Carlos Phillips, President & CEO, Greenville Chamber

A Conversation with Carlos Phillips, President & CEO, Greenville Chamber

For more than a century, the Greenville Chamber has been at the center of Greenville’s vision for the future. Founded in 1889, the Chamber has fostered new ideas and new organizations, and it has been practical in its search for answers to current problems and farsighted in its plans for the future.

Major projects of the Chamber in the early 1900s included bringing the American Cigar Factory to Greenville to diversify the city’s cotton-centered economy and encouraging the development of the Municipal League, which worked for beautification and sanitation.

The Chamber and its membership also worked to build Greenville’s first YMCA; were given credit for helping merchants avoid bankruptcy and business failure during the depression of 1907; assisted in the development of a beautification plan for the city; published an illustrated guide to Greenville in 1911; and, organized the city’s first credit report bureau.

So far in the 21st century, the Chamber has been a major supporter of the establishment of the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville, as well as Southwest Airlines’ entry to the market.

The Chamber also created NEXT, a program designed to attract and grow high-impact, knowledge-based companies by developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem and connecting entrepreneurs to it. NEXT currently supports many knowledge-based companies throughout Upstate South Carolina.

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