Mary Fortune

Ask Kimberly Cooper Thomas about her career path, and she can't help but laugh.

A logjam of postponed water-related events from 2020 is starting to clear, and the back half of 2021 is bringing a return to the river that will have big downstream effects, says Barry White, CEO of the Chattanooga Tourism Company.

Having successfully scrambled through the pandemic to keep her business alive, Terri Holley is handing off ownership of the boutique clothing and shoe business she has built over the past 16 years.

Elisha Millan opened Grass Roots, Tennessee's first hemp dispensary, in Chattanooga in 2017 after finding relief from debilitating illness through CBD, a cannabinoid derived from hemp.

If a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work, Richard Simms has landed himself a pretty great way to make a living.

Jeffrey Maddux says the close-knit legal community in Chattanooga is one of the benefits of practicing law here, and he's looking forward to seeing people out and about again.

Keith Sanford has been president and CEO of the Tennessee Aquarium since 2016, after working in a variety of roles at First Tennessee Bank over 36 years, including serving as market president.

* Location: 151 Riverfront Parkway, and all along the Tennessee River

Julie Bestry has been a Certified Professional Organizer since 2007, but she has always been inclined to create systems for keeping track of the many tasks and challenges work and life throw at us.

After the lost year that was 2020, local hotels, restaurants and attractions are seeing an encouraging rebound heading into the traditional kickoff of the summer travel and tourism season.

A new brew is replacing the line of Brewski beers introduced by Double Cola in 2019, after fans of the SKI soda that inspired the beer venture spoke up loud and clear.

The owners of Heaven & Ale have sold off their production facility on the North Shore as well as their Ooltewah taproom, and gone all in on their taproom and restaurant on Chattanooga's Southside.

Though the federal Paycheck Protection Program ran out of funding several weeks before its May 31 application deadline, one local lender still has access to a pool of $8 billion reserved for Community Development Financial Institutions.

Most of their clients made it in under the wire, but some business owners are left wondering if they'll get Paycheck Protection Program funding after the money dried up nearly a month ahead of the application deadline of May 31.

More than a third of fuel stations in Chattanooga had no gasoline on Wednesday due to the Colonial Pipeline problem — five times as many as the day before, a company that tracks such data said.

Some Chattanooga area fuel stations are running out of gasoline amid the Colonial Pipeline crisis with operators and motorists hopeful the outages are short-lived.

Two brothers at the center of a failed textile mill fraud were sentenced Friday to 50 months in federal prison.

Leaders of some of Chattanooga's largest employers gathered at City Hall on Thursday to throw their collective support behind a pledge for racial equity, calling the focus an economic imperative.

Dale Victoria Curtis will celebrate the 15th anniversary of her business Blue Ivy Flowers this autumn, but her new venture operating Ensign the Florist is keeping that milestone in perspective.

A pledge for racial equity developed by the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce has drawn about 40 business leaders' signatures, as well as some criticism that the work falls outside the mission of the economic development organization.