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SUMMER 2021

ALL HANDS ON DECK ORACLE ADDS URGENCY TO THE REGION’S IT WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT PUSH

The new wave COVID spurred entrepreneurship to an unprecedented level

Searching for that next thing John Ingram on COVID’s surge, NFT potential, and more

East Bank overhaul Oracle isn’t alone in remaking area north of Nissan

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30 FOR THE CYCLE

SUMMER 2021

How the pandemic affected broader economic patterns

TECHIE

YOU SHOULD KNOW CarSaver CEO brings online auto sales to mainstream

SAYING SORRY How Emma formulated a formative experience

EVER MORE MOVEMENT Supply chain pros talk advances, pandemic disruptions

10 ALL HANDS ON DECK Oracle adds urgency to region’s IT workforce development

14 REINVENTION VIA MANDATE Inside Ingram Content’s changes after the failed sale to Barnes & Noble

POWERING THE PLUMBING John Ingram talks COVID, unanswered questions for 2021

ENTREPRENEURS

21 GIG-A GROWTH Local landscaping entity is microcosm of gig economy

24 CRAFTING NEW PATHS COVID-impacted entrepreneur finds woodworking outlet

25 OPPORTUNIT Y COSTS Immigrant business starts outpaced national average in ’20

26 DOING IT WITH EASE Nashville scores well in ranking of cities’ business climates

27 FULLY PREPARED Franchising pros expect big rebound from last year’s shock

32 EAST BANK BUSTLE Oracle campus, other projects set for sites near stadium

33 THREE QUESTIONS Councilmember Sean Parker discusses Dickerson’s future LEADERS

34 PONDERING THE POSSIBLE Superspeedway exec talks NASCAR’S return to area

36 FOUNDATIONAL WORK Nashville SC is growing its youth academy, eyeing next steps

38 LIKE COMING HOME Brent Turner on his first CEO role in a familiar setting

28 PANDEMIC PIVOT Co-working companies adapt to COVID-caused changes

THE NEXT WAVE PAGE 20

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A new economic engine Brian Moyer is facing a luxury problem many other cities would love to have. Not long ago, the Greater Nashville Technology Council and his team set an ambitious goal to double Middle Tennessee’s tech sector employment to more than 90,000 by 2025. But on the heels of several big scores — with Oracle, the state’s biggest-ever ECD commitment at 8,500 jobs, leading the way (and somehow somewhat eclipsing Amazon’s downtown operations hub) — that goal may need to be ratcheted up. For this issue’s cover story, Cedric Dent Jr. dives into the various efforts that needed to make headway and feed the need for all that talent. The economic recovery is undeniably underway, although it is likely to be bumpy for a few more quarters. It’s telling, though, that tech looks to be one of the engines of this region’s rebound. One notable data point from the noisy spring of 2020 came from a survey conducted by the NTC: It showed that, two months into the pandemic, only one in seven tech firms had laid off people and that 30 percent of companies were still hiring. A year later, Amazon is still hiring steadily, local success stories such as Built and Xsolis are still booming and Oracle and NTT Data are on the way. The path upward is clear for tech in the Nashville area. Also set to contribute in a big — albeit far more diffuse — way are a new generation of business owners who were either spurred or forced by COVID to strike out on their own. On these pages, you’ll find a few glimpses into the world of Middle Tennessee entrepreneurship as we emerge from the pandemic. Expect many of the ventures now in their infancy to contribute heftily to our future job growth. We look forward to chronicling those entrepreneurs’ growth in coming months and years. If you’re reading this magazine and aren’t an online subscriber to the Post, we hope you’ll sign up and join us on the journey. We look forward to sharing the news with you and seeing you out and about soon. Geert De Lombaerde, Editor gdelombaerde@nashvillepost.com

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TECHIE

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Chad Collier CarSaver’s co-founder and CEO is bringing online auto sales to the mainstream BY MEGAN SELING

arSaver CEO Chad Collier laughs when asked about his first car. “My first car was a Nissan 200 SX,” he says. “I loved that car, but it was definitely a ‘first car.’ And that thing was fast! I got in an accident like teenagers usually do. I got hit on the side of the front end so my front end was pointed to the left. When I was going straight it looked like my car was turning. It took me a while before I could get enough money saved up to get that front end straightened up.” Collier also remembers his first car-buying experience — it was a different kind of wreck. He was working as a car salesman to pay his way through college at the time, but even insider knowledge couldn’t make the infamously long, tedious process any easier. “I negotiated with the dealership for several hours,” he says. “I spent most of the day on a Saturday. I really needed to be at work but I was at another dealership buying a car. Ultimately, I got turned down for the financing, so I wasted all day to find out I couldn’t buy it. I was young and didn’t have a lot of credit. That experience really bothered me.” Collier continued to work for and eventually own several car lots throughout the South, including a Ford dealership in Tennessee. Automotive News declared him one of the Innovative Dealers in 2008 after he began providing customers with iPods so that they could take no-pressure video tours of cars on the lot. Embracing technology even further, he and Sean Wolfington founded CarSaver in 2012. The company is currently the only car-buying platform to sell new, used and certified pre-owned vehicles with an end-toend online experience.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

ERIC ENGLAND

TECHIE

PREPARING ADULTS FOR CAREERS IN

‘We feel like there’ll be continued growth. Consumers buy everything online these days — your groceries, your clothes — and we don’t think cars will be any different.’

While e-commerce apps like Carvana and Vroom offer a similar online service, they currently offer only used vehicles. With CarSaver, Collier says, customers have a wider range of vehicles from which to choose, and partnerships with Walmart and Nissan’s Buy@Home platform have increased CarSaver’s reach. “Walmart reaches 95 percent of the U.S., [so] we see a pretty diverse customer base,” he says. “Certainly millennials are first to adopt this type of buying experience and technology, but we truly do see all ages. We also offer all brands. We’ve had customers buy new Bentleys from us, and we’ve had customers buy a $5,000 or $6,000 car.” Who’s getting a brand new Bentley delivered to her or his door? “We have to keep them anonymous,” Collier says with a chuckle, “but we have had several celebrities purchase vehicles from us. A lot in the music industry.” In 2019, Collier moved CarSaver’s headquarters from Miami to Franklin, though the company still has a presence in Florida. And last year the company saw a 360 percent increase in sales. It kicked off the New Year by announcing a partnership with iHeart. “We’re excited about that partnership,” he says. “iHeart is

the No. 1 audio company in the U.S. Their on-air talent is trusted. They’ve got Bobby Bones, Ryan Seacrest and Wayne D here in Nashville. There are others that I can’t name, but we have a number of new partnerships in our pipeline that we’ll be announcing.” Collier is also mum when it comes to CarSaver’s future financing plans, though he has publicly considered an initial public offering or a round of Series C funding. (The company raised $40 million combined in Series A and B rounds.) “We’re evaluating all of our options, whether that means doing another round of financing or entering the public markets,” says Collier. “It’s an interesting market, a frothy market right now,” he adds. “We’re constantly watching that and making sure we enter at the right time when we do enter the market.” “There are studies that say over 60 percent of consumers would prefer to buy their car online,” Collier adds when asked about the security of CarSaver’s future. “We feel like there’ll be continued growth. Consumers buy everything online these days — your groceries, your clothes — and we don’t think cars will be any different.”

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TECHIE

The power of saying sorry Clint Smith on how Emma turned a fiasco into a formative experience he team at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center this year launched the Circle Back podcast, which invites successful area executives to revisit their roots and their journeys to success. Among those taking part was Clint Smith, one of the founders of marketing email venture Emma, which now lives under the umbrella of global holding company (and downtown-based) CM Group. In this lightly edited excerpt, Smith details how, nearly two decades ago, a buggy software launch early in its life had Emma team members scrambling to do the right thing — and solidified a culture that would become a company cornerstone and a key differentiator in the battle for talent.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

We got to a point where, as we had sort of several hundred customers on essentially the alpha version of the platform, we had been scrambling to build the next version — what we considered the real product. And we were close. We were in this sort of quandary where the original product was dying. We had all these customers on it. The new product was a little bit unproven but seemed ready. So we felt like we had no choice but to wholesale move all the customers to the new product. And the new product didn’t work. When you’ve got several hundred customers who are relying on you to help them send their emails out… In some cases, their newsletters that they’re counting on, their sales pieces, they’re more like their lifeblood, right? And it suddenly doesn’t work and they can’t do that thing that they’re paying you to be able to do. You can imagine what kind of chaos that creates. Marcus Whitney was one of those working non-stop to get Emma back online. He calls it “a brutal experience, quite frankly,” to rewrite a system on the fly when it already had paying clients. The small team overhauled all the interfaces and the billing system — at a time when, Whitney points out, cloud computing and many other app development tools didn’t yet exist.

All we would do was pick up the phone when it rang and tell people how sorry we were and to give them the honest update as best we knew it and to tell them to please hang with us and offer them the month free — whatever we could do. And we responded to emails the same way and that’s all we did. And then the phone rang again and you do the same thing over and over again. Then we would go drink at the end of the day then we would come back the next morning and would go back that night and do the same thing all over again. So it was a bonding experience — not one you would wish on yourself, but it certainly was that.

CLINT SMITH

It was also a tremendous lesson in the power of brand relationship and also just human decency. We said the things that we rarely hear from other companies, even now: “I’m sorry, we screwed up.” We did the things that people ought to do for each other when you think of the person on the other end of the line not as a consumer but as a person. And it paid off. So much so that, at the end of these two weeks — and even when the software came back on, it was buggy — we lost two customers out of hundreds from that fiasco. Just two. And six months later, one of them came back to us. The other one had always been kind of a jerk so we didn’t care. When you live through things like that, everybody gets it. When we talk about taking care of people, that’s what we mean. And it matters even more in the worst of circumstances. So those were the experiences that really stuck with us, that got us all thinking even more from that point forward, “How can we go really out of our way, above and beyond to take extra care to people in our universe?” The launch “fiasco” led to the start of a program that let every employee give $250 annually to a nonprofit of their choice and to the start of the Emma 25 initiative, where the company for years picked 25 nonprofits that would get the company’s services free for life.

FOR MORE ON CIRCLE BACK, VISIT EC.CO/CIRCLE-BACK

There are more tech jobs in Nashville than people to ﬁll them. A tech sector that was already growing is being supercharged by an impressive list of big tech and tech-enabled companies choosing to make Nashville home. And because technology is essential to just about every organization today, the jobs requiring highly skilled tech talent aren't just in tech companies, but throughout our economy. We're doing a great job growing our own talent, but it's just not enough to meet the demand.

We need an infusion of tech talent. Now.

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Join others who have already invested and help bring top tech talent right here. Because attracting more tech into Nashville is good for all of us.

TECHIE

Ever more on the move Supply chain experts talk tech advances, pandemic disruptions BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

oth pandemic-fueled panic buying hiccups and the Suez Canal blockage early this year have shown consumers around the world that there is much more to the supply chains behind things we buy than meets the eye. The supply chain has perhaps never been more visible to more people than during the COVID-19 pandemic and the various upheavals have left those in the logistics world with some lessons. On these pages are nuggets from conversations about that with three area experts who are part of a local logistics industry that comprises the warehouses dotting Interstate 840 east of town as well as the in-house expertise at firms such as Dollar General and Tractor Supply and the downtown towers Amazon will soon fill with its 5,000-job Operations Center of Excellence. The insiders come at the industry from different vantage points but arrive at the same conclusions: The networks driving the global economy will continue to grow more intricate and tech will play an ever more crucial role in keeping the economy clicking.

