Companies in Greenville, SC: the major employers, five public headquarters and 22,892 businesses

This page covers Greenville, South Carolina, and the four-county Greenville-Anderson-Greer metro (Greenville, Anderson, Pickens and Laurens counties). It's for job seekers, suppliers, companies looking at the Upstate and B2B sellers building a territory: the major employers first, then the factory economy behind them, the public companies headquartered here, the Census count of every business and the records for checking one. If you meant Greenville, North Carolina or Texas, the federal sources below work the same way for those places.

Greenville County's major employers

The Greenville Area Development Corporation (GADC), the county's economic development organization, publishes its major employers in employment ranges. Its current list:

The list is undated and gives ranges, so it shows the shape rather than exact counts. Health care and public employers top it, but the 1,001-to-2,500 tier is mostly engineering, manufacturing and back-office work: GE's turbine operation, Fluor's engineering offices, Magna's parts plant and Sealed Air's Cryovac division, plus call centers and corporate offices for Verizon, TD Bank and SYNNEX.

A manufacturing and engineering economy

Average pay is our calculation from County Business Patterns (CBP) payroll; the health care payroll carries the Census Bureau's moderate-noise flag. Manufacturing is the largest employer by sector, with plants averaging 64.3 employees; 133 of them have 100 or more. Transportation equipment makers (NAICS 336) have 47 establishments and 10,147 employees, 26 of them auto parts plants with 6,898. Engineering services firms employ 6,971 people at an average of $101,253, the region's engineering cluster in numbers. Administrative and support services, which includes staffing agencies, employs 32,811.

Public companies headquartered in Greenville

Five SEC-registered companies with more than $100 million of revenue give a principal executive office in the metro on the cover of their latest 10-K:

Revenue is as reported. United Community Banks reports total revenue ($1.06 billion) on its income statement, net interest revenue plus noninterest income; for Southern First it's net interest income ($104.95 million) plus noninterest income ($13.14 million). United Community, incorporated in Georgia, gives 200 East Camperdown Way, Greenville as its principal executive office. World Acceptance says 260 of its 2,907 employees work at its main office in Greenville; the rest are in its branches.

The region's biggest manufacturers aren't on the list because their parents are elsewhere or abroad: Michelin's North American headquarters is here, GE Power and Magna are parts of larger groups, and Sealed Air, owner of the Cryovac division, gives Charlotte as its head office in its 10-K.

How many businesses are in Greenville

In bands: 19,341 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 2,950 with 20 to 99 and 601 with 100 or more. The metro paid $20,560,059,000 in 2023, an average of $53,561 a year and 16.8 employees per establishment, and holds 0.27% of the 8,361,342 US establishments. Pickens County, home to Clemson, has the smallest workplaces (12.8 employees on average). CBP counts locations with paid employees rather than companies, and excludes the self-employed.

Checking a Greenville company

The state's entity and licensing sites didn't respond to our checks, so we haven't linked them; search for them by name. For a contractor, confirm both the entity's status and its license before signing.

Prospecting Greenville's plants

Greenville's factories are mostly midsize and run by plant management teams with real budgets for maintenance, safety and automation. The big names on the GADC list buy through corporate procurement, but the hundreds of suppliers around them decide locally.

Illustrative example. The company, prices and results are fictional; the plant counts are from the Census data above.

Reedy River Reliability (reedyreliability.example) installs wireless vibration sensors that warn of motor and gearbox failures.

• Manufacturing establishments in the metro with 100 or more employees: 82 + 31 + 10 + 10 = 133.
• It assumes 70% run enough rotating equipment to justify monitoring: about 93 prospects.
• A first deployment of 50 sensors at $3,000 a year each is $150,000 a plant; five plants would be $750,000.
• It targets the maintenance manager and the reliability engineer, and times outreach to the months before a plant's planned shutdown, when failures are most expensive.

Finding which of 133 plants have a reliability engineer, and which are owned by a group that already standardized on a monitoring vendor, is the slow part; Bebop researches each one and finds the people to contact.

Subject: The next unplanned motor failure at [Plant]

Hi [first name],

Most plants your size we talk to in the Upstate still find out a gearbox is failing when it stops, and the line waits for a part.

We put wireless vibration sensors on your critical motors and gearboxes and send your team a warning weeks ahead, with no wiring and no IT project. Could I show you the alerts from a plant near Greenville running similar equipment?

[Your name], Reedy River Reliability

Next step: read how Greenville's legal market is organized in law firms in Greenville.