Chris William, host of “Carolina Business Review,” spoke with Charlotte Business Journal editor in chief Rob Morris and the decision to end the show after more than three decades.
Here is an excerpt:
On the show’s moment of arrival:
The first, when I knew that we may have had something, was when we got yeses from the A-listers to join our program. Our very first program, we had Ken Iverson, the chairman and CEO of Nucor. We always had a panel. We did that over the last 34 years. And the panel (on the first show) was me as moderator, Dr. John Connaughton from UNC Charlotte, Smoky Bissell, who of course rose to developmental fame. And then a gentleman named Bill Keenan from Wedge Capital.
I knew it would be successful when, over and over again, (guests) were saying yes, and they were looking forward to it, and we began to get a buzz. We didn’t know for how long. I thought maybe we’d get a couple years out of it, and I’d burn out or not be interested, or people would start saying no. But that never was the case. It just kept building momentum.
How it became a statewide show:
The expansion kind of came almost as a natural progression. After our first year on the air, we realized that we might have something that could be scaled to the Carolinas. The reason it happened is because of the Coker family in South Carolina. They have a very large stake in Sonoco (Hartsville-based packaging products manufacturer) that’s been around for 120-plus years. And they were underwriters early on. They were the ones, and specifically Joan Coker, the matriarch of that family, said to me, “You should be in South Carolina too, Chris.” She helped introduce us to the programming folks at South Carolina ETV in Columbia, and we had several conversations over a period of maybe three or four months, and they were very open to it and eventually had put us on the network. And from there we were able to leverage the expansion onto what was called UNC TV at the time with the same type of dialogue.
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