Change on the menu at Johnson & Wales University

Plus: Lessons from 40-year employee of Duke Energy; New stimulus checks proposed in N.C.; Woman drinks from self-serve beer tap in South End; Blakeney left with fewer lingerie options

Good morning! Today is Monday, August 31, 2020. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

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Today’s Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by Count on Me CLT. To help save lives, jobs and businesses, please wear a mask, wait 6 feet apart and wash your hands often. Visit CountOnMeCLT.com for more information.

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Classes start today, and enrollment is down as small colleges face challenges; time to be flexible, new president says

Only first-year students or classes with majors requiring hands-on labs (like the pastry class shown here) will be held on campus this semester at Johnson & Wales University. All other students will be learning online.

by Michael J. Solender

Colleges have been in the Covid spotlight in recent weeks as they announce and modify their back-to-school plans, and today marks the first day of classes at Johnson & Wales University’s Charlotte campus, where nearly every aspect of campus life is being affected by the pandemic.

The school is best known for its culinary arts and hospitality programs, and this year, only freshmen and students in majors requiring hands-on labs, like culinary arts, baking and pastry, are returning to campus as classes begin. All other students will be learning online.

Like most universities across America, JWU abruptly halted classes this spring as the country went under a pandemic-induced lockdown. In July, students returned to campus to complete classes that had been cut short, and about 185 stayed in residence halls, according to the university’s new president, Cheryl Richards.

“We’ve used the summer to learn what works and adopt best practices for the traditional academic year,” Richards said.

‘Covid Code of Conduct’: JWU rolled out a Covid Code of Conduct that students, faculty and staff must abide by, which include wearing face-coverings while on campus (unless isolated in a dorm room or office), physical distancing, daily symptom monitoring, self-isolation protocols and enhanced cleaning and disinfecting.

Looking to safely size lab classes, Richards invited Mecklenburg County Health Department officials onto campus to tour classrooms, labs, and kitchens and offer guidelines. The school then developed Covid protocols to be in accordance with the health department’s recommendations.

The university anticipates 950 students in student housing, but this academic year, only one student is allowed in each dorm room. So JWU has contracted with the adjacent DoubleTree Hotel to accommodate an overflow of 30 students.

Enrollment dip: JWU’s Charlotte enrollment is expected to drop nearly 16% this fall, to 1,283. This is despite an anticipated uptick in students at the university’s renamed College of Food Innovation & Technology (formerly the College of Culinary Arts).

Contributing to the rise: JWU Charlotte plans to receive dozens of transfer students from the university’s sister campuses in Denver and Miami, which are closing at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year. Some students from those campuses have transferred to Charlotte for this academic year, ahead of the closures; others are expected to come next year.

The Denver and Miami closures leave Charlotte as JWU’s sole campus outside of Providence, R.I., where the institution was founded in 1914. JWU’s footprint in Charlotte includes 14.7 acres and nine buildings uptown, and 214 faculty and staff members.

“Denver and Miami were in very different positions than Charlotte,” Richards said. “The Charlotte campus has been embraced by the community since the day it opened. We have a responsibility as an educational institution in the greater Charlotte region to be part of the economic driver, and a pathway for opportunity.”

New president: In June, Richards became the university’s first female president, and the fourth person in the last six years to lead JWU. She joins JWU from Northeastern University’s Charlotte Campus, where she served as the founding chief executive officer and regional dean. Prior to Northeastern, Richards, who’s lived in Charlotte for 16 years, was a campus and academic dean at the Cato Campus of Central Piedmont Community College.

She said JWU is working to expand its academic offerings beyond the culinary and hospitality programs it’s best known for, and in recent years the school has ramped up its business, health and wellness and arts and sciences departments.

Smaller schools in crisis: JWU Charlotte’s undergraduate enrollment is comparable with several other Charlotte-area private, nonprofit colleges. JWU’s fall 2019 undergraduate enrollment was slightly greater than Belmont Abbey College and Johnson C. Smith University, and slightly less than Davidson College and Queens University, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Colleges and universities across the country are facing an existential crisis with the current pandemic. Among the most vulnerable are the smaller, private schools whose revenue streams come predominately from tuition, according to Scott Galloway, a best-selling author and professor of marketing at New York University. He recently studied 440 colleges and universities ranked by US News and World Report, reviewing admission rates, tuition, endowments, dependence on international students, brand equity and their impact on an institution’s economic viability.

His analysis predicted that 21% faced a severe challenge with survival in the upcoming year and an additional 29% will struggle. “While some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion-dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent,” Galloway wrote in his report.

Richards says she’s committed to fostering partnerships that can benefit both JWU and the Charlotte community. “Our very first priority is to re-establish our prominence in the region and that will come through our community relationships and our industry partnerships,” she said.

