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All businesses great and small
There are 32.5 million small businesses in the United States, employing more than 61 million people and making up a staggering 99.9% of the nation’s businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. As business journalists, though, we tend to focus almost exclusively on the larger businesses that reap bigger[...]
Breaking rank
What a difference a year makes. On July 13, 2021, against a backdrop of ships blasting their horns and spraying water in celebration at the Port of Virginia’s Norfolk International Terminals, Gov. Ralph Northam sat for a harborside interview with CNBC, which had just named Virginia the nation’s best state for busines[...]
Interesting times
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, according to an apt but apocryphal quote frequently misattributed to Mark Twain. We’re certainly seeing that dynamic writ large in the 2020s, though events don’t seem content with reviving just one era. A deadly pandemic has taken millions of lives across the [...]
Something phishy
About seven or eight years ago, I was sitting at my desk one morning when I received an urgent text from my then-boss. She was holding a meeting, according to the text, and needed me to purchase $1,000 in electronic gift cards as a giveaway to the attendees as soon as possible. Needless to say, […]
Rising to the challenges
Last summer, as I was eating dinner at a Norfolk bar with a group of my Lead Virginia classmates from far Southwest Virginia, one of them asked what decision makers in Richmond thought about their region. “Most of them don’t think about it at all,” I replied bluntly and not a little sadly. During my […]
The bigger picture
Welcome to the 10th edition of The Big Book. Virginia Business Publisher Bernie Niemeier had the inspiration for this annual issue more than a decade ago when he was retrieving his mail and noted the heft of Vanity Fair’s jam-packed annual Hollywood issue. “Why can’t we have a big book like this?” he thought to [[...]
A tale of two economies
Inside View: Nowhere are millennials needed more than in small-town America.
Is the first-family gift saga reshaping Virginia’s image?
Passage of a sweeping transportation funding bill in this year’s General Assembly session was supposed to be his legacy. Instead of succeeding Gerald Baliles as Virginia’s “transportation governor,” however, McDonnell is being called the “gifted governor” for all the wrong reasons.
