The Grand Strand Is Open for Business.

• Position: Myrtle Beach Area, South Carolina

North Carolina businesses have gone south. Not in the numbers and graphs in company financial statements and annual reports. You'd have to check instead with travel agents and car-rental agencies to identify what pulls them down: the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina. The Grand Strand.

Each year, hundreds of North Carolina businesses and associations seek what they can't find as easily or get to as readily in their own state -- an area designed to lure people from their work-day lives with affordable accommodations and ample meeting space.

And so they go. Businessmen treat prospective clients to 36 holes on a signature golf course and a sundown supper of famed Lowcountry-style cuisine. They retreat to a condo at Pawleys Island for planning sessions with a cloistered few colleagues, sandwiching their toil between at least two healthy days on the links. They send struggling departments for brainstorming, trust and cooperation exercises. The employees return as a unified team with a single vision (after one final morning of parasailing over the beaches, of course). And they hold their largest trade shows and conventions at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center simply because they know their customers will be drawn there.

And why not? The Grand Strand is a perfect example of a happy marriage of business and pleasure. Where else can you find so many affordable places to stay, dine, work on your golf game, scream down a waterslide, dance at a nightclub, drive a mini-racecar, comb the beaches, enjoy world-class entertainment and hold a conference? You won't have to take a plane or even drive very far. Your chances for warmer weather and sunshine are excellent.

"This is not a new phenomenon," says Jean Ann Brakefield, vice president for the Myrtle Beach Area Convention Bureau. "For years, businesses from all over the Carolinas have known they can get here easily and that once they're here, they're going to find what they need to conduct their business and what they want to pursue for fun."

All-out fun has been the spirit of the Myrtle Beach area since its incorporation in 1938. Oceanfront hotels, amusement parks, large discount shopping centers and Calabash-style seafood restaurants were built along 60 miles of coastline.

Kaye Vines has learned not to underestimate her group's expectations of the fun members plan to have along the Grand Strand. As assistant to the vice president of Boone-based Tar Heel Corp., which owns 66 Wendy's franchise...