Welcome to our Thriving at the Beach podcast, your reliable source of information and a peek under the tent regarding all of the amazing things taking place in our Grand Strand community. There are so many great things underway here that we believe it's time to start telling our stories. That's exactly what Thriving at the Beach will do. This podcast has been created for all the residents in this great coastal community because we want you to be the first to know things that are coming and get the most accurate and up to date details on every initiative. In this podcast, we'll be hearing from the community partners that are busy building a brighter and more vibrant tomorrow.
These partners will include the city of Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance, the Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development Team, the multiple chambers of commerce, the HTC Aspire Hub Emerge leadership, key business leaders, assorted community partners, and many more. It's our hope that you'll catch the momentum of how we are and will be thriving at the beach. I'm Peggy Masterson, and I'll be your host for Thriving at the Beach. I'm the director of the Partnership Grand Strand Foundation. And in case you haven't heard about us, we are the nonprofit foundation that's an extension of the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce.
We were created by local business leaders to serve local residents and local businesses across all of the 14 communities that make up our beautiful coastal area. Our work allows us the opportunity, a very unique opportunity, to collaborate and support all of the organizations that are busy building a better tomorrow. This provides us a wonderful opportunity to collect all this exciting information and share it with each of you. I could not be more excited to be able to facilitate a way for these experts to tell their stories and share their exciting news with you. So get ready, get psyched to get a peek under the tent on projects, businesses, and opportunities coming to our area.
I can't wait to watch you catch the momentum and then share it with others. Let's dive right in. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the very first episode of our Thriving at the Beach podcast. And as we get ready to launch this podcast, we thought it would make sense to tell you a little bit about why we started a podcast and also introduce you to the cohosts and the team behind the podcast.
I'm Peggy Masterson, the director of Partnership Grand Strand and your host. But I also wanna be clear that I am an amateur podcaster, and the episodes that you're going to hear are likely to be imperfect. We will promise to continue to try to get better as we move forward. The real reason that we decided to go ahead and do a podcast is because as Partnership Grand Strand continues to immerse itself in the Grand Strand communities, we find something or someone almost every day that is busy building a better tomorrow for our community. As our role in Partnership Grand Strand is to educate and convene, we felt like a podcast would be a great format to give you an opportunity to hear the stories of these folks that are working behind the scenes.
So our podcast is viewed as a vessel to share all of these stories that are, hopefully going to be encouraging and perhaps even, inspiring to you. Basically, we want you to get as encouraged as we are about the future here in the Myrtle Beach and surrounding area. So without further ado, let me take a minute and introduce you to this team, this amazing team that's behind the podcast. You'll get a chance today to hear from our two cohosts, BJ Beaver and Sarah Dahlstrom. And you'll also get a chance to, hear from Frankie Colon, who is our producer and editor, as well as Marianne Joy, who takes care of all of our scheduling and keeps us all on track.
Let me take a minute and give them an opportunity to introduce themselves to you and tell you what they hope to accomplish through Thriving at the Beach. And we'll start off with Frankie. Frankie, can you tell us a little bit about kind of what you're excited about as it relates to Thriving at the Beach and what you hope to get out of it? Absolutely. Absolutely.
So definitely with Thriving at the Beach, I'm super excited to be taking over some of the background of this project. I wanna say, obviously, the most important thing for me is making sure that the podcast sounds good. The entire idea for me is to go ahead and create a podcast that has a super, super wide reach, you know, try to cast as big a net as possible so as many people as possible can hear the things that we are up to. So, obviously, trying to post us across all platforms where people do, normally take in their podcast, obviously, being YouTube, Apple Music slash Apple Podcast, Spotify. Yeah.
If that happens, obviously, once we get to a point where we do have hopefully thousands of listeners, I wanna make sure that every voice is crisp and make sure that every message is delivered as perfectly as possible. Well, that sounds like a big job to me. You know? One thing we love about the fact that this is a prerecorded podcast is that Frankie gets to edit all of our mistakes out of the, the podcast, at least as many as as he possibly can. So, Frankie, we thank you for all your editing work as well as the production side because without him, moving this forward, you'd never get a chance to hear the podcast and never hear these stories.
So we thank you for that, Frankie. Thank you so much. Have a good day to be a part of it. And next, we have Mary Anne Joy. Mary Anne is, our scheduler, and that is a task that, requires a great deal of heavy lifting.
So, I wanted you to meet Mary Anne and give her an opportunity to share what she thinks about Thriving at the Beach and what Thank you, Peggy. Hi, y'all. As a podcast scheduler, I'm the behind the scenes member of the team and the first point of contact. We've implemented a process and it helps us to prepare and relax our guests on the podcast. I send them some prep questions and then we have a pre recording conversation to find out what our guest wants to share with our audience.