HANNAH STOLZE got her start in the field in the U.S. Army, moving ordnance — “everything that goes boom” — from place to place. Now an experienced academic, she was recently appointed director of the Lipscomb University College of Business’ Center for Transformative Sales & Supply Chain Leadership.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Stolze was forced to cut short her Fulbright Scholarship in Indonesia when the virus was spreading early in 2020. But she says there’s at least one silver lining to the many economic problems COVID-19 has caused: More people now better understand the thing she has spent her career working on. “We want products on the shelf,” she says. “We don’t always think about where they came from.” Some of the pandemic’s shortages were hard to comprehend. Toilet paper demand, for instance, shouldn’t fluctuate all that much. And yet we bought it up in the confusing early weeks of COVID, fearing a shortage that we then helped cause. “Everyone was scrambling trying to have the right supply to meet demand without historical data to know what was going to happen,” Stolze says. “If you don’t know what demand is going to look like — because a pandemic is unprecedented — it’s really hard to do the supply chain strategy piece.” The chaos of COVID also taught us some logistical lessons that could prove useful as the economy emerges from this interruption. Stolze thinks that widespread adoption of block-

chain-enabled radio-frequency identification technology throughout the supply chain could have made life easier, both for handling consumer goods and distributing precious vaccines. The RFID technology, which is used at some levels of distribution but can be prohibitively expensive to deploy, would allow for real-time tracking of individual products. “What blockchain allows is, if you know where the contaminated bags of spinach came from you can track back and see where the contamination started, and instead of killing the entire spinach-producing industry you can shut down the lane that the contaminated spinach came through,” she says. Vaccine dose tracking has been in part reliant on barcode tracking, which leaves more room for human error than RFID. Blockchain-enabled RFID tracking of COVID vaccines, Stolze says, could have resulted in less wastage and greater trust in the system. “The biggest challenge looking to the future is who’s going to pay for it,” she says. “It’s not free for the pharmaceutical companies, it’s not free for the hospitals, it’s not free for doctors clinics or Walgreens to adopt all of the technology that’s needed.”

UNIVERSAL LOGIC

TECHIE

The organizations that have been able to adopt the technology on a large scale, Stolze says, are in large part vertically integrated and able to make the decision for each level of the supply chain more or less at once, rather than relying on other partners. To force adoption, she says, there are two options: legislation or a champion in the health care supply chain that would induce or force others to come along. Legislation, she says, would be a more inefficient route. Despite major hiccups in the global supply chain from the past year and a half, Stolze doesn’t foresee moves toward isolationism. “We now live in a global economy, where supply chain management is as central to the core value of a firm as marketing,” she says. “My prediction and my expectation is that we’re not going to unglobalize. The global economy can’t go away.” FAWAZ KHALIL is the president and CEO of ModusLink, a supply chain and logistics firm that had revenues of nearly $340 million in its last fiscal year and recently relocated its home office to Smyrna. According to him, adoption of data science and analytics has dramatically changed the way we move products. “This allows businesses to understand their costs to a much more granular level instantly,” he says. “It affords them the ability to make decisions at the time and point of impact — unlike in the past, when it would often be days or weeks before a customer knew of an issue or was able to respond to a changing market dynamic.” Like others in this sector and across the economy, Khalil points to a labor shortage as driving change. Automation is “continuing to penetrate our space” in response to a tight labor market and upward labor cost pressures, he says. “This automation is not just in the pick-and-pack operations but in loading and off-loading trailers and containers,” Khalil says. “As computing power and software sophistication continues to grow, more and more complex tasks can be completed by automated processes.” Artificial intelligence is helping automation become a more practical option for those working on the supply chain, according to the ModusLink chief. But it’s not just about how a robot picks up and puts down a package. Khalil says adoption of AI also opens up new possibilities in data mining that “will revolutionize our thinking and how we operate.” But it’s not likely to be a straight line toward progress. As with Stolze’s RFID example, high costs will limit adoption of new technologies and, he says,

ROI considerations can require larger-scale operations that are less adaptable. But the broader trend, Khalil says, is inexorable. “COVID-19 has highlighted the need to diversify one’s supply chain instead of always looking for just the lowest per-piece price cost,” Khalil says. “While this has been most evident in the PPE and health care-related supply chain, it also manifests itself in many other areas. While no change is permanent, we believe that the pressure forcing supply chains and logistic channels to be more nimble and flexible will continue to be a force going forward.” THE ENGINEERS at Nashville-based Universal Logic deploy robotics to automate manufacturing and distribution lines in ways that were difficult to imagine when the company was founded more than a decade ago as Universal Robotics. Basically, the company’s AI technology helps robots sense and react to changing environments. A human working on a distribution floor can easily adapt when an object comes down the line crooked or damaged but limited robotic technology would be left flailing. Universal Logic’s system helps bridge that gap. “As the ecosystem developed, it became easier for us to sell,” says CEO David Peters. “When we first came out of the gate, people were like, ‘Wow, that sounds like rocket science.’ And in essence, it kind of was. But not anymore. The industry expanded around us.” In the early days, when the company was still trying to convince clients that the technology would work, Peters’ team hit speed bumps as it — and its customers — learned more about the many situations the robots would encounter. Peters says “part of an early company’s success is simply its ability to survive its own mistakes” and the business soon found its feet. Though Universal’s technology is used in part to cut labor costs, Peters says workers shouldn’t be worried about robots taking everyone’s jobs. Instead, he says the technology is helping complete tasks that people don’t really want to do. “We have a profound labor shortage in the United States, particularly for these kinds of jobs, because they’re not really the kinds of jobs that people necessarily want to or can build a career on,” he says. “There’s a lot of anxiety about automation taking people’s jobs and hurting economic opportunity. We haven’t seen that. The reality is, in the world there’s more automation today than there has ever been at any time in human history, and more people working than ever before. The requirement for skills is important.”

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TECHIE

“THERE’S A BLOCK O F TA L E N T FA L L I N G THROUGH THE CRACKS,” S AY S K A R E N W I L L I A M S O F M I N T E C H A G E N C Y.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

ERIC ENGLAND

TECHIE

ALL HANDS ON DECK Oracle adds urgency to the region’s IT workforce development push BY CED RI C D E N T JR .

s a budding tech hub, Nashville has scored an enviable series of wins in recent years, headlined by two of the biggest of the names in business in Amazon and Oracle and supported by luminaries such as AllianceBernstein and NTT Data. Now comes the heavier lifting of making sure the job commitments can be met. The biggest prize — one already predicted to be a catalyst for other local scores — is Oracle, which will anchor the $1.2 billion River North development plan along the Cumberland River’s East Bank unanimously approved this spring by Metro Council with $175 million for public infrastructure. The deal commits the Silicon Valley software behemoth to 8,500 jobs, 2,500 of which are to come by the end of 2027 and have an average salary of $110,000. The four years after that are to bring another 6,000 to fill out the rest of Oracle’s 1.2 million square feet of office space at River North. Oracle officials confirmed their plans not long after Tokyo-based information technology firm NTT Data said it will bring 350 jobs to a digital

delivery center in the Capitol View development in the North Gulch. Their jobs will build on the arrivals of AB, EY, Amazon and others. According to Brian Moyer, president and CEO of the Greater Nashville Technology Council, the Oracle deal comes just two years after he and his team established “the B-HAG — big, hairy, audacious goal — to double the size of [Nashville’s] tech workforce by 2025. […] “Today, we’re beginning to question: […] Is that enough?” Moyer said during a virtual panel this spring. “We also knew — at least we had a feeling — that we just couldn’t create our own talent fast enough to meet the ever-growing demand.” Exhibit A of that demand is the recent growth in Middle Tennessee’s tech sector: A report published late last year said the industry had grown 36 percent to nearly 63,000 jobs since 2014. Author and Middle Tennessee State University professor Amy Harris projected — albeit before Oracle put a number on its plans, which had been in the works for a few years — that the number of local tech workers will grow 16 percent by 2024.

Building experience John Wark, founder and CEO of the Nashville Software School, maintains that the promising pipeline of tech talent demand is likely the tip of the iceberg. What he has sought to avoid with the software school is that mosr of the new and future IT jobs will be filled by people not from Nashville or even from Tennessee. Such a dynamic isn’t stunting Nashville’s rise as a regional tech hub — in fact, it is and has been for about a decade a key driver of that growth — but it does risk cutting off local residents from promising career paths. That idea was at the heart of an April virtual panel Wark hosted. “That’s been a theme for us since day one: home-growing talent,” Wark said to those assembled. “We still do believe that there’s still a huge amount of untapped potential in the adults here in Nashville already. They just need pathways and they need financial support and mentorship and just the knowledge that there’s going to be jobs at the end of the pipeline. I think we can fill a lot of our growing tech need.” Wark piggybacked on the point made by NSS alumna and UBS analyst Jessica Morrison, who gave her perspective of the institution’s role in the rapid growth of Nashville tech. “It’s so key to actually build up our individuals that live in Nashville, and of course there’s people from California, New York and things of that sort, but Nashville [is] a very close and tight-knit community,” Morrison said. “And Nashville Software School takes pride in actually building and giving adults in the community the tools needed to break into tech.” Morrison represents a cross-section of two of NSS’s target demographics: women and African Americans. The school’s financial support for its students comes in the form of deferred tuition. Enrollees pay a deposit but are not on the hook for the rest of their tuition until they have not just graduated but actually landed jobs in tech. At that point, tuition payments are arranged based on their new compensation levels. There’s no debating the Software School’s successes: It has graduated more than 1,450 people from 66 cohorts — another 275 students are part of 10 current cohorts — and in 2019 moved from Tech Hill Commons to a larger

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

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space on Plus Park Boulevard near Nashville International Airport. It is consistently meeting its goal of “providing motivated individuals with access to a career in software development.” But the region needs more than that. Karen Williams, founder and CEO of recruiting and staffing firm MinTech Agency, tempers expectations about Oracle being a destination for many locals. The company’s job commitments, she points out, are for six-figure salaries on average. Williams says that, by 2027, it is possible for a good number of people to matriculate through area vocational and higher-education programs to be in the mix. But those workers also will need to have gained significant job experience. “My concern is: As you see all the tech schools that are coming, they’re popping up, […] Are they going to be ready for these roles that are coming?” Williams says. “They’re saying the average job at Oracle is going to be $100,000. That means that’s not an entry-level job. That’s someone that has experience. So is that going to be someone who just went to Nashville Software School or went to Pivot Tech? Honestly, probably not.” Williams agrees that there are many untapped tech talents already present in the region. But for various reasons — including the dislocations of last year’s COVID shock — some have lost time working in their field of training, perhaps too much for them to get in line for the jobs that Oracle will bring. “I know a young lady who I was trying to help get a job. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science but she worked at Walmart because she couldn’t get on anywhere,” Williams says. “Now her degree is three or four years old […] Can she get back in the field? Does she have to go back to a bootcamp to get refreshed? So, there’s a block of talent that’s falling through the cracks.” Nashville companies, she says, have to “bend a little” and start letting more people get the experience they need not only for Oracle’s jobs but for many more that are almost certain to follow. Oracle’s presence will generate new momentum and a wealth of tech talent in Nashville — native and not — that will in turn draw other companies to the city. That’s how Middle Tennessee’s health care sector has grown into a roughly $50 billion powerhouse over the past half-century.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Keeping an eye on equity Moyer lauds NSS, which will celebrate its 10year anniversary in 2022, for its more than 90 percent retention rate and its comparably high rate of job placement. Traditional universities like Fisk and Belmont — which have both launched data science degree programs in the last three years — are averaging around 80 and 82 percent retention, respectively, as they seek to chip in to the talent pool. The Tech Council and the industry as a whole are counting on conventional and other nontraditional education programs to mature and become steady contributors as the Software School has. But Moyer and his team also are casting a national net as part of their threepronged strategy for growing Middle Tennessee’s tech workforce beyond 90,000 people by 2025. Earlier this year — after being delayed by COVID — they launched a recruitment campaign focused on Los Angeles and Silicon Valley as well as Boston, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. The pitch, as articulated on techintonashville.com, is simple: “We need an infusion of tech talent. Now.” Leaning on Nashville’s national ECD credibility — built on a business-friendly environment, a good quality of life and a lower cost of living than the target cities — the campaign is especially targeted at young workers, “many of whom are ready to invest in a home, which is next to impossible in the cities where tech talent is concentrated.” The pitch is likely to resonate; plenty of tech workers already are moving here. (See chart.) And new arrivals are likely to contribute to a cooking Middle Tennessee housing market: Glenn Kelman, CEO of brokerage firm Redfin, in late May pointed out that out-of-towners hunting for a home in Nashville are doing so with an average budget of $720,000, which is 50 percent higher than locals’. Building an office-and-residential campus on the East Bank near the historically black Haynes-Trinity community will exacerbate such discrepancies — which this spring led community advocacy groups Stand Up Nashville and the Equity Alliance to demonstrate against the proposed Oracle deal the day before the Industrial Development Board voted on the agreement.

