Featured
Restoring Service After The Storm
Remembering Douglas County’s Snowmageddon – 1 year later By Jim Teece On February 24th, 2019, a snowstorm started around 1:30 pm. Keith Brooks had some texts with Phil Bigler, his Assistant General Manager and right-hand man. Keith sent some concern about the storm and Phil replied with some reassuring texts…
Read More
SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS – The Black Box of Incident Management
Thanks to the use of social media during incidents, we have a running account of communications from events to review after the fact. If done properly, client communication is critical and important not only as a form of customer service but also as a black box to study after the…
Read More
Remembering Douglas County’s Snowmageddon – 1 year later. – Staff Stories
By Jim Teece We asked the team at UmpquaBroadband how they were impacted by the storm personally and professionally. Nick How were you affected personally? We were without power at the house for about 5 days in total. Fortunately, we have a wood stove which we could use for heat…
Read More
Remembering Douglas County’s Snowmageddon – 1 year later.
By Jim Teece Greg Henderson (Southern Oregon Business Journal Founder and Co-Publisher) and I met with Todd Way, CEO and GM of Douglas Fast Net (DFN) and Keith Brooks, General Manager of Douglas Electric Cooperative (DEC) in the DFN board room, on a nice clear and cold winter day 11…
Read More
Energy Saving Solutions + Energy and Production Efficiency = Better Product Quality & Lower Prices.
Cook Woods, a Klamath Falls-based, family-owned company mills exotic and domestic woods, and rare hardwoods, into specialty products for use by hobbyists, wood artists and instrument makers. Sustainability drives every part of the business. Having grown up in national parks as the son of a park ranger, founder Christopher Cook…
Read More
The Myth of Bend’s Timber-to-Tourism Transition
by Damon Runberg You may have heard this story before. Bend was a timber town, but after the demise of the timber industry, the regional economy shifted to tourism to replace those timber jobs. The vast ponderosa forests outside of town attracted mills that sustained the town for much of…
Read More
Economic Outlook: It’s Complicated
Grant D. Forsyth, Ph.D., Chief Economist for Avista gave a riveting talk at the November, Medford Chamber of Commerce Forum to over 200 business people. The title of his talk was “Economic Outlook: It’s Complicated”. He presented several slides to prove his title to be true. Our Economy in Southern…
Read More
$75-million 5th Street Public Market expansion project in Eugene on track to open fall 2020.
By Jim Teece We are getting quite a few requests about the photo on the cover of the November 2019 issue. We received the photo as part of a press release package from the Obie Companies talking about retail on 5th street marketplace and we thought it was very appropriate…
Read More
Holiday Cheer Abounds at 5th Street Public Market
By Jenny Ulum, Public Affairs Counsel, Obie Companies – www.obiecompanies.com The best place to find a little piece of the North Pole in Eugene is the historic 5th Street Public Market in the downtown Market District. Year-round the 5th Street Public Market is one of the area’s top tourist attractions,…
Read More
Are we in the middle of a retail apocalypse?
By Jim Teece Retailers have closed a record 102 million square feet of store space in 2017, then smashed that record in 2018 by closing another 155 million square feet, according to estimates by the commercial real-estate firm CoStar Group. Then they started 2019 by announcing more than 8,600 store…
Read More
Retail Salespersons: Oregon’s Largest Occupation
By Jessica Nelson from the Oregon Employment Department Oregon had almost 66,000 retail salespersons in 2017 – making retail sales the largest single occupation in the state. One out of every 31 jobs in Oregon is in retail sales. Those tens of thousands of jobs are grouped together based on…
Read More
What is the E2E Network?
Inspired by communities from Bend to Boulder, management consultant Cynthia Scherr and financial consultant Linda Ganim, along with other local entrepreneurs, started E2E three years ago. They challenged their friends and clients, most of whom own businesses, to come together as a loose group of entrepreneurs to focus on promoting,…
Read More