AVL Biz Weekly — Sept 16–22: Pro Golf, Big Green Eggs & 18 Farms With the Gate Open

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,

Wednesday morning the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board opens the old Honeywell campus in Mars Hill for the first WNC Small Biz Exchange. Self-guided, three hours, walk the building and meet the businesses working out of it.

A-B Tech's Small Business Center has three free sessions in three days out at Enka: CEO mindset Thursday morning, then bookkeeping and Teach Your Craft stacked on Saturday. The NC Bar Foundation is out there Thursday night too, giving free advice on LLC and PLLC setup, in person or on Zoom.

The Mountain State Fair is running Ingles and MANNA FoodBank Day on Wednesday and then wraps its ten-day run Sunday. Five cans of food gets you in the gate.

Let's get into it.

📋 On Deck

• Business: The first WNC Small Biz Exchange at the old Honeywell campus Wednesday, and free NC Bar Foundation advice on LLC setup Thursday night.

• Fun: The PGA Tour's first Asheville stop since 1942, Carolina EGGfest in the HomeTrust Park outfield Saturday, and 18 farms open for ASAP's Farm Tour.

• Music: LCD Soundsystem Thursday, Mastodon Friday, The War on Drugs Monday.

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

🗓️ Business Events

• 🗓️ WNC Small Biz Exchange — Wed, Sept 16 · 9 AM–12 PM (400 Hickory Dr, Mars Hill) — First run of a self-guided studio crawl through the old Honeywell incubator campus, hosted by the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board.

• 🗓️ Midweek Mixer: Homeownership & Down Payment Assistance with QB-1 — Wed, Sept 16 · 12–1 PM (Element by Marriott Asheville Downtown) — Black Wall Street AVL runs a lunch hour on down payment assistance programs and what's actually available to first-time buyers.

• 🗓️ Leading Your Business: Developing the CEO Mindset — Thu, Sept 17 · 10 AM–1 PM (A-B Tech Small Business Center, Enka) — Three hours on executive-level decision making, capped at 10 seats. Free.

• 🗓️ Entrepreneurs Assistance Program: LLC & PLLC Formations — Thu, Sept 17 · 6–7 PM (A-B Tech Enka, Candler) — Free pro bono legal clinic from the NC Bar Foundation on LLC and PLLC setup, in person or virtual.

• 🗓️ SCORE: Basics of Bookkeeping — Sat, Sept 19 · 9 AM–12 PM (A-B Tech Small Business Center, Enka) — SCORE mentors walk through accounting, bookkeeping, taxes and entity types. Free.

• 🗓️ Teach Your Craft: Grow Your Business — Sat, Sept 19 · 10 AM–1 PM (A-B Tech Small Business Center, Enka) — Turning a skill you already have into classes, workshops and a second revenue line. Free.

Hosting something cool?

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

💡 Local Business Spotlight

Kevin forages the way most of us avoid poison ivy: on purpose, for miles, with no promise anything comes of it. Figured that deserved a spotlight.

If you run a local business and want to be featured, reply to this email. I'm building the list.

He Hikes Miles Through Poison Ivy and Ground Bees for a Handful of Mushrooms

Foraging for Kevin Krzyzaniak means hiking, sometimes for miles, through briar patches and past ground bee nests and poison ivy. Some days he comes home with nothing. That's the part of Blue Ridge Chaga Connection nobody sees at the farmers market table, where he's usually the one walking a customer through what a mushroom does before they buy it, or helping someone ID a find from a photo on their phone.

Krzyzaniak moved to Asheville 18 years ago and got pulled straight into the mountains, drawn first to the sheer variety of mushrooms he found in the woods: the colors, the different looks, the question of which ones he could eat. He calls himself "a sponge for knowledge" from those early years, picking up whatever he could from local experts and books. Joe Hollis, who ran Mountain Gardens in Burnsville until his death in 2023, became a mentor. Krzyzaniak spent weekends there on work trade, building fences and planting seedlings in exchange for lessons on tinctures and plant and fungi formulations. He started selling mushrooms on the side in 2011 and turned it into Blue Ridge Chaga Connection in 2019, foraging wild instead of buying cultivated stock because wild mushrooms carry more medicinal properties from growing in their own environment.

What he's proudest of is teaching. His father was a teacher, and Krzyzaniak says adults become kids again once they're out in the woods with him, seeing how much of what's around them is edible or medicinal. It doesn't show up in his bank account the way the work deserves: along with the daily foraging, he runs his own books, social media, website, product-making, and mushroom tours, with a partner who's spent the past year helping formulate new products. "Doing the work I do as a small business doesn't pay great," he says. "I make enough to pay my bills and hardly anything left over." He keeps at it anyway, for the same reason he started: "When I was first learning I really looked up to the teachers and leaders in the natural spaces," he says. "Now I'm one of them."

Day in the Life

1. Favorite coffee or breakfast spot? Sunny Point Café for breakfast, Dobra Tea instead of coffee.

2. Fitness routine? Hiking the Blue Ridge Parkway daily, which usually turns into a mushroom hunt, plus 2-3 day backpacking trips with his partner. He lifts occasionally at the YMCA, though he says he's there more for the sauna and hot tub.