‘There’s still a huge amount of untapped potential.’ JOHN WARK, NASHVILLE SOFTWARE SCHOOL

BRIAN MOYER, GREATER NASHVILLE TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL

“What Nashville needs is housing. […] What Nashville needs is jobs that pay a living wage,” Stand Up Nashville Executive Director Odessa Kelly said at the demonstration near River North. “Oracle has every means to pay at least $18 an hour and going up and starting the ladder from there. What we need is robust workforce development.” IDB member Winnie Forrester voted against sending the Oracle plan to Metro Council in part because of her concern about the potential for gentrification in the area. She asked whether the company had studied the possible impact the project might have on affordable housing; the IT giant conceded it had not. The deal between the city and Oracle eventually passed as presented and the company’s

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campus will rise at the heart of a large development that is anchoring a much broader reinvention of the East Bank. (See p. 32.) New York-based waterfront placemaking gurus Perkins Eastman — of Battery Park City renown — are leading a study that will include how to connect the East Bank to the nearby residents who both stand to lose from gentrification but also could gain from a big push to open up a tech sector notorious — nationally and locally — for being ethnically monolithic. The Nashville Software School is one of the most viable resources for preparing adults in minority communities for high-level tech jobs because of its tuition deferral model. At least half of its graduates are either African Americans, women or veterans. Still, there’s a strong case to be made that much more needs to be done to open doors for those groups. “I saw a class for third-grade to 12th-grade [students], and it was like $150 for the class for three days. Average Black or Latinx people in Nashville probably can’t afford $150 to send a kid to class for three days,” Williams says. “The area that Oracle is in […] The average salary there is under $50,000. I don’t know if that means the experience level is that, or are they just not getting the opportunities? And if the opportunity comes, then they’ll be able to get these $100,000 jobs? But I’m thinking if that’s the case, then wouldn’t they have gotten the job at AllianceBernstein? Wouldn’t they have gotten the job at Amazon?”

‘AV E R A G E B L A C K O R L AT I N X P E O P L E I N N A S H V I L L E P R O B A B LY CAN’T AFFORD $150 TO SEND A KID TO CLASS F O R T H R E E D AY S . ’ — KAREN WILLIAMS

MAGNETIC FORCE Middle Tennessee is proving to be a big winner in the battle for tech talent. Bloomberg this spring analyzed the movements of U.S. tech workers as indicated by LinkedIn data and found that big hubs such as San Francisco and Boston are — at least for now — losing more workers than they’re gaining. The numbers here show the top 10 cities with the largest net inflows of tech workers per 10,000 LinkedIn users. Austin

217

Nashville

155

Charlotte

146

Jacksonville

136

Denver

130

Tampa Bay

129

Seattle

114

Las Vegas

100

Dallas

100

Phoenix

Miami

Source: LinkedIn, Bloomberg

DEVELOPING NEW MEDICINES FOR THE FUTURE

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‘The whole mandate was reinvention’ Inside the decisions that reshaped Ingram Content Group after the FTC ended the company’s sale to Barnes & Noble 22 years ago n his recently published book, “The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books,” local writer Keel Hunt sketches out the history and evolution of what is today Ingram Content Group, a holding company for publishing services ventures that employs more than 4,000 people around the world. In this excerpt from the book, Hunt details the aftermath of the company’s attempted sale to Barnes & Noble, which was torpedoed by the Federal Trade Commission in the spring of 1999. It was time to reset and reinvent parts of the business, especially when it came to equipping itself for the digital age.

Reflecting on the collapse of the B&N deal, John Ingram says: “My way of dealing with the disappointment was to figure out, ‘Okay, what do we do next?’ I am much happier and more settled when I have a North Star and I’m working hard to aim myself and the organization in that general direction. I think part of our success has been that I have a bit of an innate sense about that, and then I combine it with a strong organization to help filter through the stuff I come up with that is wrong

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or bad. I’ve told people that I think our success has been based on the fact that I’m an entrepreneur inside the organization and I have a sense about things — and I think I’m usually directionally correct about it. Of course, I’m not always right. But hopefully I’m right more often than not.” At the start of the new millennium, Ingram had annual sales of over $1 billion and shipped 115 million product units a year. It was certainly not a business on the edge of collapse, or anything close to that. As John noted in one interview, “Ingram remains a strong company today with solid customer relationships and a loyal base of associates. For now, we plan to continue operating independently. We will continue to evaluate any opportunities that will help us better adapt to marketplace changes and strengthen services to our customers.”

All true. But Ingram still had some serious thinking to do about what its future should be in a rapidly changing book business. The shifts roiling the industry — including both consolidation at all levels of the publishing supply chain and the increasing efforts by companies to improve their own distribution capabilities and so reduce their reliance on Ingram — would require some fresh innovation from the company’s leaders. By January 2000, following three decades of steady growth and penetration into new market segments, Ingram Book Group’s total employment stood at 4,450 across all its companies and divisions. This work force was mostly deployed in eight major facilities — seven distribution centers plus a returns center — across the North American continent. But with the broader industry in a sustained peri-

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od of evolutionary change, Ingram was seeing its competitive landscape transformed. The failure of the B&N-Ingram deal sent ripples throughout the industry. Several market competitors announced adjusted plans in its wake. Baker & Taylor announced its intentions to double its own warehouse capacity. Amazon, anticipating the threat posed by a B&N-Ingram combination, had already decided to build warehouse capacity in Reno. Leaders at the ABA announced they would launch an online bookstore, called Book Sense, later in the year. And Barnes & Noble itself announced it would build a new distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee, and another in Reno, Nevada. It expected to have the facilities, each totaling approximately 350,000 square feet, online by the next summer. The company also announced a 50 percent expansion of its existing one-million-square-foot-capacity warehouse in New Jersey. [Ingram Book CEO Mike] Lovett explains: “We had wanted to keep B&N out of the distribution business. But B&N then made the strategic decision to build its own distribution center network. B&N had always been able to buy books directly from publishers for slightly less than they paid Ingram. Once they had their own distribution network, they could schedule deliveries to stores according to their own needs, and otherwise come close to duplicating the services that Ingram had been providing. The result was a large direct hit to our sales.” In response, Ingram executives began looking hard at the geographic deployment of its regional warehouses, their efficiencies and location, and how they were staffed. Their business would need to become more nimble, newly focused in its response to a changing landscape. The “new world order” of digital commerce plus changes in the physical book trade made necessary a new staffing and investment strategy. The notion of right-sizing now entered the company’s operating vocabulary. Reporting to John, Lovett presided over these changes as CEO. Lovett remembers the Ingram Industries board meeting in June 1999: “The question on the table was, ‘What are you going to do now?’ John and I said, ‘We are going to reinvent the Book Group.’ We had too many

distribution centers and too many people. As some strategy folks pointed out, it is very difficult to downsize a distribution business due to volume shortfalls, because cost-cutting involves closing distribution centers, which causes further volume losses and weakens the rest of the network. But we did in fact downsize and reorganize. And we made it work. I don’t think we ever lost money, but it was tight.” Out of these discussions emerged a new topography for Ingram. What had been eight major Ingram facilities in 1997 became only four by 2004. In addition to three existing distribution centers — in La Vergne, Tennessee; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Roseburg, Oregon — the new distribution topography included a brandnew distribution center in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, which incorporated the operations of a nearby returns center. With 665,000 square feet of floor space, this new center had its grand opening on June 27, 2002. Over the next decade, that 4,000-plus head count in 2000 would prove to have been a high-water mark for staffing across the Book Group. By 2010, employment across the Book Group would shrink as the company restructured itself in order to compete and remain profitable in this new environment. These adjustments were painful for many Ingram associates. The company provided severance assistance and also, in many cases, offers of new employment at other Ingram facilities across the United States, but of course such transfers were impractical for most of those whose jobs were eliminated. It would be another decade before Ingram’s total employment returned to its pre-2000 levels. Lovett understood the human effects of these changes on Ingram associates and their families, even as he and John and the rest of the executive team knew that this reorganizing of facilities was essential to do. “This exercise was not for the faint-hearted,” Lovett recalls. “As we began the terminations, I remember saying, ‘I hope we don’t have to get good at this.’ Later, I corrected myself. I ended up saying, ‘I’m glad we got really good at this.’ By which I mean that we found ways to treat everyone with as much dignity and respect as possible in difficult circumstances.”

As of mid-2020, the four-location array that emerged from the restructuring remains the heart of Ingram’s domestic infrastructure, together with the added capacity of a publisher distribution warehouse in Jackson, Tennessee, and extensive print-and-ship capacities at the four Lightning Source print-on-demand facilities. Despite the reductions in staff and physical locations, Ingram’s business footprint would still be national and its delivery times to retailers would remain impressive. To remain the leader in customer service in the book industry supply chain, Ingram had to continue to provide the most titles, in the fastest manner possible, and at a price that made the most economic sense to a retail bookseller. The needed efficiency improvements were made possible by both acquisitions and technological innovations. All this would bring, in turn, new types of service and a transformation of the enterprise for a new century. Jim Chandler would play an important role in the reinvention of Ingram. He’d grown up in southern California, where his father supervised the openings of Bank of America offices across the Golden State. After college, Jim Chandler’s early career was in book retailing — first with the Pickwick Bookshops in Encino, then with the B. Dalton chain (by then part of Len Riggio’s bookselling empire), later with the publisher Bantam Doubleday Dell, and then at HarperCollins. His first encounter with Ingram Book was during his stint at Pickwick, in the late 1970s, at an open house hosted by the Pasadena wholesaler Raymar after it was bought by Ingram in 1976. Ingram remained a presence in Chandler’s career for years after that: “For me, Ingram was always about a culture of service, going all the way back to the Raymar merger. Ingram was a lifesaver for me as a retailer. They then became even more of a lifesaver when I was in Minneapolis with B. Dalton and we ran some fairly aggressive advertising campaigns to try to counter the impact of Crown Book’s discounting. Carol McIlwain, who ran Ingram’s telephone sales operation in La Vergne, pulled my butt out of the fire many times, making sure that we were in stock on all the advertised titles in the various markets we served.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

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“Then, in New York with Len Riggio, we did a lot with Ingram, in terms of making certain that we could use justin-time delivery to help counteract the impact of trying to reduce inventory holdings at a time that we were pretty heavily leveraged. That was another real lifesaver in terms of being able to manage a business with less inventory than we’ve had previously.” In 1997, Chandler left HarperCollins and finally joined the company that had played such an outsized role in his career to that point. His initial assignment as part of the executive team at Ingram Book was to grow the international exporting business, which was doing about $30 million in annual sales at the time. “I ran international full time for about six months,” Chandler recalls. “We’d set an audacious goal of tripling the business in three years, and we beat it.” Chandler was then given a succession of larger assignments, including the dual role of president of Ingram Book and chief commercial officer. When the right-sizing of the distribution operations under Lovett was in full swing, Chandler became

Lovett’s right-hand man. This was a challenging time for Ingram, with the bookstore chains beginning to shrink; with Borders as well as B&N building their own distribution systems; and with online retailers like Amazon looking for ways to eliminate intermediaries. Chandler explains: “To get any of this shrinking business, you had to sharpen your pencils to the point of almost no profitability. We had to have a complete breadth of inventory, systems and service that were second to none, and distribution and transportation operations of extreme efficiency. But good customer service wasn’t enough. To be able to maintain our business, we needed to grow our international business, our library business, and any other areas that we could come up with. Lovett and I went through a tremendous exercise of simplifying the business, reducing the number of warehouses, enhancing transportation, and trying to grow the business anywhere we could. The whole mandate was reinvention — very solid, strategic reinvention of the business.” The Ingram team understood that merely shrinking their employee head count and eliminating distribution centers wouldn’t be enough to ensure a solid future for the company. New areas of growth were essential. So Lovett, Chandler and the rest of the team pushed hard on inventing new ways of serving Ingram’s customers — both the booksellers who represented the downstream half of the book industry supply chain and the publishers who represented the upstream.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Powering the plumbing of Ingram Content John Ingram talks about handling COVID’s surge, the potential of NFTs and questions still to answer in what’s left of 2021 on’t tell John Ingram or his team at Ingram Content Group that the book business is dying. The holding company for various distribution and publishing services ventures and nearly 5,000 people in 2020 had the best year in its half-century history. Here, in lightly edited excerpts from a conversation with the Post’s Geert De Lombaerde, Ingram details some of the drivers of that performance as well as what lies ahead for the business.

