The GSA Technology Council and Greenville Tech’s Buck Mickel Center are proud to present a monthly series of meetings with some of Upstate South Carolina’s celebrated entrepreneurs. Meetings are the 4th Thursday of January through May 2007. Meetings are from 6 PM until 8 PM at the Buck Mickel Center.
This final event in the series features Joe Erwin, Peter Waldschmidt, and William Bradshaw.
To attend this event, please RSVP by calling 864- 250-8800.
About our speakers:
WILLIAM BRADSHAW
William Bradshaw was born in Dublin, GA., in 1950, the second of four children. His childhood was spent in Macon, and at the age of 19 he married Annette, his wife of 38 years in 1969.
During his last year at college he was approached by one of his instructors about interviewing for a position as Office Manager of a local Chevrolet dealership. He secured the position. As a result of that position William knew early on in his automotive career that he wanted to become an automobile dealer. When a small Oldsmobile-Cadillac dealership in Greer, SC, became available to purchase, William and Annette sold their home and along with his employer’s support, both morally and as a financial investor, he was able to purchase his first dealership in 1979.
That first dealership employed 15 people and total sales that first year were $9,408,967. Today Bradshaw Automotive Group has approximately 400 employees and total sales for 2006 exceeded $235,000,000.
Since 1979, William has purchased Buick, Chevrolet, Acura, Honda and Infiniti dealerships. He was also awarded Saturn franchises for Greenville and Spartanburg, SC, Asheville, NC and Athens, GA and the HUMMER franchise for the entire upstate SC area. He has most recently purchased a Pontiac and GMC franchise for the Greer, SC area.
William is the immediate Past-Chairman of N.A.D.A., a national organization made up of over 20,000 New Car Dealers, and he and his wife are very active in support and development of the Children’s Museum in Greenville. He is also a major sponsor of Greenville Children’s Hospital’s Upstate Safe Kids program and has found the time to become a leading advocate of child passenger safety initiatives. William recently hosted the largest child-seat inspection event in the history of the state as part of N.A.D.A.’S Child Passenger Safety Month.
William has won numerous awards, including South Carolina Dealer of the Year, Time Magazine Quality Dealer, Greenville Magazine’s Business Person of the year and member of the Greenville Tech Entrepreneurs Forum.
Peter Waldschmidt
Peter is an entrepreneur with a love for innovative technology. He co-founded TetraData Corporation in 1997, serving as its Chief Technology Officer. While at TetraData, he and his team designed an analytical software platform that enabled school administrators to gain insight into their strengths and weaknesses ( i.e. business intelligence for schools). During this period, he and his partners grew the company nationally becoming the market leader for educational analytics. In 2004 they raised venture capital to fund their continued growth and eventually sold the company to Follett Software Corporation in 2006.
Peter’s desire has always been to research innovative ideas and build businesses from the most promising ones. In February of 2007, Peter left TetraData to found Gnoso Inc., a technology incubator company that researches ideas and commercializes them. The first product is an innovative tool that helps software development teams maintain code quality by reporting metrics on the effectiveness of their automated tests. Several other projects are in the works.
While at TetraData, Peter served on the technical board of the Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA), a standards body that produces interoperability standards for software in the education industry. During this period, Peter co-chaired the SIFA Technical Board, the Data Warehousing Workgroup and the Web Services Task Force. He also authored the SIF Web Services Reporting specification, and the SIF Extended Query specification.
Before starting TetraData, Peter designed and built software for Geerdes International that modeled global commodity trade-flows. He also created motion control software for various robotics and factory automation projects at Carolina Motion Controls and worked on the control software for the 3D modeler built by BPM Technology.
Peter holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bob Jones University with a focus on Math and Computer Science. He has also partially completed an MBA from Clemson University. Peter’s hobbies include woodworking and high performance automobiles.
Joe Erwin
Entrepreneur Joe Erwin is the founder of Erwin-Penland Advertising, which represents national and regional clients including Verizon Wireless, Wachovia Bank, Michelin, Firehouse Subs and BMW. Founded in 1986 with one account and one employee, EP is now one of the largest marketing firms in the Southeast, with more than 140 employees and over $140 million in billings annually. The agency was named to Elliott Davis’ “Fastest Growing Companies” list in 2002, and in 2003, received the Greenville Chamber’s “Family Friendly Workplace” award. A graduate of Clemson University, Erwin began his career at Leslie Advertising in Greenville. He was soon recruited by an agency in New York, where he worked on the Corning Glass Works and Quincy’s Family Steakhouse accounts for several years before returning to Greenville with his wife Gretchen to open Erwin-Penland.
Erwin is an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner, was inducted into Greenville Tech’s Entrepreneurs Forum in 2000 and is a Member of the Clemson University Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable and the Board of the Upstate Alliance. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Greenville Chamber of Commerce, and was a member of Governor Jim Hodges’ Commission on Teacher Quality.