Impact on local restaurant scene: JWU has a big impact on Charlotte-area restaurants and the hospitality industry, with many of its alumni staying in Charlotte to take jobs here. Nearly 3,000 JWU alumni live within a 75-mile radius of downtown Charlotte, according to Chris Plano, JWU manager of alumni relations. Among the area’s most notable grads are Lynn Allen (Fahrenheit), Joe Kindred (Kindred and Hello, Sailor), Michael Felt (The Blind Pig), Ben Sholiton (Nellie’s), Mike Long (The Asbury), and Tara Goulet and Conor Robinson (Birdsong Brewing Co.).

Richards said she was optimistic about JWU’s role in the city even while having to navigate a pandemic. “The industry knows the quality of a Johnson & Wales graduate,” says Richards, who noted JWU has 145 students awaiting fall internship opportunities. “The job of an institution is to prepare individuals to be lifelong learners. There’s no better environment than the one we're living in right now to learn how to learn, pivot, and be flexible.”

Michael J. Solender is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, American City Business Journals, Business North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer and others. He develops custom content and communications for businesses and organizations. http://michaeljwrites.com/ .

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Today’s supporting sponsor is T.R. Lawing Realty:

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Duke Energy CFO: Lessons from spending 40 years at the same company

Duke Energy Chief Financial Officer Steve Young’s resume shows a long list of job changes and promotions over his 40-year career, but there’s one thing in particular that’s remarkable about it — all 40 years have been spent at the same company.

There was a time when a 40-year tenure at a company wouldn’t be a huge deal, but consider this: The median number of years that wage and salary employees have worked for their current employer is now 4.2 years, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As you’d expect, older workers stay longer at jobs than younger ones; the median tenure for employees ages 55 to 64 was 10.1 years, compared to 2.8 years for workers ages 25 to 34.

Young moved from Duke Energy’s finance department to the rates and regulatory affairs area in the 1990s, becoming a vice president. He later served as business unit CFO for the utility company, corporate controller and chief accounting officer. Now as CFO, he oversees between 550 and 600 people.

The Ledger’s Cristina Bolling talked to Young, 62, by phone recently about his decision to stay at one company for four decades, what advice he gives to younger employees about when to stay and when to go, how he tries to hang onto his best employees, and how the pandemic has affected his team.

Comments were edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Take us back to your start at Duke Energy, then called Duke Power. How old were you when you started?

I started in the summer of 1980, and it was the first job I had out of college. I was 22. I went to (UNC) Chapel Hill, and I majored in business administration with a concentration in accounting. I got out of school and went through the interview process and I got a job offer from Duke and took that. Immediately upon graduation, I started as an entry-level financial assistant doing accounting work with hundreds of other people. I tell people the job I had before I worked at Duke was as an intramural basketball referee at Chapel Hill.

Q: Talk about staying at one company for 40 years. Did you ever consider leaving? What made you decide to stay?

I never really felt like I had to look around. I was never tempted to leave Duke. The company is great, its purpose is great — supplying energy to people safely and at low cost. The people I’ve worked with have been fabulous, and the opportunities are diverse and the company is good about looking and thinking about people’s careers. There were always interesting things going on in the company. When I started, it was building some of the first nuclear plants in the industry. Now, we’re building wind farms, solar farms, battery storage facilities. I think the company has always been innovative and that’s been attractive to employees.

Q: What advice to do you give younger professionals about when it makes sense to stay in one place like you have, and when it makes sense to switch companies?

I’ve generally said, when a job gets to be very easy for you, maybe it’s time to expand. You should interact with your manager to understand, “What are my needs for development? What are your thoughts about my needs?” Look for (lateral moves) to broaden you out. Not every move is going to be up. That’s where patience can help you. Put yourself in the best position, so when an upward opportunity is there, you’ve got a shot at it.

People ask me, “Did you have a timetable of progression and goals regarding when you would be at VP level?” I never had that. My only goal was to do the job I had to the best of my ability. That takes a bit of faith that there are people looking and understanding that you’re doing well. But I think the company has proven that they are doing that. So I didn’t feel like I needed to put a constraint on myself.

Q: Talk about the pandemic and how it’s affected your organization. Does this remind you of any other time during your tenure at Duke Energy? How has your organization had to adapt?

I have not seen a parallel to this pandemic. Most people in my area are working remotely. Now we’re trying to plan how to bring people back to work. We’ve learned a tremendous amount, and we’re not going to let this go to waste. We have learned how to work virtually very effectively; how to identify resources that might be available to be utilized in other areas. Leadership has been doing video updates, and we’ve been using technology to really interface a lot. I would sure love to walk around and talk to people the way I used to. I think the other forms of communication that we’ve put in place have worked well, but I do miss seeing people physically and talking about what’s going on in their lives. — CB

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Quotable: ‘quite volatile’

From a June 12 Charlotte Observer article, “Mecklenburg expects August surge in cases, asks residents to keep social distancing”:

Mecklenburg officials say there could be a surge in COVID-19 cases in the county in August and September as the state reopens. … Current coronavirus analyses — including what’s known as the CHIME model from the University of Pennsylvania — for Mecklenburg predict “significant increases” in COVID-19 cases in mid- to late August and into September, [County Health Director Gibbie] Harris said. Still, those models can be “quite volatile,” she said.

