Nashville Post Fall 2020

FALL 2020

Taking Stock VETERAN LEADERS ON T H E S TAT E O F M I D D L E T E N N E S S E E R E A L E S TAT E

APPLY ING K NOW LE DGE How hospitals will look different by the next pandemic

Learning and leading Our Most Powerful Women on giving, taking advice

S TI C K I N G TO T H E PLAN Developers eye urban aspects for Cool Springs

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Building trust comes before

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Whether you’re running a household, growing a business, serving on a board or planning for retirement, our PNC-Certified Women’s Business Advocates are here to help. We’ll work closely with you to understand your unique needs. Then we’ll access resources and connections, and provide financial solutions to help you get where you want to go, in work and in life.

Reach out to an advocate today at pnc.com/women

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Financial support for the things that matter most.

Our Experience Can Shape Your Experience We feel fortunate to have contributed to Nashville’s architectural fabric for almost 60 years.

Look around to see examples of our design handiwork. Hospitality venues.

Corporate oďŹƒces. Healthcare facilities. Education campuses. Senior living communities. Community and the arts facilities. Whether recapturing the beauty of historic structures or setting the stage for new ones, our designs are created to withstand the test of time, while establishing a unique experience..

Translating your vision into an architectural solution is what we do— and placing people at the center of our designs is what we are all about.

Moving forward together to create environments that shape lives. architecture interior architecture master planning space planning

615-329-9445 www.esarch.com

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YOU SHOULD KNOW ESa’s Lauren Siler on Nashville’s community of young designers

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DATA BANK Featured: Delinquencies, rents and jobless claims

13 STREET CHALLENGED Will a key stretch of 21st reach its potential?

16 THIS POINT IN TIME Real estate pros discuss the market and their expectations

22 THREE QUESTIONS John Tirrill ponders postCOVID placemaking

24 ‘A GAME OF DOMINOES’ Dowdle reinvents ex-lumber mill with offices, retail

28 STILL IN THE WORKS COVID won’t stop plans to make Cool Springs quasi-urban, walkable

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FALL 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

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VITALS

30 STEELING FOR THE NEXT SURGE Hospital leaders, designers look to apply learnings

32 A SATISFACTION BOOST? Study shows consumers want a simpler system

LEADERS

34 BEST-L AID PL ANS Local universities face COVID-19 pandemic

TECHIE

46 RAISING CAPITAL Creativity, diligence can help entrepreneurs close deals during pandemic

47 ‘BET TER-QUALIT Y OPPORTUNITIES’ NCN leader takes stock after team’s 50th investment

48 NO VIRUS VACATION FOR BAD GUYS Cybersecurity pros discuss how business leaders can protect their organizations

FAVORITES SPORTS

44 SHIFTING GEARS Outlandish ideas can get the conversation started

51 A SPORTS-IS-BACK MOMENT Chase’s Denise Horvath enjoys special times by the diamond

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36 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN Our all-star group on mentoring and leading during a crisis

DANIEL MEIGS

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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OPEN

Taking a breath Sometimes, the simple questions are the most effective. How are things? How do they compare to what you had expected? What are you paying attention to looking forward?

That’s the approach we took for the cover of this quarterly. Since March, we’ve all had to chart a path through the daily noise of the COVID-19 pandemic, each short-term decision guided by the latest apparent trend. Our cover story takes stock of where that has led the region’s real estate sector and lets some of the city’s most experienced pros say it in their own words. We hope it provides some useful perspectives to guide longer-term decisions.

As we did with our second-quarter issue pulled together shortly after COVID arrived in Nashville, we’ve also looked beyond the immediate headlines of the day for deeper changes already occurring and/ or being contemplated. You’ll read about the evolution of hospitals’ design for when the next pandemic hits and about how some university leaders are approaching the most disruptive semester they’ve had to handle.

Also featured in these pages are this year’s dynamic group of Most Powerful Women, who have a tremendous range of experiences drawn from their work across the city. We are honored to introduce them to you here and to be able to host them for our annual — and this year, virtual — luncheon Sept. 16. We hope you’ll be able to join us; you can buy your ticket at nashvillemostpowerfulwomen.com.

