AVL Biz Weekly — Aug 26–Sep 1: Entrepreneurship Week, a First-Ever Neighborhood Festival & Shindig's Last Call

Welcome to AVL BIZ Weekly—your local cheat sheet for what’s happening in Asheville’s small business + creative scenes.

Each week: hand-picked events, marketing ideas that actually work, and a little local flavor to keep things fun.

My name's Jason and I'm writing this (connect with me here).

Hey friends,

Buncombe County is running pedestrian plan drop-ins Wednesday in Enka-Candler and Thursday in Swannanoa. Ten priority sidewalk projects up on the wall, no registration, walk in and tell tell them what you think.

Monday at 9am, Seven Acres hosts a free hour on reading your own financials with Amanda Bell of Thrive Strategy Lab. No accounting background needed, which is the only reason I'd make it through.

Thursday night, we have Best of WNC at Highland, a food rescue mixer at Devil's Foot, and the Downtown Association's housing mixer at Revival. Pick one, or two if you got a fancy car.

Let's get into it.

📋 On Deck

• Business: Asheville Entrepreneurship Week opens Monday with a free small business analytics session and closes Tuesday with the Venture Asheville Innovation Summit at UNC Asheville.

• Fun: The Legacy Neighborhoods Coalition throws its first-ever festival at Memorial Stadium, and Shindig on the Green plays the last night of its 60th season.

• Music: Gregory Alan Isakov at Hellbender, Keller & The Keels celebrating 20 years of Grass at French Broad River Brewery, and Black Label Society closing the week out loud.

🙋 Want your biz featured in front of a few really smart AVL business owners? Email me for details

🗓️ Business Events

• 🗓️ Buncombe County Pedestrian Plan Drop-In — Wed, Aug 26 · 5:30–7:30pm (Enka-Candler Library) and Thu, Aug 27 · 5–7pm (ArtSpace Charter School, Swannanoa) — Drop in, review the survey results and the 10 priority sidewalk projects, and tell the county what they got wrong. No registration, Spanish interpretation available.

• 🗓️ Housing, Capital & Community: ADA Member Mixer — Thu, Aug 27 · 4–6pm (Revival Asheville, 66 Asheland Ave) — Beth Silverman of Lotus Campaign and AJ Jackson of LEO Impact Capital on what actually moves the needle on housing affordability, plus a housing trivia game.

• 🗓️ FWS Quarterly Networking: Food Rescue Toolkit — Thu, Aug 27 · 5:30–7:30pm (The Mule at Devil's Foot Beverage, 131 Sweeten Creek Rd) — Free mixer with light bites where the City and County walk through their new School Food Rescue Toolkit.

• 🗓️ The Morning Read: Small Business Analytics Edition — Mon, Aug 31 · 9–10am (Seven Acres, 105 Fairview Rd) — Amanda Bell of Thrive Strategy Lab walks real financials line by line, no accounting background required.

• 🗓️ Venture Asheville Innovation Summit — Tue, Sep 1 · 11am–6pm (Mountain View Room, Sherrill Center, UNC Asheville) — Sessions on economic trends, reverse engineering your sale, capital strategy, and the founder-to-operator handoff, with a rooftop reception to close.

• ⭐ 🗓️ Fractional Executives Connect — Tue, Sep 1 · 4–6pm (White Labs Kitchen & Tap, 172 S Charlotte St) — My friend Angela Smith is hosting this capped-size conversation for working fractional COOs, CFOs, and CMOs on pricing, positioning, and juggling clients. A must-attend if you’re a fractional pro.

Hosting something cool?

📬 Hit reply and tell me what you think. Or share an event!

💡 Marketing Quickies

This week is about the quotes you sent months ago and never heard back on. Contractors and professional service businesses both have a pile of these, and most of them are still winnable.

