Here are Streetwise's top Green Bay-area business stories of the year

GREEN BAY − This year the Green Bay Press-Gazette business team covered stories from every corner of northeastern Wisconsin.

Business reporters Alexandria Bursiek Kloehn and myself (Ariel Perez) conversed with experts in different sectors, small business owners as well as large ones, entrepreneurs and important personalities of our communities. We covered openings and closings of businesses, labor shortages and many other topics important to our community and readers.

There are dozens stories from which to pick, but to make sure it isn't too long of a list, we've selected some of our best work, guided not only by the amount of readers who interacted with them but also their relevance to the community. These stories helped businesses and people alike, touched on important subjects or even taught readers something they didn't know.

Bursiek Kloehn started the year as the Streetwise reporter for the Press-Gazette. That later changed, as she took over The Buzz at the Appleton Post-Crescent, and I stepped into her beat in Green Bay.

In one of her first stories of the year, Bursiek Kloehn was kind enough to speak about her own experience as a first-time homeowner in this piece: "We flooded our house a week after we bought it. The hurdles of home ownership from the perspective of a first-time home buyer." This story not only talked about the hurdles of searching for a home and buying one, but everything that comes with it.

Another important story she wrote was this sensitive piece about workers walking out of a mental health facility for children with special needs. Employees decided to leave Kismet Advocacy LLC after several months of experiencing issues with their paychecks. A follow-up report focused on Heather Schmid, a mother of an autistic child client of this company, showed the lack of special needs services in Brown County.

As a Streetwise reporter, Bursiek Kloehn most wide-read reporting, however, focused on the comings and goings of local businesses. This next piece tells the story of a couple that decided to bring a little of Texas to Green Bay with their store Generations Vaquero Shop. The couple focus on hand made and authentic products.

In another story of a couple bringing their culture to the area, she wrote about Maria and Everardo Ortiz opening Tequilas Mexican Bar and Restaurant in the Olde Main Street district. The space was previously a similar restaurant but the Ortizes gave a it twist.

Lastly, her story about chefs Tito Jackson and Marcus Krause, who worked at Wally's Spot for 20 years and four years respectively before the Green Bay staple closed in July to make way for a new Popeyes location, drew a lot of interest from the community.

As for myself, I spent most of the year as a regional business reporter writing about entrepreneurs, new and old businesses and their importance to our community.

I started my reporting career at the Green Bay Press-Gazette with a story about a hardworking family in Green Bay: The Maldonado. They moved to the city in the 1990s and started building their dream of owning a business 10 years later. The story shows how a family business came to be, and how it thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I've heard many times that Wisconsin is mainly known by the Green Bay Packers, farms and dairy products. But there's more to it than just that. I found that as I wrote about RC Mowers, a company that builds remote-control lawnmowers, and Roving Blue, a tech company that sells devices that make contaminated water drinkable in minutes, are living proof that there is a lot more happening in the state.

One story that for me was very revealing was one about the GreenLeaf Bank in the towns of Wrightstown and Green Leaf. What's the importance of community banks? How does a family-owned bank thrive and how does it help its clients? Those are some of the questions I sought to answer.

For this next story, I teamed up with Jessica Van Egeren, who's now a health and science enterprise reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and wrote a profile piece on Ace Champion, one of Green Bay's top chefs, who opened up to the Press-Gazette, allowing us to to discover who he really is: an entrepreneur.

This last story I'll highlight I wrote in early July and tells the story of "One of the last Jedis," Jim Walczyk, a cobbler who learned the trade from his father and carries on the tradition in Green Bay. Here I learned the challenges this industry faces, the uniqueness of the trade and what may save it in the future.

If you've got a tip for a story you'd like to see in the Press-Gazette in 2023 and beyond, I encourage you to reach out.

Ariel Perez is a business reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. You can reach him at APerez1@gannett.com or view his Twitter profile at @Ariel_Perez85.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Streetwise: Here are our top business stories of 2022