If you enjoy this issue but don’t subscribe to our daily emails, you’re missing out on those aforementioned headlines of the day. The growth of Middle Tennessee in recent years produced plenty of those even before the added dimension of COVID. For less than $10 per month, we’ll deliver to you twice a day the news you need to help you sustain and grow your organization in the months ahead.

Geert De Lombaerde, Editor gdelombaerde@nashvillepost.com

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On the cover Barry Smith Photo by Daniel Meigs

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FALL 2020 | NASHVILLEPOST.COM

Nashville Post is published quarterly by FW Publishing, LLC. Advertising deadline for the next issue is Thursday, Oct. 29. For advertising information, call Heather Cantrell Mullins at 615844-9252. For subscription information, call 615844-9307. Copyright © 2020 FW Publishing, LLC.

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YOU SHOULD KNOW

Lauren Siler ESa architect shares views regarding Nashville’s community of young designers

L AUREN SILER was lucky to have achieved one of two childhood goals.

Siler, a design manager and architect with Nashville-based Earl Swensson Associates, considered as a second grader a college career focused both on playing basketball for the late and legendary Pat Summitt and studying architecture at the University of Tennessee. As a young adult, she was not afforded a shot at the former, so she focused on the latter, eventually graduating from UT in 2012 with a degree in architecture.

“While my dreams of playing for [the Lady Vols] were short lived, I did stick to my second choice,” says Siler, now 33 and a project designer at ESa. “I have always been interested in how things are put together and how space — both built and in nature — affects how we feel and interact with others.”

On the UT note, Siler is married to a fellow Tennessee graduate, Jake Siler, who also holds a degree in architecture from UT and now works as a contractor. She says the overall vibe — in terms of camaraderie, familiarity, etc. — between the community of the city’s younger architects is strong.

“The architecture and design community is pretty connected and often a small world of knowing or knowing of many people in the profession,” explains Siler, who has been with ESa since 2017. “Many of the 39-and-under architects in town went to school together, have worked with one another at some point at the many different firms, are friends of friends or are dating/ married. Our schooling often results in some great friendships from long hours in the architecture building working on projects and a smaller class size throughout the time we are in school.”

On this theme, many Nashville architects, and particularly the younger ones, attended either Tennessee or Auburn University.

“A lot of that has to do with the fact not all universities or colleges offer a National Architectural Accrediting Board-accredited professional degree in architecture,” Siler says. “[The state of] Tennessee currently has two programs, one at UT-Knoxville and one at the University of Memphis. Belmont is currently adding the degree to its

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lineup and will be the first in Middle Tennessee.

Most of the surrounding states have only one or two accredited schools of architecture. This heavily limits how many architects you can know from different schools.”

And since many of the local young architects (and older ones, too) know each other well, they have a feel for the thoughts, styles and approaches of their peers.

“The growth Nashville is seeing is a big factor that draws a large number of younger architects to our city,” Siler says. “Where there is growth, there is opportunity for design.

There are lots of unique and challenging jobs and some great firms to be a part of. The 20plus cranes that could be seen from my office desk this past winter are always a great sight in our minds. But as architects and designers, we need to be good stewards of the many projects we are seeing. Growth is great, but planned and well-executed projects that will withstand the test of time are key to a healthy and vibrant city.”

Siler specializes in designing of health care buildings, having worked on six major such projects for ESa. She says designers of health

'The 20-plus cranes that could be seen from my office desk this past winter are always a great sight in our minds. But as architects and designers, we need to be good stewards of the many projects we are seeing.' care facilities have a responsibility to make those places and spaces as inviting and comfortable for users as possible.

“We design spaces where families wait during long surgeries, where patients spend many days and nights recovering, where oncology patients go for treatment, where babies are born, where doctors perform lifesaving procedures and where many people get sometimes great and sometimes devastating news,” notes Siler, who lists the Music City Center and Thompson Nashville hotel among her favorite recently designed local buildings for which ESa was not involved. “These buildings, while often intimidating, can be designed to welcome everyone and provide a little bit

of peace and order during an often hectic life experience. As a health care architect, we get to help shape those experiences.”