Send the nine-word text. Pull every quote or proposal you sent 60 days ago or more that never got a yes or a no, and text each one: "Are you still looking to get [the deck / the kitchen / your books cleaned up] done?" It's short enough that people actually answer it, and you'll be surprised how many say "yes, sorry, life got busy."

Give every open quote a schedule. The reason follow-up dies is that it lives in your head next to forty other things. Put a real cadence on it instead: a text on day three, a call on day ten, an email on day thirty, then a check-in every quarter after that. Write the messages once and let them send themselves while you're on a job or in a client meeting.

Then keep going for a full year. A homeowner who passed in March is a different person in November, and the accountant who lost a prospect in Q1 usually gets another shot at budget season. Our Show Up and Follow Up System runs text and email touches for twelve months after the first contact, which is how a dead lead turns into a referral or a second job without anybody remembering to do anything.

Local Business Spotlight

They Bought a Hobby. Now They Have to Make It a Business. — with Alex and Heidi Jeffrey of Notorious Coffee

Story

Heidi Jeffrey had been roasting part-time for a guy named Jeff Lowe for about two years when he told her he was retiring at the end of 2025. She went home to Alex and opened with a warning. "Hear me out. Let's buy a coffee roasting business." They had been driving over to Lowe's roastery in Mars Hill since before COVID to buy five-pound bags straight from him. If nobody took it, Notorious Coffee was closing.

Lowe called it his hobby and he meant it. He had run it mostly alone for years, said plainly that he was never really in it for the money, and gave the Jeffreys a deal on the sale because what he wanted was for the coffee to outlast him. He was straight about the rest of it too: I know I need to raise prices, I just don't want to upset anybody. Those prices held up fine for one man's weekend project. They did not hold up for two owners with a baby on the way. The Jeffreys honored them through the end of the year anyway, out of respect for his customers, then watched the math go sideways. "We bled so much money," Alex says. They have been climbing out of it since.

Lowe roasted to a temperature schedule, rinse and repeat, and it made good coffee for years. Alex wanted to know what else was in there. He took every variable apart, origins and crack timing and single degrees of heat. He has a bean right now that he has roasted seven or eight times and still won't release because he can't get it right. Heidi frames it the way Lowe used to, that roasting is like cooking, you can come at it as a science or as an art. Alex is the scientist. Heidi is the artist.

Ask Alex what you are actually paying for and he walks you through a natural process coffee like their Bali. The bean dries inside the coffee cherry instead of getting washed out first, so the fruit works its way in. You taste citrus and floral notes in a plain black cup with nothing added. It is the original way coffee was dried, and it costs more than the mechanical wash process that replaced it. "You would never see that coffee in a grocery store," he says.

The roastery is a garage in an old gas station lot in Mars Hill, and there is no sign on it. That part is deliberate. The lot has lumber stacked out front and was never built to catch walk-in traffic, so instead of dressing it up as a storefront, the Jeffreys put the hours into the roast and into getting the coffee out the door. It pours at Double D's and a few other local spots in Asheville, goes out to wholesale accounts around the region, and ships nationwide. What they run in place of a sign is more personal than one. Order online for pickup and one of them texts you back to set a time, so there is always somebody there to meet you.

The sign comes when they decide what the place is going to be. They got their first date night since the baby was born not long ago and spent most of it talking about opening a cafe, probably closer to Asheville. They are not quite a year in. "We're there," Alex says. "We're there."

Day in the Life

1. Favorite coffee or breakfast spot? Double D's, the red double decker bus on Biltmore. They pour Notorious.

2. Fitness routine? Alex teaches yoga at Asheville Community Yoga and lifts at home every two or three days so he can be around for the family. Heidi lifts and walks the baby.

3. First-time visitor to WNC? Breakfast at Yellow Mug Coffee Lounge in Weaverville, dinner at Ukiah Japanese Smokehouse downtown. Heidi sends people to Bailey Mountain Preserve in Mars Hill for the reconstructed barns and the climb up.

