Last week, a couple of seemingly unrelated miracles unfolded in the city.

On Thursday night, Ric Elias, who as a kid sold 50-cent avocados along a Puerto Rico roadside, strolled onstage at the Westin ballroom to accept the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The moment was a culmination of sorts for the 44-year-old Elias, whose once-struggling direct marketing and sales company, Red Ventures, is one of the hottest local startups.

The following morning, the Airbus A320 whose passengers escaped tragedy in 2009 when its pilot heroically turned the Hudson River into a landing strip, was brought for posterity to Charlotte.

In the end, of course, we're all connected on some level. As it turns out, Elias was among the 155 people who boarded US Airways Flight 1549 on that fateful mid-January afternoon. He speaks powerfully about the life-changing effect of sitting quietly in 1-D and hearing the pilot intone: "Brace for impact."

No less critical, though, is the quiet impact of Elias' progressive ideas about work life and corporate culture - philosophies that have much to teach Charlotte's buttoned-down bank-bred business community. And most importantly, give rise to a new type of labor force driven by so-called STEM workers (proficient in science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Since Elias launched the company in 2000 along with Dan Feldstein (the two worked together at direct marketing giant Cendant), he's been on a crusade to liberate employees from clock-punching bureaucracies and an ethos of fear and caution into an atmosphere of risk-taking innovation. You might say he is trying to infuse a bit of Silicon Valley into the Queen City.

Visit Red Ventures' spanking new 90,000-square-foot headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C., (they call it "SoBa" for South of Ballantyne), and it's clear you've drifted far from Banktown. If the legions of 30-something employees buzzing around in T-shirts and jeans don't strike you as different, there's always the basketball court, running track, putting green. On Fridays, employees unwind in a big meeting where they drink beer and celebrate everything from new accounts to new babies. Ah, and the annual getaways; last year it was Aruba, the year before, Cancun.

"In order to attract the kind of talent we're looking for, we need to give people a great place to come to work every day," Elias says.

Yet despite all the trappings of a corporate Nirvana, Red Ventures' biggest obstacle is, as company executives politely say, human capital. Of late, we've heard lots about how the Carolinas' labor force must reinvent itself to reflect the shift from manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy.

Last month, for example, the N.C. Commission on Workforce Development urged bolstering the talent pipeline in its State of the Workforce report. "As firms begin to re-hire during the recovery, they are not likely to simply replace the workers they shed before the recession," the report concluded. "Instead, businesses are much more likely to seek more highly- skilled workers who can do very different jobs than workers did before the firm began transforming its business model and work process."

At least 42 percent of the new jobs being created in the state will require at minimum some post-secondary education, many in those STEM disciplines, according to the report.

Over the past three years, Red Ventures has grown an average of 50 percent annually, and projects 2011 will be no different. Yet at the moment, the 1,200-employee company (with offices in Miami and San Antonio) also has dozens of job openings on both the corporate and sales side, everything from Web developers, marketing analysts, to sales managers. And it's struggling to fill them.

Yes, good help is hard to find - especially when the task is stuff like refining a client's search engine optimization strategy.

To be fair, Red Ventures, data-driven and hyper-analytical, is notably selective in its recruiting. The company, which ambitiously bills itself as the "Google of the South," doesn't buy advertising and is known for its unorthodox interview process. Sample interview question: "So tell me, what's your favorite word?"

As Elias puts it: "We really look for great 'athletes,' people who know how to work well on a team, people who are driven to succeed and are self-motivated and more than anything - people with raw skills."

Moving forward, we can expect Red Ventures to be proactive about creating the workforce it will need. Last week, for example, the company brought in around 30 employees and interns, found through its new college recruiting initiative at such schools as Duke, UNC and Virginia Tech. The effort complements the company's aggressive social media campaign. On Facebook, for example, Red Ventures is constantly updating its job listings and photos.

Next week, the company will announce a partnership with the Charlotte chapter of Teach for America, the national nonprofit that places young professionals into public school classrooms. Employees will volunteer to do everything from teaching the basics of online marketing to donating school supplies to assisting Teach for America's members who relocate to the area.

It may take awhile, but all those efforts could make Elias a major force in Charlotte down the road. Let's brace for impact.