When it comes to economic development, some of the usual suspects include infrastructure, available workforce, business climate, etc. But now and then, a city gets a major boost or a homegrown success story out of an overlooked resource: fate.

This came up recently while listening to Highland Brewing CEO Leah Wong Ashburn talk about her family’s story and how she stepped into leading the longtime Asheville company.

Wong Ashburn visited Wilmington to speak at the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s annual Women’s Professional Development Luncheon. Her father, Oscar Wong, founded Highland Brewing in 1994 in the basement with a buddy.

Now children, circle round, and let me tell you a story about what craft beer was like in the late 1900s. I know it’s hard to believe, but there was a time when the grocery store didn’t include rows and rows of colorful beer can graphics from craft breweries across the country; IPAs didn’t come with thesaurus-level adjectives in their name; and, crazy enough, there weren’t these community meeting spaces called breweries as destinations to hang out with pints and atmosphere. I guess there were still bars, but they had fewer corn-hole boards and food trucks.

Wong built Asheville’s first craft brewery in the city since Prohibition and helped usher in a generation of other local breweries as the industry exploded nationally, earning Asheville the nickname Beer City USA. Today, from its 40-acre property in the mountains, Highland Brewing remains the largest independent, family-owned brewery native to the Southeast as larger, national names have moved into the area such as Sierra Nevada Brewing.

But how did it all start?

Wong was not from Asheville and did not work in the beer industry. The son of Chinese immigrants, he grew up in Jamaica and moved to the U.S. to go to the University of Notre Dame, after which he began a long career as an engineer.

After selling his engineering firm, he and his wife happened to want to move to the mountains and bought a house in Asheville in 1992. Always a social guy, Leah said, Oscar – who had been a home brewer in college – happened to connect with a local brewer and they started up in the rented basement space.

The rest unfolded from there.

The happenstance origins mixed in with years of hard work, including for Wong Ashburn, who took over as the company’s president in 2015 and CEO in 2018, as they navigated a boom of competitors, a major rebrand, COVID-era limitations and planning for the future.

Fate only gets you so far if you don’t follow up.

In our annual Spark Issue, there are plenty of examples of business happening in the Wilmington region as a result of this mix of happenstance and playing the long game. From the long, long-term investment of a new Cape Fear Memorial Bridge to the random bad roommates and business class projects that led young entrepreneurs to base their tech startups here, the next big thing is just waiting to happen.