4. Nonprofits you support? Asheville Community Yoga, MountainTrue river cleanups, and the food bank in Asheville.

Want to work with them?

Order at notoriouscoffee.com with nationwide shipping, or pick up in Mars Hill Monday and Wednesday, 11 to 1. Texting 828-484-1555 is the fastest way to reach them.

🎉 Fun Stuff Around AVL

• 🗓️ Mountain Xpress Best of WNC Party — Thu, Aug 27 · 6–10pm (Highland Brewing Meadow) — Free party for this year's Best of WNC winners with music, food trucks, and photo booths.

• 🗓️ 828 Day — Fri, Aug 28 · All day (West Asheville) — Heart of West Asheville turns the neighborhood into a scavenger hunt with discounts and prizes at participating shops.

• 🗓️ Legacy Neighborhoods Coalition Festival — Fri, Aug 28 · 6–9:30pm and Sat, Aug 29 · 12–10pm (Memorial Stadium, 32 Buchanan Pl) — First one ever, free, celebrating Burton Street, East End/Valley Street, Emma, Shiloh, and Southside with music, food, art, and storytelling.

• 🗓️ Steve Hofstetter: Begin Again — Fri, Aug 28 · 7:30pm (Wortham Center, 18 Biltmore Ave) — Touring stand-up with a billion-plus views online, downtown for one night.

• 🗓️ Flickoff to Kickoff: Paper Football Competition — Sat, Aug 29 · 12–10pm (Bear's Smokehouse Barbecue) — Ten hours of paper football, which is either the dumbest or best thing on this week's list.

• 🗓️ Shindig on the Green: Final Night of the 60th Season — Sat, Aug 29 · 7–10pm (Pack Square Park) — Free bluegrass, old-time bands, and jam circles across the park. Last one until next summer.

🎧 Bands on the Horizon

Wed, Aug 26

• Sally Jaye and Sonia Leigh (Well-Crafted Music Series) — 6pm @ Highland Brewing (Meadow)

• Jason Curtis and The Blacksheep — 7pm @ Grey Eagle Music Hall

Thu, Aug 27

• Widely Grown — 5:30pm @ Grey Eagle Patio Stage

• Penelope Road & Winyah — 7:30pm @ The Orange Peel

• Santiago Y Los Gatos w/ Fashion Bath & Jason Daniello — 7:30pm @ Grey Eagle Music Hall

Fri, Aug 28

• Beer and Loathing — 5:30pm @ Grey Eagle Patio Stage

• Chiodos — 7pm @ The Orange Peel

• Emanuel Wynter — 7pm @ Highland Brewing (Meadow)

• Gregory Alan Isakov — 7:30pm @ Hellbender

• Gimme Hendrix w/ Starseer — 8pm @ Grey Eagle Music Hall

Sat, Aug 29

• Rock Academy Showcase — 12pm @ Grey Eagle Music Hall

• Ska City — 7pm @ Highland Brewing (Meadow)

• Keller & The Keels w/ Tanasi — 7:30pm @ French Broad River Brewery

• Casey Rocket — 8pm @ The Orange Peel

• King Garbage — @ Pisgah Brewing Taproom Stage (Black Mountain)

Sun, Aug 30

• Mojohand — 2pm @ Highland Brewing (Meadow)

• Rooftop Salsa — 5pm @ Highland Brewing (Rooftop)

• Cordovas w/ Gavin Kattesh — 5:30pm @ Grey Eagle Patio Stage

Mon, Aug 31

• Estimated Prophets: Grateful Dead Cover Show — 6pm @ Grey Eagle Music Hall

• Black Label Society w/ Zakk Sabbath & Dark Chapel — 7:30pm @ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium

Want your biz in front of a few really smart AVL business owners? Reply with what you're up to and we'll see if it's a fit.

Until next week,

Jason De Los Santos
Pixelated Stories Digital Marketing
(828) 585-4293