Then we finalize the topics for the actual recording. We have a Thriving lineup set up for you, so stay tuned. And that lineup happens because of Mary Anne. She will be your first point of contact if you would like to become a guest on our Thriving at the Beach podcast and, help us share your good news about the initiatives that you or your company are working on, please reach out to Mary Anne directly, and, she can go ahead and get you on the schedule. But we'd love to hear from you, and we really appreciate all the work you do in implementing the, process, as you put it, that we have put in place to make this experience, in a podcast interview as smooth and as enjoyable as possible.
So thank you. And I'll talk to some of you soon. So next, I get to introduce you to my favorite part, which is having two co hosts that are going to be helping with the interview process in this podcast. The first of which is BJ Beaver. And BJ, I'd love you to share a little bit about what you, do at Partnership Grand Strand and what you would hope to accomplish with this Thriving at the Beach podcast.
Perfect. Thanks, Peggy. As you mentioned, my name is BJ Beaver, and I'm lucky enough to be the business retention and development manager here at Partnership Grand Strand and I get to oversee two of our pillars which is workforce development and small business retention and expansion and really excited to bring the stories of our community to our listeners, all the great things that are happening in workforce and small business. You know, as a native of our community, I've seen us grow so much over the last couple of years and having the ability to be able to be a part of the future growth and the future thrive that we're going to have and continue to thrive as we have in the community is really important to me. So, thank you, Peggy.
To have an individual that has been here his whole life long sit back and say he feels like we're thriving and feels like things are moving in the right direction is a significant accomplishment. So, we have made you a believer, it sounds like, BJ. Absolutely. We're doing great work in this community. There's a lot of partners at play who are really putting Myrtle Beach and Horry County on the map.
So, I am a believer in the thriving of Myrtle Beach. Well, awesome. And our stories will help prove that to you if you continue to listen into our podcast. So thank you, B. J.
I appreciate that. You got it. And we also have, B. J. We also have Sarah Dahlstrom on our team.
And Sarah, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your role at PGS and what you would like to try to accomplish through Thriving at the Beach. Thank you, Miss Peggy. My name is Sarah Dahlstrom, and I am the business retention and development coordinator. And my goals through this podcast are really to highlight and focus on those small businesses that are within our community, to give them a voice to share their success stories and share how they are thriving at the beach. We also have a lot of entrepreneurs in the area and I don't know that a lot of people realize that so I want to bring some attention and light on them as well so they can also share their stories another goal that I have is to continue speaking with our small businesses in the area we have some business retention and expansion surveys where we want to get feedback from the businesses so we can hear what is working for them so that they can thrive and then if somebody out there is listening to this and they're thinking about starting their own business they can pick up on some of the information provided by those surveys, and then they can get on their way to be thriving at the beach as well.
Oh, cool. So, really, what you'll be able to hear, thank you for that, Sarah, is, you know, the a community is made up of multiple pieces and parts, right? And what we're trying to pull together in this podcast is work that's happening in the entrepreneurial space, work that's happening in small business, initiatives in workforce, and the connection that we're building between the school systems and the employer base. You'll hear all those stories kind of mixed in as well as you'll hear from the leaders within the community that are making those things happen. But it wouldn't happen without the work that BJ and Sarah are doing.
So, I want to make sure that I take this opportunity to thank you both for your leadership in those two segments, very important segments of what we need to prosper. So thank you for that. Absolutely. We'll grow stronger together. Amen.
So as you can see, this is a team effort, and that's the whole reason we wanted to do this introductory podcast. Things can't happen in silos. Things can't happen independent of one another, and that's one of the things that the work that we've done in partnership Grand Strand has taught us immediately. So what we wanna do, just like this this podcast takes a group of people to actually host and edit and schedule and produce, we hope that you'll continue to to join this team and know that this podcast is for you. We are taking the leap to, put ourselves out there as podcast amateurs in light of the fact that we think it's really important for you to be able to hear the story first hand about what's coming to this particular area in terms of, opportunity for growth and prosperity.
So we hope that you will listen to our podcast regularly, share it with your friends, and certainly subscribe so you don't miss, any of our upcoming episodes. We do plan to, release a new episode of Thriving at the Beach every other week. We look forward to continuing to keep this dialogue running. And until then, we thank you for listening and want you to keep thriving. Talk to you soon.
Bye. So that's all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. You can find this podcast as well as a transcript of the podcast on Partnership Grand Strand's website, which is partnershipgrandstrand.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll release a new episode every other week, so stay tuned to get that behind the scenes info on how we are thriving at the beach and across our entire coastal community.
Till next time. Keep thriving.