Siler contends Nashville’s younger architects have lots to learn from the local design sector’s old guard.

“Nashville is seeing a lot of great, wellknown names of some key design firms in the city pass the torch to the next generation of leaders,” she says. “I believe it is very important that we keep their legacy alive, both in design and business. They have established the great architecture community that we have here and laid the groundwork for the Nashville design community to continue to thrive.” > WILLIAM WILLIAMS

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CL AIMS PAIN The spike in unemployment this past spring left few sectors without serious scars. But once the state’s economy began reopening, not all its parts rebounded at the same pace. Based on their share of total continued unemployment insurance claims, manufacturers are ramping up more quickly than the hospitality and business services sectors.

Data Bank MUCH OF THE STORY ABOUT HOW COVID-19 is affecting various parts of the economy remains to be written. But the pandemic’s impact on real estate is likely to linger for a long time. Here are a few data points from its early days.

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18%

10%

As of this summer, mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates weren’t yet showing the effects of the pandemic, but the coming quarters will show whether rates might approach or surpass those of the Great Recession. Here’s how area counties finished 2019 versus the last downturn’s peak.

COUNTY

DELINQUENCY

FORECLOSURES

Cheatham

-79.2%

-93.0%

Davidson

-87.1%

-94.8%

Dickson

-81.0%

-93.8%

Maury

-88.2%

-95.0%

Montgomery

-56.9%

-76.6%

Robertson

-76.7%

-90.9%

Rutherford

-85.5%

-93.6%

Sumner

-83.6%

-91.2%

Williamson

-89.7%

-96.7%

Wilson

-87.8%

-96.1%

Leisure/hospitality

Manufacturing

Business services

Trade

Education/health

Other

By mid-summer, state data showed that Williamson County was recovering more quickly than others in the area, particularly more tourist-reliant Davidson. Here are the shares of continued unemployment claims as a share of the labor force as of July 25.

Williamson ...................4.7%

Source: Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, UT Boyd Center for Business & Economic Research

Montgomery ................7.5%

Source: CoreLogic, Tennessee Housing Development Agency

Dickson ........................ 5.6% Cheatham.................... 5.8% Robertson.................... 6.6% Sumner ........................ 6.9% Wilson ...........................7.0% Rutherford....................7.5% Maury ........................... 9.0% Davidson..................... 11.1%

RETREATING RENTS Not surprisingly, the country’s apartment market is repricing itself during the pandemic. Research firm Yardi Matrix noted that national rents were down in June from the year prior — the first time that had happened since December 2010. In March and April, Nashville rents were up about 4 percent year over year, making Music City one of the country’s hottest markets for rental properties. Here’s how those numbers had changed by early August.

CITY

MEDIAN RENT

’19-’20 CHANGE

’18-’19 CHANGE

Nashville

$1,160

0.4%

2.6%

Murfreesboro

$1,140

0.4%

3.1%

Franklin

$1,330

1.2%

1.3%

Hendersonville

$1,260

1.4%

3.1%

Smyrna

$1,310

2.9%

2.3%

Gallatin

$1,060

0

0.8%

Goodlettsville

$1,160

-0.3%

1.4%

Source: Apartment List

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By year’s end, Nashville rents are forecast to fall, albeit less than those in a number of its peer cities.

METRO

YEAR-END RENT GROWTH FORECAST

Denver

-5.9%

Atlanta

-5.9%

Orlando

-5.3%

Indianapolis

-3.8%

Charlotte

-3.4%

Nashville

-3.3%

Austin

-1.5%

Source: Yardi Matrix

A CHANGING ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE THE CHAMBER’S RESEARCH CENTER UNCOVERS INSIGHTS TO HELP BUSINESS LEADERS UNDERSTAND A CHANGING ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE The economic landscape in Middle Tennessee is changing. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce Research Center (The Research Center) is set to release a new workforce development study which will unveil insights aimed to help business leaders understand this shifting landscape.