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John Ingram

As you look at the various parts of the business, what stands out to you as things where you’re paying extra attention these days? I’d like to believe I always keep one foot in today and the other always searching for that next thing to step up to. It’s interesting that you should ask this because I just had a conversation yesterday about NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and how those might play in the book business. A few weeks ago, I’m seeing Elon Musk talking about not just Bitcoin and making what I thought was a joke about how much energy consumption is used to make these tokens. I thought, “Come on, this is digital.” I didn’t realize all the computations that go into that. So that’s my way of saying how little I really understood about it on one level. But I think there’s a real role for that in books and almost any piece of content.

DANIEL MEIGS

In terms of the authentication? That and the fact that each piece is unique. Typically in the book market, a book — a physical book or even a digital book — is sold once, right? And then it goes into this whole other world of the used market where authors and publishers get no compensation. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way in a world of non-fungible tokens because each one is unique. I just point that out as something I’m interested in. There are all kinds of new models that will include selling content. New, different models of digital book clubs and ways to discover content. Every time I come across one of these, I’ll call them up and introduce myself and say, “Look, authors and publishers love talking about their content but don’t forget they equally love selling it. And we’re really well positioned to be so much of the plumbing and infrastructure on the back end of making that easy for you to do.”

Because the book business, for all the success Amazon and others have had, still exists. It didn’t get destroyed the way so many people predicted. I want to say the pandemic was really positive for book reading in general. I guess we were all trapped, more or less, and books — whether one prefers reading physically or digitally — were one way to escape. It was a moment for that and I think that has continued on. Certainly, our business has been strong into 2021 as well.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

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When the pandemic hit, was it a matter of figuring out where you needed to invest? Or was the scale the company needed already there and it was more about being open to whatever might come?

So thinking about this dynamic of things flaring up and having the capacity to react, how do you make longterm technology decisions and feel good about those being the right way to go for the next X number of years?

We do a number of different things but it was really fascinating. I think the country really shut down about March 13. Between March 13 and March 16, our core business — a lot of it is shipping books to people’s homes on behalf of retailers and publishers — went up 300 percent in three days. It was like a rocket shot. It didn’t stay at 300 percent but it stayed above what I would say are normally our busy-season levels, which is Thanksgiving through Christmas. And it has remained above that. It’s really an illustration of how we have the infrastructure, the capabilities and the scale to be able to step into the breach and get books to people along with the Postal Service, UPS and FedEx and other people. One of the other things people don’t really know is this: The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — not one of our country’s greatest moments by any means — last year triggered a huge desire for content around racism, social justice, equity, things like that. Well, the pandemic had created an absolute mess of the printing world, too, [which led people to] our ability to print on demand. In the month of June, 50 percent of the New York Times bestseller list for softcover nonfiction was basically sole-sourced from us — and it was all these types of books. We made over 400,000 of these titles in a three- or four-week period. The normal printers publishers might have wanted to use weren’t functioning and it was taking too long. That’s one of the things about the book business. People ask us, “Well, how often do these events like that happen?” And the truth of the matter is, “Every day.” And it’s somewhat self-serving for me to say but also for publishers: Every title that they can put into print on demand, that they can make available, they ought to do it. It’s as easy to activate as going to your computer and flipping a switch and then it’s available and people can get the content. Kobe Bryant’s helicopter goes down, this happens, that happens. It’s every day.

I’m less concerned about the technology because it’s always changing. The key thing is, “What is the service you want to provide? Why do you want to do it? What’s the value it adds — and is that sustainable?” We’ve changed out the technology in terms of the printers we use at Lightning Source three or four times, just wholesale from this manufacturer to that one. Honestly, I don’t really care. The point is: Does print on demand make sense? Is there a real business rationale for it and do consumers like it? The fact of the matter is that the books we make today are basically indistinguishable from the ones that publishers have more traditional printers make. So as long as you as a consumer get your content when you expect it, you don’t care where it comes from. Technology is a vehicle and you try to use whatever the best technology is. But the point is: What are you solving for and what is the pain point you’re trying to fix? I’m a big believer that we as humans like to be out of pain, whether it’s physical pain or the pain of something being complicated or time-consuming or not up to our expectations.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

If anything, we as consumers have become more demanding over the years. We’re more demanding and if you can solve for that, you can go figure out what technology works and take advantage of the opportunity. A few weeks ago, you announced you’re selling VitalSource Technologies, your educational publishing technology platform. Put that on the broader story arc of the company if you would. Is that not core to the business anymore or is that a market you can’t address as you want to? We bought VitalSource back in 2006 when it was very small, a $4 million company. And it was a technology company; they had cre-

‘Authors and publishers love talking about their content but don’t forget they equally love selling it.’

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ated the first all-digital curriculum for dental schools and they put all that content on IBM PCs and gave you unlocking codes. We got it when we were trying to make acquisitions in digital technologies that we thought could have broad applications for us. It really didn’t have broad applications for the rest of the business and it kind of has had its own life. It’s been very interesting and we’ve learned a lot about the higher education market. What ended up happening is that it really is a technology company, almost bleeding edge — which is almost farther out than the rest of our organization can deal with. Ever since we’ve had it, we’ve asked, “What do we do with this?” So I made a deal with my older brother that we’d grow it as fast as we can and keep it around break-even. That seemed to be a good deal. But COVID accelerated the heck out of it. It was already beginning to accelerate as more

and more institutions were adding digital curricula in a much more meaningful way and having it penetrate more deeply within universities. It really exploded in a positive way during COVID. You mentioned NFTs as among the things you’re watching. For the rest of 2021, what are some of the other questions you want the organization to answer? Well, there’s the very interesting question of, “What does the new normal look like? Where does this settle? Does this settle?” I don’t expect things to go back to how they were pre-pandemic but where is the new balance point? And what does that mean for investments we need to make and things we throttle up and throttle back? I think there will be a lot of that that occupies us for the balance of 2021.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that finding a willing workforce is another thing. I’m not meaning this in a political context and I won’t say it that way but when you’re talking about warehouse workers or manufacturing workers, if you pay them more to stay home than go to work, they’re going to stay home. Is that dynamic holding you back in some areas where you want to move more quickly? To a certain degree. I think the other thing — in kind of a perverse effect — is that it makes looking at automating things more attractive. If you don’t have a reliable, affordable workforce, you have to figure out how to substitute for that. If you want a $15, $17, $20 minimum wage, you’re going to create fewer of those jobs because businesses are going to look at that and say, “I now can afford to automate that.”

ENTREPRENEURS

THE NEXT WAVE DURING THE PANDEMIC, U.S. residents launched new businesses at a faster rate than in any other year on record. In Tennessee, about 55,000 new businesses were registered with the Secretary of State in 2020 and a record first quarter of 2021 pushed the annual pace to more than 62,500. By comparison, filings for new entities — see the chart here — had risen from about 35,000 to 45,000 from mid-2016 through late 2019. New entity filings grew an astounding 55 percent year over year in Q1, with domestic limited liability companies (+69 percent) leading the way. Some of these ventures have been born out of opportunity

as people chase lifelong dreams of starting their own businesses. But many more have launched out of necessity: As the economy suffered through shutdowns, job losses — Middle Tennessee’s economy is still about 20,000 jobs shy of its 2019 levels — and a gradual reopening, people had to seek out ways to differently monetize their skills. On the coming pages, we examine some of the drivers behind this new wave of entrepreneurship, look into the broader business environment and talk with some Nashvillians who, when faced with adversity, took matters into their own hands.

TENNESSEE NEW ENTITY FILINGS Source: Tennessee Business Filing Data and Bureau of Labor Statistics

2007

2008

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2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

ENTREPRENEURS

Gig-a growth A local landscaping intermediary is a microcosm of the booming gig economy BY KARA HARTNETT

he uncertainty of 2020 gave new meaning to platformenabled work for the labor market, providing income security and scheduling flexibility to a growing field of gig workers tossed about by economic volatility of the COVID-19 pandemic and a redefined workplace culture. In an online survey conducted last November by daVinci Payments, nearly 35 percent of respon-

dents identified as gig workers — defined as temporary or part-time work contracted by independent workers for short-term engagements. Of those people, 59 percent said they work, most often using mobile apps, to supplement their incomes while 42 percent said they enjoy the more flexible work schedule and 20 percent said they have a better work-life balance. The gig economy, daVinci says, grew by a third in 2020 to include 93 million people who earned a

combined $1.6 trillion from that work. As unemployment spiked last spring to, by some estimates, its highest level since The Great Depression, 14 percent of respondents said they turned to part-time business activities because they could not find a full-time job. In Tennessee, 400,000 jobs were lost in the spring of 2020, and the economy has only added 287,400 jobs back to payrolls since then, according to the Tennessee Secretary of State. Many of the new positions are tied to tech in relatively new ways, whether that’s for helping meet skyrocketing demand for food and grocery deliveries, dog sitting, ridesharing services or other e-commerce services.