3. First-time visitor to WNC? Craggy Gardens, Black Balsam, and the swimming holes in Brevard; a beer at Whaley Farm Brewery in Old Fort, run by friends who brew with mushrooms he forages; and a walk through the RAD for the art studios and graffiti.

4. Favorite place to shop local? Wilderness Muse in Fairview, an old car wash turned into a shop for local makers, plus Black Mountain Variety, French Broad Food Co-op, and farmers markets first.

Want to work with them? blueridgechagaconnection.com, or find Kevin on Instagram at @blueridgechagaconnection.

💡 Marketing Quickies

This week is the one-year follow-up, the part of the system that keeps talking to a customer after the invoice clears. Contractors and professional service businesses both tend to stop the day the job closes.

Book the next touch before you leave. The day a job wraps, put a date on the next contact and write the message while the details are still in your head. Ninety days out: "Hey, it's been about three months since we redid the deck. Anything settling or sticking I should come look at?" A calendar entry with the message already written is a follow-up that actually goes out.

Write one seasonal message and send it to the whole year. Pick the moment your work resurfaces and write for it once. Roofers and gutter crews send a pre-winter check in October. Accountants and attorneys send a Q4 deadline note the same month. Same message, scheduled by date, going to everyone whose job closed in the last twelve months.

Ask for the referral at ninety days. At three months the job is fresh enough that they still remember you cleaned up after yourself. Text them: "Know anyone else who needs [X]? Send them my number and I'll take care of them." Send it and leave it alone.

Running all three by hand for a year is where most people give up around month four. That's the piece we automate in what we call the Show Up and Follow Up System, so the messages fire on schedule while you're on a job.

🎉 Fun Stuff Around AVL

• 🎉 PGA TOUR: Biltmore Championship Asheville — Fri–Sun, Sept 18–20 (The Cliffs at Walnut Cove) — The Tour's first Asheville stop since 1942, on the Jack Nicklaus course.

• 🎉 Carolina EGGfest — Sat, Sept 19 · 11 AM–3 PM (HomeTrust Park) — Grill teams cook on Big Green Eggs in the outfield and you eat your way through it until the food runs out.

• 🎉 ASAP's 2026 Farm Tour — Sat–Sun, Sept 19–20 · 12–5 PM (18 farms across WNC) — $35 a carload gets everyone in the vehicle onto every farm on the list, both days.

• 🎉 Art in Autumn — Sat, Sept 19 · 10 AM–6 PM (Main Street, Weaverville) — Nineteenth year of this one: 100-plus juried artists, live music, free to walk and free to park.

• 🎉 THE MOTH Presents: Asheville StorySLAM — "Nine to Five" — Thu, Sept 17 · 7:30 PM (The Grey Eagle) — Open-mic storytelling, five minutes a person, all of it about being on the clock.

• 🎉 Citranova Space Rodeo — Fri, Sept 18 · 6–11 PM (The Meadow at Highland Brewing) — Highland launches its new Citranova IPA with a mechanical bull, Hearts Gone South at 7, DJ Teathyme at 9, and a space cowboy dress code. (I'll be there. Boots and shimmer, apparently.)

🎧 Bands on the Horizon

• Ben Howard — Wed, Sept 16 · 8 PM @ The Orange Peel

• The Wellermen — Wed, Sept 16 · 8 PM @ Asheville Music Hall

• Matt Smith's Well-Crafted Music Series w/ The Carpenter Ants — Wed, Sept 16 · 6 PM @ Highland Brewing Meadow

• Golden Folk Sessions — Wed, Sept 16 · 7 PM @ The Grey Eagle

• LCD Soundsystem — Thu, Sept 17 · 7 PM @ Hellbender

• Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals — Thu, Sept 17 · 8 PM @ The Orange Peel

• El Ten Eleven — Thu, Sept 17 · 8 PM @ Asheville Music Hall

• Elizabeth and the Workin' Men — Thu, Sept 17 · 7 PM @ Highland Brewing Meadow

• Mastodon w/ Deafheaven, Alcest — Fri, Sept 18 · 7 PM @ Asheville Yards

• The Milk Carton Kids w/ Paper Wings — Fri, Sept 18 · 8 PM @ The Orange Peel

• Goodnight, Texas — Fri, Sept 18 · 9 PM @ Asheville Music Hall

• nate sib — Fri, Sept 18 · 8 PM @ The Grey Eagle

• Sean Hayes — Sat, Sept 19 · 8 PM @ The Grey Eagle

• We Have Ignition (free patio show) — Sat, Sept 19 · 2 PM @ The Grey Eagle

• Cumbia vs Norteña — Sat, Sept 19 · 9 PM @ Asheville Music Hall

• Jackson Slater & The Revelators — Sun, Sept 20 · 5:30 PM @ The Grey Eagle Patio

• The War On Drugs — Mon, Sept 21 · 7 PM @ Asheville Yards

• GoldFord — Mon, Sept 21 · 8 PM @ The Orange Peel

• Deltron 3030 — Tue, Sept 22 · 8 PM @ The Orange Peel

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