MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WBTW) – The 50 workers that were left unemployed by the Greenwood Hall Center on Friday, December 15, received confirmation via email on Wednesday that they would not be getting their final paychecks due to a lack of leftover cash.
Gary Pudles, CEO of the call center outsourcing company Answernet, sent four documents to the former employees, one of them being an apology. In a phone call with News 13 on Thursday, Pudles explained that the workers “have a right to know what is going on.”“The company has no more employees and no cash to pay its payroll obligations. Unfortunately all of the assets were foreclosed on by the company’s lender and sold.”
One of the other documents sent to former employees was titled, “What happened at Greenwood Hall,” which provided a timeline of when CEO Gary Pudles first considered getting involved with the company before the center in Bryan, Texas closed. The other documents were for the remaining Greenwood Hall clients stemming out of the call center in Pheonix, which is now owned by Answernet.
In October, Horry County leaders agreed to allow Greenwood Hall an exception to be eligible for an incentive package, although the company only planned to invest $1.4 million into the county, and typically a company needs to invest at least $2.5 million or more.
News13 reached out to each member of the Horry County Council for a comment on why the council supported Greenwood Hall with a tax incentives exception. At the time of this posting, not one phone call has been returned.
The CEO for Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development Corporation, Josh Kay, said they had confidence in Greenwood Hall because of its new leadership with CEO Bill Bradfield, despite the financial red flags in the company’s recent history. He said the corporation doesn’t have a standard vetting process, and instead, the economic development corporation decides what companies to allow to come into this area on a circumstantial basis, considering the unique factors for each company.
“We walked through their past but also their future, looking at contracts, looking at what their projections were about reducing expenditures over a certain period of time and as long as those contracts stayed in place expenditures would go down and profitability would go up and so we felt very comfortable with where they were going,” Kay said.
SC Works helped to recruit 48 out of the nearly 60 employees with Greenwood Hall, and now they are working with them again to help find work. Kay said the corporation has also been referring other former employees to SC Works as well.
“Yeah, unfortunately, we have not been in contact with anybody from Greenwood Hall we haven’t been able to get a response, and so our main focus is on the former employees and make sure they have gainful employment, long-term employment,” Kay said.
Kay said although Greenwood Hall did not perform as hoped, the regional economic development center does not plan to alter its vetting process when working with companies to come to Horry County as each business is unique, so they are vetted differently.
