Four North Carolina Legends, One Enduring Idea

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In 1989, Financial World magazine surveyed corporate America and crowned its “CEO of the Decade.” The honor did not go to a Wall Street financier or a Silicon Valley pioneer. It went to a soft-spoken Charlotte engineer named Bill Lee, the chairman of Duke Power.

Lee had joined Duke Power as a junior engineer in 1955 and spent the next four decades building some of the lowest-cost, highest-performing nuclear plants in the world. After Three Mile Island, the industry turned to him to lead the creation of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. After Chernobyl, he became the first president of the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Today his name is on the engineering college at UNC Charlotte and on the stretch of Interstate 77 running north out of his hometown.

But six years before that magazine cover, in 1983, Lee took on a quieter project, one that never made national headlines. He joined three fellow North Carolina executives, each a giant in his own right: Roger Gant of Glen Raven Mills, David Stedman of Stedman Corporation, and Paul Broyhill of Broyhill Furniture Industries.

Consider what those four names meant in 1983. If you lived in North Carolina, these men’s companies kept your lights on, wove the awning over your porch, made the shirts in your dresser, and built the furniture in your living room.

Gant, an Army veteran of World War II and a grandson of Glen Raven’s founder, led the Alamance County textile maker through its boldest bet. When competitors saw a dying awning business, he saw the potential of a new solution-dyed acrylic fiber, struck the deal with Monsanto, and gave the world Sunbrella. Glen Raven remains family-led today and sells performance fabrics in more than 120 countries. The Gant name will be familiar to longtime Nexus readers; the family’s civic leadership in North Carolina continues to this day.

Stedman led his family’s Asheboro apparel company, which began making handkerchiefs in 1930 and sewed T-shirts for the U.S. Navy during the Second World War. A North Carolina Business Hall of Fame laureate, he was also the driving force behind the campaign that brought the North Carolina Zoo to Randolph County.

Broyhill took the reins of his father’s Lenoir furniture company when it employed about 1,000 people and grew it to nearly 7,500, with sales doubling on average every seven years. A relentless marketing innovator, he put Broyhill furniture on national television game shows and in homes across America, making Lenoir the Furniture Capital of the South along the way.

These four men did not need another board seat or another banquet. What they believed North Carolina’s business community needed, and lacked, was reliable intelligence. They ran their companies on hard data: load forecasts, fiber costs, freight rates, housing starts. Yet when it came to the political forces shaping the state’s economy, even the most sophisticated executives were navigating by rumor and reputation.

So in 1983 they founded the North Carolina Forum for Research and Economic Education, NCFREE, with a mission that reads as plainly today as it did then: to educate the business community and the public on issues affecting North Carolina’s economy through research, analysis, and the distribution of factual, nonpartisan information.

They were not building a lobbying shop. They were building something rarer and, in many ways, more valuable: a trusted, independent source of intelligence that business leaders could rely on regardless of which party held power in Raleigh.

As Gant told the Greensboro News & Record in 1984, the foundation is “an effort to supply information to our members about private enterprise issues, attitudes, and voting records.”

The idea caught on quickly. More than 40 companies and associations joined in the foundation’s first two years, among them Duke Power, Lowe’s, R.J. Reynolds, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, to name a few. Under John Davis, executive director from 1986 to 2008, NCFREE grew to more than 500 member companies and became a fixture in Raleigh.

Davis distilled the founders’ insight into a single sentence that still holds up. The foundation’s research found, as he later told the Charlotte Observer, that “the biggest predictor of an ally on business issues is occupation, not political party.”

In the years that followed, NCFREE made a deliberate and defining choice: it wound down its affiliated political action committee and consolidated its work within the nonprofit foundation its founders had also established, focusing exclusively on nonpartisan intelligence and research. It was a principled decision that reinforced the founders’ vision of an organization grounded in analytical credibility.

That credibility earned recognition from both sides of the aisle. Perhaps no endorsement captured it better than the one offered by former Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight, one of the most powerful Democratic legislators in North Carolina history, who called NCFREE “North Carolina’s best non-partisan information source on the General Assembly from the business perspective.”

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Consider how much has changed since those four men shook hands. North Carolina’s economy reinvented itself around banking, life sciences, technology, advanced manufacturing, and energy, and CNBC has now named it America’s top state for business three times in the last four years.

The founders’ idea proved more durable than any single industry: a strong business climate depends on business leaders who genuinely understand the environment shaping it.

That idea is now in the hands of a new generation. Over four decades and seven executive directors, NCFREE has evolved alongside North Carolina itself. The organization is in the midst of a deliberate rebuild. Intentional board engagement and strategic guidance from seasoned business leaders have helped drive remarkable growth in NCFREE’s revenue, membership, and overall participation over the past several years. The products NCFREE is now producing are some of the most sophisticated analytical tools to date, under the guidance of Executive Director Alex Baltzegar. 

The Legislative Business Ratings (LBR), NCFREE’s flagship product, evaluate state lawmakers’ votes on free enterprise legislation and survey business and trade association leaders with deep knowledge of the legislature. The LBRs factor in each lawmaker’s bill sponsorship record, producing a nonpartisan scorecard that tells business leaders who in Raleigh supports their priorities, and who does not. The ratings recognize lawmakers of both parties: in 2025, the most-improved legislators included Democratic Senators Dan Blue and Joyce Waddell, and Representatives Carla Cunningham and Ray Jeffers.

The Partisan District Scores provide a district-by-district analysis of the underlying partisan baseline for all 170 House and Senate districts, with the 2026 edition released earlier this month incorporating the most sophisticated methodology yet.

The Campaign Finance Dashboard tracks how industries, PACs, and candidates engage in North Carolina politics, giving members real-time visibility into the flow of money that shapes legislative outcomes.

The District Profiles, a prototype of which is already live, revive one of NCFREE’s most beloved traditions: the Almanac of North Carolina Politics, which ran nearly a thousand pages in some editions and was distributed to every NCFREE member. Today, the full online version is once again available to NCFREE members, with more enhancements to come.

Behind these tools sits a track record the founders would have appreciated. In 2024, NCFREE correctly positioned the eventual outcome of all 170 state legislative races.

But information is only part of it. In politics and government, relationships matter just as much. In November 2025, NCFREE hosted its annual Leadership Luncheon at the Angus Barn Pavilion in Raleigh, bringing together Governor Josh Stein, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, and House Speaker Destin Hall with hundreds of North Carolina business leaders. The next luncheon is already slated for November 19, 2026, and the work now turns toward Charlotte, Bill Lee’s hometown, where the next chapter begins this summer.

North Carolina remains one of the most competitive and closely watched political states in the country. With 170 legislative races on the ballot this fall and a U.S. Senate contest drawing national attention and resources, the decisions made in Raleigh over the next several years will shape the business environment for a long time to come. 

Understanding who holds power, how they got there, and what they believe is not a luxury for North Carolina’s business leaders. It is a necessity.

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The four founders are gone now. But drive north out of Charlotte, and you are on the Bill Lee Freeway. Take your grandchildren to the North Carolina Zoo, and you will pass the W. David Stedman Education Center. Sit under an awning or aboard a boat almost anywhere in the world, and odds are the fabric is Sunbrella, born of Roger Gant’s conviction. Walk the gardens Paul Broyhill gave to Lenoir.

Their names are written across this state. So is their idea. To learn more about the foundation they built, and the business leaders carrying it forward, visit ncfree.org.