65,000

55,000

45,000

35,000

25,000 ANNUALIZED INITIAL FILINGS

15,000

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

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G R E E N P A L’ S REVENUE GROWTH

$30 million (Projected)

GreenPal founders Zach Hendrix, Bryan Clayton and Gene Caballero

‘15

‘16

‘17

‘18

‘19

‘20

‘21

VENDOR GROWTH 12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

‘15

‘16

‘17

‘18

‘19

‘20

Source: GreenPal

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For those less affected by the wave of layoffs, the shift to working from home brought with it a new routine that, many found, included more time in the day. Digital platforms, new and established, enabled people to launch their own pandemic side hustles. Those revenue streams are set to grow: Nearly 80 percent of respondents to the daVinci survey said they were planning to do the same amount or more work this year. James Knight is the personification of many of these dynamics. In March of last year, Knight was working as a client services specialist with tech insurance and services giant Asurion when he converted to remote work along with the rest of the company. The shift changed his entire lifestyle, he said, and gave him more time to focus on his family and dedicate space for work he loves to do. Namely, lawn care. By July, Knight had launched his side business, Legacy Lawncare TN, through Nashville-based tech startup GreenPal, an all-service platform dubbed the “Uber of lawn care” by its creators. Founded by Bryan Clayton, Gene Caballero and Zach Hendrix in 2012, GreenPal markets a platform – via an app and a website — that connects independent vendors with homeowners seeking lawn and landscaping services. The service was launched in 2015 after a trip to Nash-

ville Software School by Hendrix, who used the experience to build out the software. Six years after launching, GreenPal is operating in 48 states and more than 250 cities and still growing. Its interface was developed to create a streamlined experience for customers without upfront registration and offers back-end support that helps Knight and other vendors manage their business. “Their app handles the scheduling, the financials and the communication. I can literally just open the app and run my business,” Knight says. “That’s what I’ve enjoyed most about the platform.” Knight says he also feels empowered by the control he has over his work, being able to pitch project bids in specific neighborhoods on his own schedule. Knight credits the cultural shift to remote work that came with mitigating COVID-19 that caused him to “accidentally” start his own company. He started April lockdowns as the guy who mowed his lawn twice a week, he said, and it grew from there. “Had the pandemic not happened, the complacency and the routine that had been present for the previous two years would have continued on. For me, the pandemic was such a blessing. It birthed this business, my relationship got stronger, and I was able to do things with my boys,” Knight says. “It

DANIEL MEIGS

ENTREPRENEURS

really, truly forced us to look at things differently and do things differently because that routine had been taken away […] It helped me reclaim my life.” Since launching his company through GreenPal, Knight has been able to leave his Asurion job and replace his income focusing solely on lawn care. With his workload, he dedicates three days a week to recurring lawn service jobs and two more to special landscaping projects. After departing Asurion in April, “I was much happier,” he said. “I was looking at Excel spreadsheets all day dying a slow death. And that’s no knock against Asurion; they are a great company and the job I was doing was very necessary [...] But with that said, I was handcuffed to a desk and I had to look out a window all day when I really wanted to be outside.” Knight is no rarity. In 2020, GreenPal signed up twice as many new vendors as the year before, adding more than 5,600 lawn care practitioners. Twenty percent of those new vendors, according to internal company data, joined due to loss of employment or need of supplemental income. “I think what has happened is you have a lot of these individuals that were working certain jobs and all of a sudden, ‘Hey, this job is gone. What can I do to provide for my family?’” Caballero said of that growth. “Our platform allows vendors to start bidding immediately once they pass the vetting process, so there’s not any sort of learning experience or anything like that. If you’ve mowed lawns before, then it’s kind of like riding a bike: You can go back and do what you need to do and that can be done fairly easily and quickly.” The growth in GreenPal’s vendor network was helped in part by the company’s expansion into 30 new markets. In all, revenue — the company collects a commission on jobs it facilitates — doubled to $20 million last year and that growth has legs: The company is on track to bring in $30 million in revenue this year. By mid-May, another 2,500-plus new vendors had come aboard across the United States, pushing GreenPal’s total to nearly 24,000, and Caballero and his partners were preparing to launch in Canada. There, they will undoubtedly pilot their newest seasonal offering: snow removal services.

The state is also a beneficiary of the e-commerce boom An evident side effect of the pandemic has been the record rate by which people are buying and selling goods online. Consumers spent more than $860 billion with online U.S. retailers last year. That was up 44 percent from 2019 as spending patterns changed rapidly during COVID and digital platforms simplified the shopping experience and empowered third-party vendors with more sales and marketing tools. Amazon marketplace sellers — which account for 50 percent of all sales on the online retail platform — shipped 3.4 billion products last year and averaged $160,000 in sales. Social selling on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat also took off, with many sites now offering product and sales services to anyone with a login. You can now even pay your favorite local journalist — cough, cough — on Twitter. With the tools of the trade so easily at the disposal of most people with internet access, technology has made it easier for people to make an extra buck from their hobbies and skill sets. Only time will tell how many of the record number of ventures launched in the past 15 months will survive long-term — historically, about 80 percent of new businesses in Tennessee are still operating a year later — but it’s clear the state is benefiting from the rise in e-commerce and will continue to do so. In March 2020, a bill drafted by the National Conference of State Legislatures and sponsored on Capitol Hill by Sen. Jack Johnson added a provision to state tax laws requiring marketplace facilitators — Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, Uber Eats, Postmates, etc. — that have more than $100,000 in sales in Tennessee to report and remit sales tax on behalf of their vendors. Reviewed

prior to any notion of a pandemic arriving, the bill was expected to bring the state $84 million in previously uncollected tax dollars in its first year. Since it was enacted last October, the state has received more than $160 million in sales tax from marketplace facilitators, about a third of which the state believes was already being collected. Even so, marketplace tax collections are set to exceed estimates by $131 million by the end of the year, according to the Department of Revenue. The growth has helped lift state tax revenues 14.7 percent so far this year, with Tennessee now on pace to collect an unplanned $1.3 billion surplus by the end of June. “The pandemic-led increase in online sales has led to a strong increase in the number of non-store retailers nationwide, as consumers have dramatically shifted toward online shopping, likely explaining part of the increase in new entity filings,” the state’s most recent quarterly business and economic indicator report said. “Strong sales tax collections have also been driven by recently implemented legislative changes requiring marketplace facilitators to collect sales tax on online transactions on their platforms.” — Kara Hartnett

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

ENTREPRENEURS

Crafting new paths His retail business hamstrung by COVID, an entrepreneur finds an outlet working with wood BY KARA HARTNETT

asha Darakhshanian’s daily schedule came out of the pandemic more flexible and efficient, allowing him to incorporate side hustles that stabilized his income and offset some of the lost revenue from the Boost Mobile stores he owns and operates. Darakhshanian, a 32-year-old engineer, is the COO of seven locations for the telecommunications franchise. When the shutdowns and the subsequent economic fallout that defined 2020 hit last spring, revenues at the stores dropped dramatically, jeopardizing his business and sending Darakhshanian into survival mode. He applied for PPP loans and other small business support to retain his team and ensure that his employees could continue making a living wage. He also transitioned back-end operations remotely, a move he later realized saved him time, opening up his days to develop other revenue streams. “Everything gets done faster, everyone is comfortable and everyone is healthy,” he says. “It seems to be working in many industries, so why would it be any different in ours, really?” Darakhshanian now spends about 20 percent of his time working for his Boost Mobile stores. The rest goes to building out his woodworking business, driving an Uber and dog-sitting for friends and family. His woodworking, which he started as a hobby in 2019, took off during the pandemic and he ended 2020 having built nearly 300 custom pieces.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Darakhshanian started making projects for relatives, but slowly grew his customer reach through Facebook Marketplace and his personal website, woodz.tech. He now spends upwards of 60 hours in the work space at his home, producing orders and brainstorming new designs. His first projects included wood clocks and flag designs that were perfectly scaled to official regalia. Now, Darakhshanian’s portfolio includes a slew of tables and custom furniture, an outdoor bar, light fixtures and a Nashville SC-themed foosball table. One of his latest creations, a balcony desk table that can be mounted over patio railings, has been a hit for outdoor at-home work spaces. Darakhshanian has received more than 40 orders for the design, making it one of his most in-demand pieces.

Each order has brought Darakhshanian closer to his goal of financial security, and has allowed him to stretch out his day to include income that cushions the current volatility of the telecommunications market. His time management has also fostered a work-life schedule that constantly keeps him in pursuit of the next opportunity. “Nothing is forever,” he says, so he wants to keep evolving to new markets and ventures to recoup some of the losses of the past year and support the people around him. “I have to worry about not just myself but also my family, my mother, my sister and also my employees and their families,” he says. “So if my cash flow finally runs out and the market isn’t back where it’s supposed to be before the pandemic, what do I do then?” Darakhshanian migrated to the United States 20 years ago after his Bahá’í family endured reli-

DANIEL MEIGS

ENTREPRENEURS

gious persecution in Iran that made it difficult to find and retain work. His dad was a construction and maintenance man but would often be denied contracts or go unpaid due to his faith. His mother, an educator, wasn’t allowed to teach in government-run schools, he says, and would tutor neighborhood children to bring in supplemental income. Darakhshanian began his informal engineering training while on the job with his father in Iran. During technical classes, he built toy cars and got into robotics before working as an apprentice for a family friend, fixing laundry machines and electric water heaters. After moving to the United States, he launched a series of tinkering businesses that supported him through high school and his mechatronics engineering degree at Middle Tennessee State University. He ran an ondemand phone repair service out of his car and later launched a hoverboard repair shop that helped him earn the money he used to open his first Boost Mobile store with a business partner. “I have always been an entrepreneur. Ever since I was young.” Darakhshanian describes his series of businesses as stair-steps to the next. The successful ones help lift him to new opportunities while the failures teach him hard lessons. He’s not sure where woodworking will take him long-term — open a shop or keep it a hobby? — but for now, he’s happy for the supplemental income to pay off debt and keep him on his feet through a difficult year. “Before the pandemic, I was on the right path to my own financial stability, and I think that is another motivator,” he says. “Because if the trend continues, and I’m finally financially fully stable, then I can use that money for something else. I’ll have a different adventure, and I’m always looking forward to that day.”

OPPORTUNIT Y SHARE OF NEW ENTREPRENEURS

More people than ever before started businesses out of need rather than opportunity in 2020.

85% 80% 75% 70%

1996

High opportunity costs Immigrant workers started businesses at double the national average in 2020

2008

2020

NEW ENTREPRENEURS BY NATIVIT Y

Immigrant

Native-born

0.6% 0.5% 0.4% 0.3%

A Kauffman Foundation report on early-stage entrepreneurship in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the creation of new businesses climbed as people’s opportunities — and other options — fell. The rate of entrepreneurs, calculated by the number of nonbusiness owners that start a business each month, rose across all demographic groups in 2020 to the highest rate on record (going back to 1996). Last year, an average of 380 out of every 100,000 U.S. adults launched their own ventures — a rate that was 26 percent higher than in 2019. Compare that to the so-called opportunity share of new entrepreneurs, the percentage of new business owners who launched companies out of opportunity rather than necessity: In 2020, that metric fell from an all-time high to an all-time low, plummeting 17.1 percentage points from 2019 — more than twice the 6.9 points it fell during the Great Recession of 2008. In short: 2020 was a year unlike any other when it came to

0.2%

1996

2008

2020

Source: Kauffman Foundation

new business owners turning to part- and full-time work because of severe economic insecurity and the loss of their jobs. “The sharp decrease in the opportunity share in 2020 reflects the massive economic losses during the pandemic,” the Kaufmann report says. “As non-essential businesses closed to stop the rapid spread of COVID-19 and consumers cut back on in-person consumption, the share of new business creation originating from opportunities fell precipitously.” Paralleling some of the social and health impacts of the pandemic, the economic repercussions also more acutely affected immigrants. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employed immigrants declined from 27.6 million to 21.9 million between February and April 2020. The number of foreign-born business owners also fell by 36 percent, compared to a 22 percent decline overall. Driving some of those numbers were job losses in sectors deemed “essential” at the start of the pandemic — agriculture, forestry, construction, manufacturing, transportation and hospitality, among others — but that experienced the highest unemployment rates during the labor market collapse last year. In addition, many immigrants were ineligible or faced restricted access to social safety net programs, depending on their legal status. That led immigrants to start their own businesses at double the rate of the national average. Smaller increases occurred among people who don’t have a high school degree, the Latinx population generally and among those aged 45 to 54. — Kara Hartnett