The purpose of this study is to help leaders understand the data and trends underpinning regional industry growth. The study will

examine economic, occupational and industry strengths and the opportunities and challenges posed by these strengths.

The Research Center began their work with an industry growth analysis and target market assessment for the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and the Clarksville MSA; combined, these MSAs comprise the economic region.

Industry Growth Analysis The industry growth analysis assessed growth over time in the number of establishments, employment and wages for each county in the economic region.

Through this data, The Research Center identified high growth and high wage industries as healthcare; transportation equipment manufacturing; and businesses services. Education and the leisure and hospitality industries were also identified as high growth areas.

HIGH GROWTH & HIGH WAGE INDUSTRIES

HEALTHCARE

TRANSPORTATION EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING

BUSINESS SERVICES

HIGH GROWTH INDUSTRIES

EDUCATION

HOSPITALITY & LEISURE

Industry Cluster Analysis Industry clusters are groups of related businesses that function interdependently creating a competitive hub for linked industries that share common markets, occupational skills and technologies within a given region.

Clusters are important to the economic landscape because they allow for shared access to specialized suppliers, skilled workers, proximity to competitors and a base of industry knowledge. Clusters create a localized competitive advantage over similar industries operating in more isolated locations.

The Research Center identified traded and local clusters for the economic region using data from the U.S. Cluster Mapping Project and location quotients.

Traded clusters are industry groups which provide goods or services beyond a region’s geographic boundaries, bringing in capital from outside the region. These clusters benefit from a strong global business climate and account for about 33 percent of a region’s employment while providing 50 percent of wages and more than 90 percent of a region’s research and development. Local clusters provide goods and services to a limited service geography.

Through this analysis, The Research Center identified 10 traded clusters, two local clusters and four opportunity clusters (see illustration).

Industry Cluster Advantages and Opportunities A closer look at the Nashville economic region’s industry clusters identifies opportunities for economic and workforce development stakeholders and policy makers to capitalize on the region’s strengths and create new opportunities for growth.

Automotive and advanced manufacturing are two of the largest clusters in the region, both of which led to growth in metals and plastics manufacturing.

These four industries have spurred the growth of the transportation, distribution and logistics industry.

The increase of advanced manufacturing in the region presents opportunities for further growth in chemical manufacturing. The presence of industrial

TRADED CLUSTERS ADVANCED MANUFACTURING AUTOMOTIVE

DOWNSTREAM CHEMICALS

METALS

INSURANCE

MUSIC

PLASTICS

BUSINESS SERVICES

PERFORMING ARTS

TRANSPORTATION DISTRIBUTION & LOGISTICS

OPPORTUNITY CLUSTERS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY

MEDICAL DEVICE

LOCAL CLUSTERS HEALTH CARE

EDUCATION

and occupational specializations in these clusters lends itself well to create a medical device manufacturing cluster in Middle Tennessee that could rival the Memphis region.

Davidson and Williamson Counties have seen increases in business services involving management of companies or headquarters.

Additionally, insurance and captive insurance firms have seen significant growth, thanks in part to a strong push by the State of Tennessee to tailor a regulatory framework conducive to the growth and recruitment of captive firms.

The increase of the local health-related cluster has also underpinned the growth in insurance-related industries. Between these business clusters and the insurance industries, there is an opportunity for a highly specialized information technology cluster.

Housing and Transportation in the age of COVID-19 Housing and transportation are critical to Middle Tennessee’s quality of life. The Research Center considered both issues as they relate to workforce, including the impact of COVID-19 on efforts to improve housing and transportation quality and access.

A common housing metric is cost burden. A household or individual is considered cost burdened if they spend 30 percent or more of their take-home pay on housing. Data from the economic region shows disparities when broken out by race, ethnicity, ownership status and educational attainment.

