NEER announces finalists for annual award

B. Mayo Boddie Sr., chairman of the NorthEastern Entrepreneur Roundtable, has announced the names of the four finalists for the 2009 NEER Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

"We received over 15 qualified nominations for this year’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award competition," Boddie said. "Our selection committee had a difficult time narrowing our finalist list for this honor, but we believe we have selected four outstanding candidates.”

The four entrepreneur nominees and their companies are Beth Chappell, George’s Sauces, Nashville; Pete Roy, Pelican Packaging, Halifax; Doug & Cary Tennis, Crow’s Nest Trading Company, Wilson; and Brooks West, Sweet Concepts, Momeyer.

The winner will be announced at the 15th Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Banquet sponsored by NEER on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at the Rose Hill Conference Center in Nashville. Dr. Joseph Kalinowski and Dr. Andrew Stuart, both associated with the Department of Communications & Disorders with the College of Applied Health Sciences at East Carolina University, will be the banquet keynote speakers.

Drs. Kalinowski and Stuart along with Dr. Michael Rastatter and other colleagues in their department spent the past 15 years researching the effects of delayed auditory feedback and frequency auditory feedback on stuttering. Their findings led to the development of the SpeechEasy, anti-stuttering fluency device.

• Beth Chappell, Georges Sauces, Nashville

Since 1992, Beth Chappell has turned her backyard enterprise into one of North Carolina’s most unique grocery lines. George’s BBQ Sauces are today found in many supermarkets and restaurants across the state. Under Chappell’s ownership and vision, 3500 16-ounce bottles of George’s BBQ Sauces are cooked and bottled each working day.

George’s Sauces product line has grown over the years. The company has a small and self-contained staff of six who are all cross trained to fill many roles from cooking, bottling and boxing the sauces to loading the cartons on the trucks for delivery. To keep up with consumer demand, customers can purchase the original George’s BBQ Sauce created in 1975 by George and Ed Stallings in 1975 or they can buy the newer George’s Hot BBQ Sauce and George’s Special BBQ Sauce created by Beth’s staff members.

George’s Sauces have now also found a market outside of North Carolina.

The internet has started providing an extended market reach for the company and after Everyday with Rachel Ray featured George’s BBQ Sauce as the “Best of the Carolinas” in its “Big Bite” section in the April 2008 issue, the orders via internet have increased significantly and from all over the United States.

• Peter Roy, Pelican Packaging, Halifax

Pete Roy comes from a family of entrepreneurs in Louisiana. After graduating from LSU with a degree in Petroleum Engineering, Roy worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. When Mobil Oil launched a plastics recycling program, he joined the company working with its Hefty Bags division.

Later, after joining Carlisle Plastics in its recycling program, he moved to Rocky Mount to work from the company’s Battleboro plant. Then in 1996 Roy went out on his own and launched Pelican Packaging, a company specializing in the recycling and distribution of industrial plastics.

Because of the continuous growth of the company during its first 10 years of operation, Pelican Packaging built its own 100,000 square foot facility just off of I-95 in Halifax NC in 2007. Here the company grinds plastic scraps and other manufactured plastic products into pellets that are then containerized and re-sold to plastic manufacturers across the county.

Roy’s company focuses on being a full service recycler for the plastic industry. The company also handles post consumer product recycling on a limited basis. Then Pelican Packaging uses a sophisticated and multi-step recycling process to make the material usable again.

• Doug & Cary Tennis, Crow’s Nest Trading Company, Wilson

Doug and Cary Tennis met in Winston-Salem. Both were working for large corporations at the time. Later they moved to Atlanta to other corporate positions. In 1994, the couple decided to go out on their own and launch a Sportsman’s Gift Catalog targeting fishermen and hunters and they decided to begin operations in Wilson.