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

ENTREPRENEURS

Doing it with ease Nashville scores pretty well in ranking of cities’ business climates BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

hen Arizona State University released its latest “Doing Business North America” report, researchers found that it was relatively easy to do business in Nashville, which ranked 20th out of 130 North American cities based on the 111 data points compiled by ASU. That wasn’t much of a surprise to Nashville’s business cheerleaders — the people tasked with recruiting businesses to town and helping those already here thrive. “Nashville and Tennessee are regarded as very business-friendly,” says Ralph Schulz, president and CEO of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. “There’s no income tax here, the tax burden on businesses is relatively low compared to our benchmark cities and those mid-range cities are where the action is right now.” The Arizona State study ranked Nashville tops when it comes to resolving insolvencies and eighth in employing workers. It is in the top third of the pack on several other clusters of data but ranks just 67th when it comes to getting electricity. So while Nashville’s overall ranking is good — and ahead of or in line with most of its peer cities (see chart) — that doesn’t mean things couldn’t be easier for area entrepreneurs. Some fundamental city issues can be a drag on both new and old businesses (and residents), Schulz says. While the city is home to more than a dozen colleges and universities, a low unemployment rate in recent years, among other factors, has made finding talent more difficult. Though the city is more affordable than places like New York or San Francisco, Schulz says a lack of affordable housing contributed further to the workforce issues.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Schulz notes that companies and employees moving from larger cities (not to mention long-time residents) can find Nashville’s public transit system lacking, another drag on workforce availability. And, he notes, local entrepreneurs have historically had a relatively hard time securing access to capital, especially from local sources, although this is changing. While government can play a significant role in addressing those remaining hurdles to starting and maintaining businesses in Nashville, high taxes or regulatory burdens do not seem to inject much friction. Courtney Pogue has only been Nashville’s economic and community development director for a few months — he previously led economic development in Dallas — but he says his goal is to make sure all the parts of Nashville’s business ecosystem are working together to help small businesses, specifically those with 50 or fewer employees. That means bringing together higher education institutions, nonprofits, chambers of commerce and local, state and federal government agencies. And while attracting big-splash employers like Amazon and Oracle is a part of the job, Pogue also is focused on fostering a healthy and diverse pool of local small businesses. “To have a balanced platform for economic development, it really entails having a strong small business apparatus to support the city,” he says. “I think there’s been a shift over the past few years as far as the field of economic development to make sure we’re focusing on small business.” There’s no better time than now. More people are starting businesses than ever before since the start of the pandemic, the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office reports. A lot of that has come from out-of-work people being forced by COVID-19 shutdowns to pivot from previous employment or businesses, but it still represents an unprecedented growth in new small businesses in Tennessee. “The proof of the ease of doing business is in the tasting,” Schulz says. “We have high interest on relocations, high interest on expansions, the workforce is attracted to the quality of life, and the ease of business is largely tied to those activities. The ease of doing business in Nashville is being judged by the customers to be pretty good.”

IN THE MIX Music City compares favorably to most of its peers in a recent report on the ease of doing business. 1. Raleigh 2. Jackson, Mississippi 3. Tulsa 4. Sioux Falls 5. Charleston 6. Houston 7. San Antonio 8. Colorado Springs 9. Cincinnati 10. Cheyenne, Wyoming … 12. Atlanta 14. Denver 15. Orlando 18. Louisville 20. Nashville 22. Memphis 25. Columbus 26. St. Louis 32. Kansas City 38. Charlotte 39. Chicago 41. Dallas 42. Austin 46. Birmingham 62. Indianapolis 80. New York City 81. Los Angeles Source: Arizona State University 2020 “Doing Business North America” report

ENTREPRENEURS

Fully prepared

‘If history is any guide, franchising is going to boom.’ BRIT TANY DRISCOLL

Franchising pros expect a big rebound from 2020’s shock BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE

rittany Driscoll had to hit the pause button last year on her push to grow her Squeeze massage parlor concept around the country. But that didn’t mean she sat around and waited for the market to come back. Driscoll, the former marketing chief at Drybar, relocated to Nashville from Los Angeles to take the lead on growing Squeeze beyond its one California location. When the pandemic put those plans on hold, she and her team — which includes other Drybar alumni, including that company’s founders, Michael Landau and Alli Webb — dove back into the numbers, models and protocols to get everything just right for the economy’s return. “We found some savings and I now feel even more bullish about the opportunity to scale,” says Driscoll. “People are paying more attention today to taking care of themselves. We want to be fully prepared for franchisees.” Looking to bring an app-based experience to clients and a streamlined real estate process to franchisees, the Squeeze team is aiming to bring on board 30 franchisees by the end of next year and grow a national network of more than

GROWTH ENGINES The number of franchise establishments across the country is expected to grow 3.5 percent this year to more than 780,000, more than erasing 2020’s losses. Here are some large categories’ growth rate forecasts. Table/full-service restaurants

6.2% Quick-service restaurants

4.1% Real estate

3.5% Personal services

3.5% Commercial and residential services

3.4% Source: FRANdata

300 stores in the next three to five years. Driscoll says she has stayed in touch with some prospective franchisees throughout the pandemic but says conversations are heating up these days with a nice mix of experienced operators and people who have left corporate America — willingly and not — looking for their next careers. “If history is any guide, franchising is going to boom for that reason,” Driscoll says. The franchising industry’s main trade group agrees with Driscoll’s view of the market: In its annual economic outlook published in February, the International Franchise Association predicted that franchise businesses will add more than 760,000 jobs in 2021, recouping 81 percent of the positions it lost during the COVID shock of 2020. The franchising sector’s GDP, it predicted, will grow by 7 percent this year to more than $477 billion. Dan Aronoff, regional market president and franchise consultant at FranNet, is seeing the optimism to justify those forecasts — in part because he says Nashville will “go gangbusters” coming out of the 2020 downturn and people will want to be part of that growth. And because franchises straddle the line between true entrepreneurship and corporate life — and because the processes such as those Driscoll and her team have refined allow businesses to set up more quickly — they are more likely to be part of the rebound’s momentum. “It lets you mitigate risk and you can get to a place where you’re humming because the franchisor has figured out all the kinks,” Aronoff says. The pandemic was much better for some franchise concepts than for others. Not surprisingly, mobile businesses such as in-home senior care and those focused on home improvement work were hot. Conversely, concepts in the lodging, fitness and restaurant spaces suffered mightily. That’s changing now, too, says Aronoff. “How I position it is, if you’re still concerned about COVID but still interested in bricks and mortar, now is the time to research, sign an agreement and find your real estate,” he says.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

ENTREPRENEURS

Pandemic pivot Shared workspace companies see positives in COVIDcaused changes BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS

he COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all facets of office work — and dramatically in some respects. However, companies that offer shared workspace services have actually benefited from changes the coronavirus thrust upon office workers. The positive results might seem surprising on the surface. But when considered in detail, they actually make sense. Jon Pirtle, CEO of Nashville-based e|spaces, says business has remained very stable

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

during the pandemic. And for every member lost, a new member has emerged. “Podcasters are using our spaces more,” he says, for example. “We’re set up with the technology solutions they require and have ‘Zoom Rooms’ they can rent by the hour whenever they need them, as they might keep different schedules and need the offices at off times. The [podcasters] even have a built-in audience [at e|spaces] and other members really root for them to be successful. It’s been a fun thing to observe and it’s happened very organically.” Pirtle says that since the pandemic hit, he has observed established companies utilizing e|spaces for cost savings and for landing new clients. As an example, banks are starting to question their traditional sales model, he notes. “I was speaking to a member the other day and he said, ‘Why do we make a potential mortgage client come to us? We should go where the clients are,’” he says. “They can set up a small office exactly in the middle of 50 potential clients who walk by their office every day, and they get to know a new prospect pool. They save money in the process. It’s that

‘There is no longer a playbook for teams and employees. And the more flexible options companies provide, the better.’ ERROL WILLIAMS, WEWORK

ERIC ENGLAND

ENTREPRENEURS

WeWork’s East Nashville space

kind of use that we’re seeing more and more of from companies of all sizes.” Pirtle says one of the positive results of the pandemic is the diverse makeup of e|spaces’ clientele. People — entrepreneurs and those employed by larger organizations — who might never have looked for co-working space are seeking it now. “It’s creating a great energy in our spaces,” he explains. “It’s also emphasized that we live in a highly connected and collaborative world that has a different set of needs from [those needs of ] just a few years ago. We’re uniquely positioned to provide those solutions.” Errol Williams, WeWork’s Atlantic Territory vice president, says that due to the pandemic, flexibility will continue to be a key priority for every size business worldwide. “COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we work and has accelerated a new way of working that would otherwise have taken decades to unfold,” Williams says. “Flexibility has been pushed to the forefront as companies rethink their workplace strategies and real estate footprint.”

Williams predicts the conventional office model will survive. However, while companies re-evaluate and rethink their workplaces, WeWork is seeing the market — and specifically enterprise companies — realize the value of its “flexibility at scale.” “We’ll see this demand for flexibility continue post-pandemic as companies and employees do away with this idea of ‘presenteeism’ in the office in favor of providing the best location for employees to do their work,” he says. “There is no longer a playbook for teams and employees. And the more flexible options companies provide, the better.” Moving forward, and as business leaders continue to think about the future and adapting to their employees’ needs, Williams and WeWork foresee them providing access to clean, flexible workspace in the same way they provide perks and benefits like health care or free lunches. For this reason, WeWork has accelerated its plans to digitize its product, providing users with the ability to choose when, where and how they work, directly from their phones.

“The shift towards greater demand for flexibility and optionality will define the way we work moving forward, and WeWork’s On Demand and All Access products (both available in Nashville) are uniquely positioned to solve for this need long-term,” he says. Williams says WeWork is now speaking to various higher education institutions that are searching for space solutions in order to reopen schools and reimagine how they use spaces for learning. The company has seen “early successes” with Georgetown University, Northeastern University, the University of Arizona and New York University Shanghai, he says. In April, WeWork unveiled its Future of Workplace plans, which include de-densifying spaces, enhancing sanitization and increasing air circulation, and adding signage to promote health-focused behaviors like wearing masks and maintaining social distance. And with the pandemic’s impact easing, one thing cannot be denied, e|spaces’ Pirtle says: “There have been a lot of entrepreneurs born in the last year — through force or by choice.”

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

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For the cycle Just how did the pandemic affect broader economic patterns? BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

OVID-19 threw a wrench in most economic outlook predictions. Pretty much overnight, hundreds of thousands of Americans were suddenly out of work, and years of economic gains since the Great Recession evaporated. Now, more and more people are getting back to work, trillions of stimulus and relief dollars have been pumped into the economy and experts are beginning to reassess where we stand and what the next five to 10 years could look like. The Post spoke about this with three of those experts: restructuring veteran Steve Curnutte of Tortola Advisors, University of Tennessee Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research Associate Director Don Bruce and investment strategist David Waddell of Waddell & Associates. On the primary question of where we stand in the typical economic cycle, the answers were varied though generally positive. First of all, Bruce says, “There’s no such thing as a typical economic cycle.” And anyway, he adds, there’s no question that the pandemic “rewrote the book on economic cycles.” In the months before COVID-19 reached the United States, Waddell feared a looming minor recession, though obviously not one of the scale and abruptness ushered in by the pandemic. Now, though, he is optimistic.

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

“I wish people would dance,” he says. “I wish they’d be happy. The economy is at record highs, corporate earnings are at record highs, stock prices are at record highs and household net worth is at record highs. This is the time to be happy.” With that rosiness comes a fear for some: inflation. “Middle Tennessee was hot before the pandemic, and is likely to get hot again, even with strong headwinds,” Curnutte says. “The headwinds I worry about are inflation and the unintended consequences of tax policy changes.” Bruce and Waddell accept that there is some risk of inflation but neither is terribly concerned about the chances of it being extreme or that it will matter all that much in the long run. Bruce points to years of slow wage growth in tempering his fears of runaway inflation.

Waddell, meanwhile, looks to history, noting that the American economy has thrived in times when inflation was above the level some experts are now warning it could reach. “Inflation is something we’re not used to, but in the past, just because you had a little inflation didn’t mean the world fell apart,” he says. The trillions of government dollars invested into the economy — in the form of stimulus checks, the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and other forms of spending — had its desired effect, for the most part, the three experts agree. The spending put off a feared tidal wave of commercial bankruptcies and kept many businesses afloat. “There was disruption, certainly in the service industries, but it wasn’t the buffet that bankruptcy attorneys would look for in a traditional recession,” Waddell says.

