Tina Harrison says she's been planning since July for the kickoff to the holiday season.

Stacked on a pallet in an East Chattanooga warehouse, the boxes of wool socks bound for Bulgaria make Jim Markley's point perfectly.

A decade ago, Doris Schober began looking in Ooltewah to build another Lupi's Pizza restaurant, but she had trouble finding a suitable site in one of the fastest growing parts of the Chattanooga region.

Startup Week, like its sponsor The Company Lab (Co.Lab.), tries to turn creative ideas into successful businesses by helping entrepreneurs with what Co.Lab Director Marcus Shaw calls "the formula for success."

Boasting nicknames such as "freight alley" and "the Silicon Valley of trucking," the Chattanooga area is riding a growing ecosystem for startups in the sector and a reputation where companies outside of the city need a presence, according to experts.

As vice president of economic development for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, Charles Wood is in charge of directing economic development and helping lead the visioning process Velocity 2040 to plot Chattanooga's economic future over the next two decades.

In our 4th annual Champions of Health Care awards program, we recognize those individuals who put the care into our region's healthcare system.

Clifton R. "Clif" Cleaveland, M.D., hung up his stethoscope in 2004, but he has never stopped listening to the human heart.

Viston Taylor has battled cancer since 1990. At age 73, Taylor had his annual CT scan in June, and it showed a possible reoccurrence of lung cancer. On July 18, he went to Memorial Hospital for a bronchoscopy and biopsy.

Roy Turley wants to make it clear that he didn't campaign for his Champions of Health Care award as the year's top volunteer. "But I deserve it," he quips.

From infants with severe infections to teenagers with traumatic injuries, patients and their families come first for Dr. Marvin Hall, a pediatric critical care specialist at the Children's Hospital at Erlanger.

In a stroke emergency, a patient loses about 1.9 million brain cells a minute, says Chattanooga neurologist Dr. Thomas Devlin.

Changing times and needs led Cempa Community Care — formerly Chattanooga CARES — to evolve from HIV/AIDS educator in the 1980s to a champion of healthy communities today.

The career path of nursing came to Phil Perry as a second chance.

As the son and grandson of medical doctors, Chris LeSar says he initially tried as hard as he could to run away from being a physician and thought he was more interested in physics growing up and going to Xavier University in Ohio.

Commercial real estate broker David DeVaney says he's never seen so many big dreams etched on Chattanooga's drawing board in his 30 years in the business.

When real-estate investor Crawford K. McDonald takes on a new property, there's almost always an affecting story about the homeowner's reason to sell. McDonald specializes in a niche market of real estate that uses cash offers and quick turnarounds to buy residential homes that can be easily flipped to use as rentals or resold for a profit.

For some people, midday is time for a lunch break, or perhaps a nap.

When Darlene Brown moved into the former Chattanooga Bank building and began trying to market residential condos in the former Loveman's department store across Market Street downtown in 2001, the Chattanooga Realtor recalls most people were skeptical about living in the central city.

When Kaleena Goldsworthy set out to start her own business, The Bitter Bottle, three years ago, she had two significant obstacles in front of her.

For the past six years, attorney Andrew Mutter says he has been like a storm crow crying out about the potential dangers from Cyber threats to employee, customer and other data held by most businesses. The Chattanooga native spent three years focusing on insurance and cybersecurity issues for the Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding before returning to his hometown and helping to establish the Cybersecurity group at the Chambliss law firm three years ago.

Chattanooga personal injury attorneys C. Mark Warren and John Mark Griffin have spent years advocating for stricter hands-free driving laws, putting their faces and "NVR TXT & DRV" ad campaign on billboards and the sides of buses in the city.

Cory Sharpe worked as a journeyman lineman for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the city of Dayton, Tennessee, for 18 years before deciding he wanted to try running his own business.