Michael Mance: A Profile of Creative Energy

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Michael Mance has the mind of an artist, one in endless motion that approaches any project of situation with a creative eye.

Behind a calm exterior, churning out a strategy for his next project seems to always be hiding just below the surface, with a canvas as small as a sketch pad or as large as a multi-acre rolling piece of land.

Recently the community has shined a brighter light on his efforts as a businessman and community leader. Last year was a busy year for Mance, who was selected to serve on the Anderson Capital Projects Sales Tax Commission where he worked to identify and refine what efforts where most needed and where relating to Anderson County roads and bridges. The Andersonian was recognized by the Greenville Chamber of as owner of the Minority Business of the Year, and, with his father, Small Business of the Year.

The award was the culmination of a season that Mance describes, with a sly smile, as “like getting an M.B.A. for small businesses.”  The Greenville Chamber’s Minority Business Accelerator, the program that preceded the honor, walked participants through the architecture of modern entrepreneurship: marketing, human resources, three‑year strategic planning, the unglamorous mechanics that stand behind a logo or a storefront.  For Mance, the coursework did something more intimate. It shifted his self‑conception from sole proprietor—a man with skills and a stack of projects—to what he calls, with a certain deliberate pride, a CEO of his own business.

At age 39, Mance can trace the line back to a classroom where he was not particularly interested in the lesson on the board.

“I was always the guy drawing in class, making music,” said Mance, confessing to a minor delinquency that turned out to be vocational.  Art, for him, was not a discreet hobby but a tendency, a way of moving through school and church and small‑town adolescence: sketching in the margins, composing beats, tinkering with images long before he knew what “multimedia” was supposed to mean.

College gave the habit a name. At Tri‑County Technical College, he studied media and television broadcasting, absorbing the grammar of cameras and scripts, the way sound and image could be marshaled into narrative.  Later, at ITT Tech, he earned a multimedia degree, formalizing the collages he had been making in notebooks into something that could be framed as a profession.  Then life intervened with one of its practical compromises: a job as a marketing director, where Mance learned, from the inside, how companies talk about themselves and what they are willing to pay for the right story.

When he left that industry, Mance Multimedia came into being almost by default, as if the company had been waiting for him to catch up to it.  The business offered him a way to braid the strands of his life—drawing, music, video, the marketer’s instinct for audience—into a single, billable product.  He began, as many freelancers do, with a set of modest claims: logos, graphic design, promotional materials for local businesses that needed a flyer or a brand and did not yet know how to ask for a “visual identity.”

There is a particular intimacy to doing creative work in a place that still remembers you as a child. Mance’s parents were among his first clients, hiring him to help with marketing and business development for the family landscaping company.  The assignment was filial and strategic: redesign the logo, modernize the messaging, think about how a business that had grown out of one man’s labor might position itself for the next decade.  What began as a contract line item — “marketing, business development”—deepened, over time, into leadership. Mance now helps lead the landscaping company itself, applying the accelerator’s tools to balance payroll and projection, crews and contracts.

The Greenville Chamber’s accelerator program arrived at a moment when these roles—the designer behind a screen, the son walking job sites with his father—were converging.  Its curriculum forced a kind of reckoning: What, precisely, did he want these businesses to be in three years? In five?  The classes on strategy were not abstract exercises; they were invitations to rethink Mance Multimedia and the landscaping company as structures that could outlast the adrenaline of startup energy.  If he was going to move from artist‑for‑hire to executive, he would have to be as intentional about operations as he was about color palettes.

When the Chamber selected him as Minority Business of the Year, it was partly in recognition of this duality: the creative who had learned to read a balance sheet, the family firm that had embraced formal planning without losing the texture of its origin story.  The Small Business of the Year recognition, shared with his father’s company, underscored that business, in this corner of South Carolina, is rarely a solitary act.  It is something closer to a relay, a passing of responsibility from parent to child, from one generation’s hustle to the next’s attempt at structure.

Mance speaks about these developments without jargon that often clutters business profiles.  There is no talk of “synergy,” no recitation of quarterly metrics. Instead, he returns to more grounded images: a young man drawing in class, a designer tweaking a logo into the late hours, a son sitting at the kitchen table explaining to his parents why the company needs a three‑year strategy.  In his account, the accelerator was less a prestige credential than a mirror, reflecting back the seriousness of work he had been doing in fragments for years.

To watch him now is to see the quiet integration. The same eye that once sketched in the margins now decides how a truck should be wrapped, how a website should greet a visitor, how a small business announces itself to a world saturated with images.  The same discipline that carried him through late‑night degree programs is applied to budgeting, hiring, and the often-tedious labor of compliance.  In an era when entrepreneurship is often framed as a personality trait, Mance presents it as a series of learned skills layered over a bedrock of instinct.

There is, in his story, an argument about what business education can look like for people who did not grow up imagining themselves in boardrooms. A chamber‑run accelerator becomes, for Mance, a bridge between the informal economies of talent and family obligation and the formal economies of strategy and scale.  It offers language for what he has always done, and tools to do it with less improvisation and more intention.

The awards themselves—Minority Business of the Year, Small Business of the Year—are both recognition and responsibility.  In the community that has been home all of his life, such titles invite scrutiny as well as celebration; they mark their recipients as examples.  For Mance, that seems less like a burden than an extension of what he has already been doing: taking the raw material of his own life—art, family, work—and arranging it into a form that might, if he is careful, be valuable and useful to others.