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Sure, they say, the spending could have simply whitewashed underlying pre-COVID issues for some businesses that could still fail in the coming months and years but for the most part, the three agree, the spending helped healthy businesses survive forced shutdowns and months of slow times. “The surge of business bankruptcies that seemed imminent last spring never materialized,” Curnutte says. “In many cases, the ‘fix’ worked. Businesses and their banks will sort through normalization in the coming years. But in others, the ‘fix’ was more like a ‘cover-up’ for businesses or loans that were weak-kneed before the pandemic, or in the path of long existing economic disruption in the first place — think the corrosive trend on brick-and-mortar retail that pre-existed the pandemic, for example. I expect those businesses’ problems that were ‘covered up’ to soon be uncovered with some pain over the coming 18 months.” Another feared decimation — of commercial real estate as workers and companies realized they could function from home — does not appear to be materializing, at least according to Curnutte. “I don’t think there is a commercial real estate Armageddon — but rather a commercial real estate adaptation,” he says. “Easy to see that office usage will look different, but especially in Nashville, won’t collapse. Industrial spaces around town are in high demand. Retail vacancies will force a repurposing and retrofits.” As for what to expect moving forward, the three have a generally positive read on the economic situation but acknowledge that there are concerns to address. Many people are still jobless, for various reasons, and some businesses have closed forever, many in the hard-hit service industry. Bruce notes that many higher-income positions were unaffected other than a pivot to work-fromhome, while lower-income positions — disproportionately held by minority workers — took a more widespread hit. “It’s not a random sample of the population,” Bruce says. “It forced us to have some kind of national reckoning, and we’re still in the process of dealing with that.” Overall, though, Bruce says the economy should continue to improve. We’ve become more productive and efficient because

Loan demand lags

‘I wish people would dance. This is the time to be happy.’ DAVID WADDELL

COVID-19 in some cases forced us to be, he says, and that will only add fuel to the fire moving forward. “I don’t think of February 2020 as the peak for the American economy,” Bruce says. “I think we will eventually be back to that level in terms of GDP, in terms of employment, in terms of everything we care about in the macroeconomy. I don’t think that happens very soon but I think it’s certainly within the forecast horizon.” Still, he admits that predicting anything related to COVID-19 is difficult because there are few if any analogous situations with which to compare the present. “Your ability to forecast anything is entirely a function of having similar events in history and we just don’t for this, not with really good data,” Bruce says. “We’ve been working on this for months. As each month passes, we get tighter and tighter. At the aggregate level, things are looking really good right now.” All that optimism does not mean there aren’t people still out of work or that other economic problems don’t need addressing. But for now, Waddell urges people to relax. “If you’re going to be happy, do it now,” he says. “I’ll tell you when the recession is going to come and you should start to be unhappy, but that’s not now. People need to cut loose.”

When COVID-19 hit the U.S. economy, borrowers and lenders of all stripes were forced to sit down and come up with a combination of payment deferrals, extra collateral commitments, PPP stopgap loans and other accommodations to work through the shock of the pandemic’s effects. More than a year later, that cocktail of cooperation appears to have largely been a success. FirstBank parent FB Financial, for instance, had to charge off a mere 5 basis points of its loans in the first quarter and finished the period with just 0.77 percent of its assets classified as nonperforming. The books of many other banks also are about as clean as their stewards could have wished for a year ago. But while traditional bad-loan metrics aren’t flashing red, one could argue demand for future loans is flickering orange and suggesting relatively slower growth ahead. “If you just look at the loan demand in our footprint, it’s still very low,” Pinnacle Financial Partners CEO Terry Turner told analysts and investors in April. “We expect it’ll pick up later in the year but it’ll be muted by all the liquidity in the system.” Some of the sluggish demand — the FDIC says total U.S. bank lending fell 0.4 percent in Q1 — is because many organizations and individuals took advantage of the extra cash coming to them to pay down or altogether pay off their debts. At FirstBank, CEO Chris Holmes pointed out recently that a February that had him “a little concerned” about loan growth was followed by a “really strong” March and then a weaker April. The back end of the second quarter, he added, again looked to be stronger. In short, there doesn’t yet appear to be sustained momentum to turn a recovery into a true boom. But come fall — presumably a season featuring fully reopened schools, far more repopulated offices and properly revived leisure and hospitality companies — Turner, Holmes, their peers and the rest of us should have a decent idea if 2022 will produce that next leg of growth. — Geert De Lombaerde

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

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East Bank bustle

3 Cleveland

Dickerso

Oracle's campus isn't the only project remaking the area north of Nissan Stadium

1 2

Grace

Oracle's planned campus, which will connect to an extended Grace Street The remainder of the River North footprint controlled by Chicago-based Monroe Investment Partners Minneapolis-based Dominium plans to build a 255-unit apartment project at the corner of Dickerson Pike and Cleveland Street, which also will be extended into River North

TopGolf

Skyline Hospitality plans a two-hotel project as well as a possible mixed-use tower After being damaged by last year's tornado, CrossPoint Church is being rehabilitated

Atlanta-based Rangewater plans a 350-unit apartment building

Mental health services provider Park Center placed this 4.2-acre site on the market in early 2021

RMR Group of Boston wants to build about 3 million square feet worth of office, residential and hospitality buildings

4 5

Spring

on effers

7 S First

2 Cowan

or years, the conversation about redeveloping the East Bank of the Cumberland River focused almost exclusively on the PSC Metals scrapyard area south of Nissan Stadium. But all the momentum these days is further north and centered around Oracle's future office hub, which is expected to be home to 8,500 workers by 2031. Here's an overview — sure to grow much more significantly in the coming years — of some of the other real estate activity around River North.

8 9

A partnership that includes Rob Lowe of Cushman & Wakefield is converting the Stadium Inn into a boutique hotel and last year bought the adjoining site at 104 N. Second son

ert

ob sR

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Jam

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most intensity between Dickerson and the interstate. The most dense node is around the Trinity interchange. Planned intensity tapers off quickly on the east side and transitions down to established neighborhoods. Zoning will probably continue to be project-by-project. The density planned for the area will require infrastructure — road and greenway connections, etc. Making that infrastructure a reality means working with the community, individual property owners, developers and Metro departments on each project. We’ve got to get buy-in from stakeholders who see the benefits of improved infrastructure and higher density. How will the Cleveland Street extension impact the future growth? There are three major connectivity pieces associated with River North. The Grace Street (for pedestrians and cyclists) and Cleveland Street (for motorists) connectors [under the interstate and linking River North to] East Nashville and the pedestrian bridge [over the Cumberland River and connecting River North to] Germantown. I’m hopeful that the new pedestrian connections at Grace and across the river will help reduce car dependency for residents. Once you’ve got jobs, recreation, entertainment, grocery stores all in your neighborhood, it becomes much more practical to bike or walk around. With corresponding investments in transit, I’m hopeful that we’ll see new developments themselves be less car-oriented. One of the major roadblocks is the current configuration of Dickerson Road. Stringent sidewalk guidelines for new development have led to parcel-by-parcel improvements, and additional sidewalk work is slowly progressing. The WeGo No. 23 is already one of the most popular bus lines in Nashville. I’m hopeful the state will continue working with us to improve safety and transit on Dickerson (which is a Tennessee Department of Transportation road).

THREE QUESTIONS

Sean Parker The Dickerson corridor is no longer overlooked

he Metro Council District 5 representative talks about the future of Dickerson Road, a long-overlooked thoroughfare in Nashville’s hub-and-spoke physical layout — and an urban street poised to gain major momentum with expected growth looming.

ERIC ENGLAND

With the recent announcement that Oracle will create a major campus at River North, how many large-scale projects — that is, buildings with, say, 50 or more residential units and/or retail and commercial space — do you anticipate being announced within the next 10 years for Dickerson Road? And is it more suitable to see these projects concentrated (for example, south of Cleveland Street) or interspersed? Relatedly, could some rezoning to allow for taller structures than is presently the case be forthcoming? We’ll see dozens of largescale projects for the area within the next decade. The Metro Planning Department’s recent policy update for the area focuses

Do you anticipate the future growth along Dickerson to be driven more by out-of-town development companies or local entities or an equal percentage? And on that theme, is there a nice balance that needs to be struck? It’s no surprise that a hot market attracts outside investment. I would love to see more local investment and development on the corridor. I don’t know of any bureaucratic or regulatory means to accomplish or entice that. I don’t think we give enough credit to the folks who stepped up and invested in the corridor years ago. Shugga Hi, Good Wood, Retrograde and Uptown Fruit Market to name a few. Those folks have helped make it a desirable place for all this new growth to occur.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

LEADERS

Nailing down what is possible The Superspeedway’s Erik Moses on top-tier NASCAR racing’s return to the area and engaging fans in the process

over Motorsports executives last summer named Erik Moses president of Nashville Superspeedway in Wilson County as the company began to reopen the track to racing and prepared for the return of NASCAR’s top-level Cup Series to Middle Tennessee. Moses brings a range of sports business experience to his post, most recently as president of the D.C. Defenders of the XFL. This spring, he sat down with Michael Gallagher to talk about how his team is approaching its work and the track’s longer-term future. With the Superspeedway not having the attractions of downtown Nashville, how have you and Dover Motorsports approached the fan experience aspect of hosting a Cup Series race? Phrased differently, how do you keep fans from showing up, watching the race and leaving immediately after? We want our fans to have a memorable time at our inaugural tripleheader NASCAR Weekend this June and to present them with experiences that they can’t get at any other venue in Middle Tennessee. As you would expect, the circumstances around the COVID-19 pandemic have curbed some of the great ideas and plans we will eventually make a part of our NASCAR race weekend. Ultimately, we will ensure that all visitors to the Nashville Superspeedway have an unforgettable “Nashville experience.”

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

JON MORGAN

LEADERS

Unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution, not everything that a typical NASCAR weekend entails will be in place for our June 18-20 weekend events. For example, there will be no autograph sessions with the drivers and little to no infield and/or garage access for spectators. That is just the reality of our situation in 2021. Our job from the track perspective is to nail down what is possible and make that experience the very best we can for our fans, who have not seen a NASCAR Cup Series race in this area since 1984 — longer than some of them (including many on our staff) have even been alive. How do you feel your diverse background in the XFL, Events DC and the DC Sports & Entertainment Commission has prepared you to position the Superspeedway to be successful with ticket sales, race day experience and fan engagement? Every position I’ve had professionally has contributed to my preparation for this incredible challenge and opportunity. What makes all sports similar are the business fundamentals — ticket sales, sponsorship sales, food and beverage, fan experience and being a valued member of the community. We are fortunate to have experienced a huge level of enthusiasm from the NASCAR fanbase, which is the reason we had to bring in additional grandstands after only one month of tickets being on sale to the general public. This area is hungry for top-level racing and the fans are willing to pay their hard-earned money to let loose for a few hours or an entire weekend and enjoy themselves. Our job is to make sure that trust and support from the fans is rewarded the best way possible during our race weekend and every other event we host. My sports and entertain-

ment experience has taught me that our focus must always be on serving the fans — who want and deserve to have a safe and convenient way to make memorable shared experiences when they go into any venue. To help us in that continued objective, we have recently composed a Nashville Superspeedway Fan Council, which will meet periodically and provide us with a good sense of what matters to fans from a facility perspective and how we can make their experiences here better and more meaningful. We had 823 nominees from our fan base apply to serve on the Fan Council. We chose 30 fans to serve as our initial class. With the Fairgrounds Speedway trying to attract a Cup Series race, do you feel any pressure to compete to be Nashville’s destination track for NASCAR races and what do you see the longterm relationship for the two tracks looking like? Honestly, my focus is 100 percent on Nashville Superspeedway and the work, challenges and opportunities that we have at this facility. If the enthusiasm we’ve heard from this community proves anything, it’s that Middle Tennessee fans deserve to have the NASCAR Cup Series back in this area. It’s been almost 40 years since America’s best drivers competed in this part of the country, which is really stunning considering the passion for racing that I hear and experience every day when I visit business groups, speak with fans and community leaders or attend other events in the area. Ultimately, if the Nashville market can sustain two top-level Cup Series events, that benefits not only motorsports in general but the fans in this area, who are certainly deserving of the best that racing has to offer.

