to become pilots for many years and today their program is bursting with undergraduates eager to help fill these soon to be vacated airline cockpits. Professors James Birdsong and Jim Witte run the Auburn University School of Aviation. Students graduate with a pilot’s license and are well on their way to the needed flight hours to begin their careers with a major airline.
This episode is in collaboration with Business Alabama magazine.
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) – Presenting Sponsor
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Ellen Douglas Alves sat with my family at a delicate point in the care for my now deceased mother and calmy offered insight and options to a family nearly paralyzed with sadness. She’s part of a growing cadré of geriatric care managers who assist families who have very difficult decisions to make – love for a sick person, limited financial resources, lack of knowledge of options, the list goes on. With a rapidly aging society, demands for geriatric care managers are expected to soar. Meet Ellen Douglas, learn about her role as a “professional relative,” and why you may need to reach out to someone like her some day.
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
The Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE)
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Tim Dozier is CEO of full service ad agency Hummingbird Ideas in Mobile. His clients pay his firm to put them in the best light and make them easily found online. However, Tim tells us, search is changing. No longer is Google the go-to like it once was. And it’s today’s youth who are disrupting this market – using non-traditional online sites (i.e. TikTok, YouTube) to drive their search. Even though the results are less accurate, today’s kids continue to go back, meaning Tim and team have to become more and more savvy to keep their clients in buyers’ eyes.
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE)
Angelo DePaola – The Coastal Connection Realty
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Hatton Smith was introduced to a group of young beer brewers eager to learn and to grow their brand. Hatton offered two things: wisdom in the beverage business and access to capital. He joined the young company and today, Back Forty Beer Company is growing, having doubled their production in the last few years. They survived the initial rush of breweries after Alabama changed the laws and many brewers arrived onto the scene and have since vanished. Hear the wisdom he offered and their plans for the future.
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE)
The Coastal Connection Realtors
United Bank – New Sponsor! Thanks!
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Tanya Hart Little, a Baby Boomer, admitted that maybe there’s something she didn’t know. In her new commercial real estate brokerage, Hart Commercial, she needed young, ambitious, and agressive talent. At the time, Tanya was mentoring Allison Johnston Frizzo, a Millennial. Through their relationship, then friendship, and now business partnership, Tanya realized that the historic model of the senior people in the industry know the most, know what’s best, and know how to get things done was broken. Tanya gave her young team some direction, worked to shape the company goals, and offered lots of leeway and then let them run with it. The result? Overwhelming success in a much shorter amount of time than anyone could have predicted.
Thanks to Show Sponsors:
The Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE)
The Coastal Connection Realtors – New Advertisers! Welcome!
Trey Langus – Transworld Business Advisors
Allison Horner – State Farm Agent
