You won’t find entrepreneur Kerry McCoy lounging in her considerable pool of accomplishments. Rather, look for her swimming in the open sea of risk toward new horizons. While most business owners her age are contemplating retirement, McCoy is busy parlaying her business, FlagandBanner.com, into a multi-media enterprise. Those that know her do not find this…
While many business owners dream of being able to pass their enterprise on to their children, Roderick Edwards’ parents urged him to do his own thing. It wasn’t out of concern, though; they didn’t want him to feel handcuffed to their business. So he set his sights on a medical career. He graduated pre-med and…
Gary Horton says he stumbled upon his career, but once he got into it knew he had found his calling. As a college student looking for a job to make ends meet, Horton took a job in an orthotics shop. Once he learned about how his work was making a difference in people’s lives, he…
Charlene Simon is the embodiment of the Mark Twain quote, “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Simon is a serial entrepreneur whose success has proved a formal education is just a formality. A wife at 15 and mother of three by 20, her…
Open up this month’s AY Magazine, and you’ll see that readers chose Chef Jamie McAfee as the Best Chef in the state. He’s the general manager and executive chef at the Pine Bluff Country Club and has been cooking all of his life. His father was the chef at the Delta Country Club in McGehee from…
Becky Whelan never imagined some 20 years ago when she was a customer at Cecil’s Fine Jewelry that someday she would be the owner. She had a thriving design business, first in Hot Springs Village in the 1970s and 1980s and then as the head of design for the old Brandon House until the late…
Blackmon Auctions, a third-generation, family-owned, auction company specializing in construction, trucking, industrial, and real estate sales is celebrating its 81st year in business. “We are still owned by the original family, and we have been in business longer than any others in the industry,” says CEO Thomas Blackmon. “We are also rare that for the…
Arkansas is home to a number of outstanding companies that have been passed down through generations. It’s an impressive feat to launch a business and be able to pass it to the next generation, much less successive generations. John Ward, co-director of The Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and…
By Janie Jones For more than 25 years, the unsolved murder of Pamela Felkins haunted a lot of people: her family and friends, the people of Greenbrier where she lived and died and the investigators who would catch a lead only to see it vanish in the wind. Was her killer a stranger? Or was…
I love communicating. Whether it’s the written word or the spoken, I love to chat it up. So imagine how thrilled I was when my two worlds collided yesterday. I am a contributor here at AY Magazine, and I’m doing live shots for KARK-TV, Channel 4 until March 1 at 4 p.m. every day. Most days…