Positive energy and camaraderie fuel the spirit of the region. Every day, people find new ways to take advantage of opportunities offered, to make something from nothing, to make their mark, to realize their dreams. At the center of this spirit is the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. Be a part of something great.

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LEADERS

Building on the foundation Nashville SC is growing its youth academy, eyeing the next steps BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER

he most visible evidence of Nashville SC’s growth is rising at The Fairgrounds Nashville in the form of a sporting temple that, with a capacity of 30,000 people, will be the largest soccer-specific stadium in the country. But the club also is growing steadily in other ways in the Middle Tennessee community and in the soccer world more globally. One of those initiatives, its youth system, will likely be as important a contributor to the franchise’s long-term success as an attractive and profitable stadium. Addressing reporters following the 2021 Major League Soccer SuperDraft, Nashville SC General Manager Mike Jacobs spoke in great detail about why the draft was perhaps more important for the young club than it was for any other team in the league. Jacobs has had to construct a team from the ground up in a region that hasn’t produced much MLS talent — as part of MLS, Nashville SC has territorial rights to all youth players living in Tennessee. And he is having to do it without a developmental team, or a “B” team as he calls it, which places more emphasis on the development and funneling of talent through the club’s youth academy. “When you look at other territories in MLS, the state of Tennessee is one of, if not the least populated territories of players who have matriculated into MLS,” Jacobs says. “So the challenge we have is to take this territory that traditionally has not had a lot of players who have grown into MLS prospects and be able to turn that around.”

Mike Jacobs

ERIC ENGLAND

LEADERS

The MLS team academy initiative, which began in 2007 as a way to supplement the development of elite youth players and provide a clear path to MLS, is a concept Jacobs and his staff have spent a great deal of time scouring through with a fine-tooth comb. The club’s youth programs are based at Currey Ingram Academy in Brentwood and are led by former MLS player Jamie Smith. (NSC’s MLS players also train there for now; the club has begun building a 15-acre training center for them in the Century Farms development in Antioch.) At the SuperDraft, Jacobs maintained that his immediate goal is to build an academy that can start feeding NSC’s main roster relatively soon. Currently, right back Alistair Johnston is Nashville’s only regular contributor from the club’s two SuperDrafts; central defender Jack Maher and winger Luke Haakenson are both typically late-match substitutions. “The dream” for Nashville SC under Jacobs would be to have at least half of the club’s gameday roster coming from the team academy. That would be similar to what Sporting Kansas City — Jacobs’ former employer — has done, listing as many as nine homegrown players on its bench for a recent match. In hockey terms, think of the player pipeline from the Milwaukee Admirals to Nashville Predators in recent years. The last five roster spots for MLS teams are typically reserved for players 24 years old or younger. Clubs without a fully established academy such as Nashville have the option of signing other team’s homegrown players for those spots and Jacobs has been active by picking up midfielder Alex Muyl, winger Handwalla Bwana and defender Nick Hinds in the past year. “It’s set up that way by the league to encourage teams to sign players in that age group and helps kind of foster this MLS academy initiative,” Jacobs says. “Until we’re growing players in those spots, we have to use either our SuperDraft selections and maximize our college players.” MLS changed its academy concept in 2020 to compensate for the void left by the closure of the U.S. Soccer Development Academy due to a lack of funding from the COVID-19 pandemic. The new MLS Next program encompasses more than 11,000 players across

NASHVILLE SC

113 clubs and six different age groups. In 2021, Nashville’s academy is fielding teams in the U12, U13, U14 and U15 age groups, with plans on the horizon to expand to the U17 and U19 groups as those players move through the pipeline. “We’ll be flexible in how we populate players from our roster,” Jacobs says. “Next year, for sure we’ll move from just having 13, 14 and 15s to then graduate to a 17s team as well.” There currently is no U23 group under the MLS Next umbrella. One possible next step for Jacobs and his team would be to form a Nashville SC 2 club in the lower-level United Soccer League. Atlanta United, D.C. United, New York Red Bulls and Kansas City are among the MLS clubs that have gone that route to give promising youngsters more playing time earlier in their careers. “MLS is looking strategically at what to do in this space right now between 17(-year-olds) and MLS — whether it’s continuing with USL or to have MLS 2 teams like you’ve seen in some groups,” Jacobs says. “Something in the future that we’re very serious about having is a reserve team. It’s super important for the young players on your team to play regularly. “In a perfect world, we’d have our own reserve team rather than send them on loan to Charlotte or parts unknown, but we’re just not there yet. But I will say, when you do it right, your reserve team is a bridge between your academy and your first team… Our hope

is that someday we will have our own reserve team here in Nashville.” (Shortly before this issue went to press, The Athletic reported that MLS executives are far along with plans for a lower-division league to better connect many teams’ academies to their highest-level squads. If carried through, the league is expected to start next year.) While the primary goal of a youth academy is to eventually help populate the MLS roster — graduating one player per year is considered a very high hit rate — there also are sound financial incentives involved in cultivating a pool of promising youngsters. Clubs such as FC Dallas have positioned themselves well in the global soccer market by selling talented homegrown teenagers — on whom they didn’t have to spend transfer fees — to big European clubs and reinvesting proceeds into the youth organization. “From a business standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to be able to develop your own players,” Jacobs says. “The idea of being able to sell your players and take that money that you made on developing a player and selling them abroad, to then buy other players, to reinvest it back into your academy or other players abroad… That’s really how the business of our sport [works].” Nashville SC has solidly established itself in MLS’ ranks in just its second season. For its GM and his team, the next steps involve becoming a key cog in the global game, too.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | SUMMER 2021

LEADERS

Like coming home Brent Turner on his first CEO role in a very familiar setting BY LENA ANTHONY

rent Turner was undaunted by the challenges facing him at Franklin-based Summit BHC, which operates 24 addiction treatment and behavioral health hospitals nationwide, when he took over as CEO in September 2020. Yes, the nation was in the throes of a pandemic that posed serious supply-demand implications for the behavioral health industry. And yes, he was stepping into the C-suite’s top spot for the first time in his career. But the newly minted CEO was no stranger to the industry, its opportunities — or even his new teammates. Turns out, the behavioral health care industry, despite being valued at around $50 billion annually, is actually quite small. Turner had worked with Summit BHC’s former CEO and now-president Jon O’Shaughnessy at two previous posts — at Franklin-based Acadia Healthcare and Psychiatric Solutions before that. Turner left Acadia in early 2019, after the arrival of CEO Debbie Osteen, by “mutual agreement” and his non-compete clause expired just in time for him to take over the helm at Summit BHC. “I was already very familiar with Summit,” he says. “When the opportunity presented, it made a lot of sense, given the scalability of the business. It’s a nice match for my background and experience.”

SUMMER 2021 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

The company was already on a growth trajectory before the pandemic. If anything, the past year has only accelerated it. In 2020, Summit BHC closed on deals for four in-patient psychiatric hospitals and two addiction treatment facilities. Turner says 2021 is on a similar track. At Acadia, Turner helped grow the company from just six facilities to hundreds. But the Summit BHC job is so much more than been there, done that — because now he gets to do it with a CEO’s perspective. “In my past two jobs, I had a great experience being a part of the leadership team, but never the CEO,” he says. “This was a chance for me to sit in that seat and really guide the company strategically, through the various leaders of the company. My role is to provide the team guidance to continue to grow and deliver high-quality, compassionate care.” Finding the deals isn’t the problem for Turner and his team. “Most everywhere in the country, there’s an opportunity for us,” he says. Indeed, more than 100 million Americans live in communities where there aren’t enough behavioral health professionals, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Then the pandemic arrived and contributed to a startling rise in mental health and substance use disorders. Preliminary data from the CDC points to a 22 percent jump in overdose deaths in 2020 from the year before. Anxiety symptoms and depression saw even sharper rises. At the same time, support for mental health services has never been stronger. Mental health parity and the intact inclusion of mental health coverage in the Affordable Care Act aside, the federal government in May announced it would spend $3 billion in block grants for mental health services, in addition to the $2.5 billion in supplemental funding announced in March. The opportunity is there. The challenge for Turner and Summit is discerning the right ones from the wrong ones. “There’s just so much demand out there — well in excess of the supply of beds,” he says. “Summit can help continue to drive improvements and efficiencies. We’ve done a great job so far, and as we get bigger, I don’t see that changing. But that takes discipline and doing all the possible due diligence and integration planning and then putting that plan into place as the deal closes.”

‘My role is to provide the team guidance to continue to grow and deliver high-quality, compassionate care.’ BRENT TURNER, SUMMIT BHC

Turner says the main factors that go into the decision-making process are community need, payer mix and reimbursement. “Avoidance of growing pains” also gets considered. When a deal closes, Summit’s headcount gets an instant boost. With each acquisition, the company adds between 50 and 200 to its current number of 2,200 employees — a responsibility Turner does not take lightly. Turner will soon be hitting the one-year mark in this position, but he says the experience already has been validating. “I know I can lead from the CEO seat and at the same time do it in a very servant leadership manner,” he says. “I’m just trying to continue a success trajectory that Summit was on before I got here. I’m focused on helping folks do their job and do it well and feel good about what they’re doing. And when you’re in this business, that’s not hard to do.”

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INDEX

A-C

G-L

R-Z

Acadia Healthcare 38

Gene Caballero 22

Ralph Schulz 26

Amazon 8, 11, 13, 15, 23, 26

Greater Nashville Technology Council 11

Rangewater 32

Amy Harris 11 Arizona State University 26 Asurion 22 Brent Turner 38 Brian Moyer 11 Brittany Driscoll 27 Bryan Clayton 22 CarSaver 4 Chad Collier 4 Chris Holmes 31 Clint Smith 6 CM Group 6 Courtney Pogue 26 Currey Ingram Academy 37

D-F Dan Aronoff 27 David Peters 9 David Waddell 30 daVinci Payments 21 Debbie Osteen 38 Dollar General 8 Dominium 32 Don Bruce 30 Dover Motorsports 34

GreenPal 22 Hannah Stolze 8 Ingram Book Group 14 Ingram Content Group 14, 16 International Franchise Association 27 James Knight 22 John Ingram 14, 16 John Wark 11 Jon O’Shaughnessy 38 Jon Pirtle 28 Kaiser Family Foundation 38 Karen Williams 12 Kauffman Foundation 25 Legacy Lawncare TN 22 Lipscomb University 8

M-P

River North 11, 32 RMR Group 32 Rob Lowe 32 Sean Parker 33 Skyline Hospitality 32 Squeeze 27 Stand Up Nashville 12 Steve Curnutte 30 Summit BHC 38 Tennessee Department of Revenue 23 Terry Turner 31 Tortola Advisors 30 Tractor Supply 8 Universal Logic 9 University of Tennessee Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research 30 WeWork 28 Winnie Forrester 12 Yasha Darakhshanian 24

Major League Soccer 36 Mike Jacobs 36 MinTech Agency 12 ModusLink 9 Monroe Investment Partners 32 NASCAR 34

Drybar 27

Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce 26

Emma 6

Nashville Entrepreneur Center 6

Erik Moses 34

Nashville SC 36

Errol Williams 28

Nashville Software School 11, 22

e|spaces 28

Nashville Superspeedway 34

Fawaz Khalil 9

Odessa Kelly 12

FB Financial 31

Oracle 11, 26, 32

FirstBank 31

Pinnacle Financial Partners 31

FranNet 27

Psychiatric Solutions 38

Zach Hendrix 22

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