• 7-day average of new Mecklenburg Covid cases on June 12: 218

• 7-day average of new Mecklenburg Covid cases on Aug. 26: 130

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In brief:

• New round of stimulus checks? Leaders in the General Assembly are drawing up plans for stimulus checks of hundreds of dollars to state residents to help provide relief during the pandemic. “Budget writers from the Senate and House are spending the weekend negotiating the proposal aimed at giving parents money to offset costs related to child care and virtual learning needs,” according to the Raleigh News & Observer, which cited unnamed sources. The money would come from federal funding. A vote is expected this week. The article did not address if there would be an income limit or whether Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper supports the idea from the Republican-controlled legislature. (News & Observer)

• BofA high-pressure credit card sales? A lawsuit and interviews with former Bank of America workers in Oregon show that company executives pressured branch employees to sell more credit cards, according to an investigation by American Banker. Former workers depicted “an environment in which credit card sales were paramount and little regard was paid to the question of whether particular customers wanted or needed a new piece of plastic,” and the allegations “suggest that the company has found ways to continue its focus on aggressive sales even within the confines of new regulatory expectations,” the publication said. A BofA spokesman declined to comment on the allegations but said the bank works closely with regulators on its sales practices. (American Banker)

• Lower power bills: Duke Energy Carolinas says North Carolina customers will pay less for electricity starting Tuesday. Bills should drop by 2.9% for the average residential customer, 2.5% for commercial customers and 2.1% for industrial customers. (Winston-Salem Journal)

• 7th & Tryon examined: When finished in 2024, the $600M 7th and Tryon development uptown will “include restaurants and shops, a 25-30-story office tower, residences, a walkable plaza, sidewalk cafes, above-ground and underground parking, and a new main library building.” Charlotte Agenda takes a closer look this morning, including a new rendering of the project. (Agenda)

• Track CMS construction: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has a new website, cmsbondconstruction.com, that allows residents to check the status of construction projects more easily. It includes live webcams of construction of new high schools at West Charlotte and in Steele Creek. It shows design work for the new high school in the Ballantyne area, envisioned on Johnston Road at I-485, as starting next month.

• Going viral: Ellie the dog picks up a bag of Chick-fil-A curbside take-out in Chapel Hill and runs it back to her owner, Nick, across the parking lot. (YouTube)

• Literally going viral: Social media in Charlotte was aghast at a video posted over the weekend of a young woman, mask pulled below her chin, drinking straight out of a self-serve beer tap at Hoppin’ in South End, as onlookers cheered, “Go! Go! Go! Yeah!” Hoppin’ released a statement on Instagram on Sunday saying the incident was “completely unacceptable, not indicative of how we run our establishment,” and that it would close for a day to clean and meet with staff. (Twitter)

• Christmas in September: A local casting company is looking for people for a “Christmas movie” being filmed in Charlotte next month. Tona B. Dahlquist Casting says it’s looking for extras, dancers and a dance choreographer, a violinist and cellist (BYO instruments) and a children’s choir. More info is available on the company’s Facebook page. The company handles casting for productions in North and South Carolina and has previously helped with “Homeland” and “The Hunger Games.”

• Alcohol enforcement plan: Three local alcohol-enforcement agencies released a statement Saturday saying they would work more closely together to enforce Covid-related alcohol restrictions. Alcohol Law Enforcement, Alcohol Beverage Control law enforcement and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police indicated that “restaurants that are keeping health and safety of their guests as a top priority will not be the focus of enforcement,” according to the local foodie publication Unpretentious Palate. The statement did not address recent confusion regarding whether private bars can remain open or whether restaurants can seat diners at bars. (Unpretentious Palate, subscriber-only)

• No ‘Secret’ here: Lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret has closed its location in the Blakeney shopping center in south Charlotte, according to a sign on the door. In May, the company announced it would close 250 of its approximately 1,100 locations in the coming months. On Saturday, a dumpster behind the Blakeney store was filled with shelving materials and other store fixtures in the brand’s signature hot pink and black. The company’s website lists five other locations in the Charlotte area.

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Correction

An item in Wednesday’s newsletter about the LoSo Station development gave the wrong name for Beacon Partners. Apologies.

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Loves me some internet

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Taking stock

Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:

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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire; Reporting intern: David Griffith