ACCORDING TO THE 2O19 VITAL SIGNS SURVEY, IN THE JOINT METRO REGION APPROXIMATELY 6O% OF BLACK OR AFRICAN AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDS ARE COST BURDENED COMPARED TO APPROXIMATELY 4O% OF WHITE HOUSEHOLDS.

SIMILARLY, APPROXIMATELY 6O% OF HISPANIC OR LATINO HOUSEHOLDS ARE COST BURDENED COMPARED TO APPROXIMATELY 4O% OF WHITE HOUSEHOLDS THAT ARE NOT HISPANIC OR LATINO.

This housing and transportation data represents a period before COVID-19’s impact on Middle Tennessee.

More households have become cost burdened as individuals have lost employment, been furloughed or experienced reduced income. As eviction moratoriums end, the effects of the economic downturn will become more severe.

ACROSS THE JOINT METRO REGION 48% 26% IN THE NASHVILLE MSA, APPROXIMATELY 4O% OF ALL HOUSEHOLDS ARE COST BURDENED. THIS IS SEEN DISPROPORTIONATELY IN RENTERS.

48% OF RENTER-OCCUPIED HOUSEHOLDS ARE COST BURDENED. 26% OF OWNER-OCCUPIED HOUSEHOLDS WITH A MORTGAGE ARE COST BURDENED. IN THE CLARKSVILLE MSA, APPROXIMATELY 37% OF ALL HOUSEHOLDS ARE COST BURDENED.

While cost burden related to housing has been negatively impacted by COVID-19, Middle Tennesseans who commute to work are experiencing far less traffic on the roads than is typical. In 2018 in the Nashville MSA, approximately 20 percent of daily commuters experienced a commute of over 45 minutes.

Over the last five years, remote working has been on the rise, particularly in the Nashville MSA, increasing from approximately 4 percent to 6 percent of the labor force. With the sudden impact of COVID-19, many organizations have been forced to suddenly turn to remote work and are now fine-tuning their remote work policies with indications that remote working will become an ever increasing trend for years to come.

Industry Diversity by County in Tennessee Metropolitan Statistical Areas

Industry Diversity Percentile

CLARKSVILLE MSA

81% - 1OO%

61% - 8O%

NASHVILLE MSA

21% - 4O%

O% - 2O%

41% - 6O%

The numbers associated with each county represent their ranking among all counties in the United States.

ROBERTSON

STEWART MONTGOMERY

County

SUMNER

CHEATHAM DICKSON

DAVIDSON

MACON

TROUSDALE

WILSON

SMITH

WILLIAMSON RUTHERFORD CANNON MAURY

The diversity of industry that comprises Middle Tennessee creates a landscape with the promise of economic strength, resilience and prosperity. This future growth is dependent on how the challenges presented by workforce demand and COVID-19 are addressed. While this excerpt discusses regional shifts and prospects that growth and COVID-19 has had on industry, transportation and housing, it is important to note another opportunity for our region. The workforce study will include a section

CANNON CHEATHAM DAVIDSON DICKSON MACON MAURY MONTGOMERY ROBERTSON RUTHERFORD STEWART SMITH SUMNER TROUSDALE WILLIAMSON

Ranking 1,896 2,785 367 2,128 2,226 1,828 579 2,441 1,482 2,784 2,529 473 1,187 1,535

This map shows industry diversity percentile by county in Tennessee, highlighting Nashville and Clarksville Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA).

Industry Diversity Rankings are included for these MSAs. Map courtesy of Shruthi Kumar, Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, The Research Center Consultant.

on the strategic importance of childcare as an imperative to ensuring the strength of the region’s economy during and post COVID-19. Whether business recruitment, industry growth, or the challenges facing the region in terms of workforce development, housing, transportation or childcare, the Chamber encourages the business community and the community at large to be a part of the conversation to find solutions that make the Nashville region the best place to live and work.

nashvillechamber.com / research

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Street challenged Will a key stretch of 21st Avenue reach its full potential?

BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS

he topic is one for debate.

Most Nashvillians likely would name Broadway/West End Avenue from First Avenue at the Cumberland River to Interstate 440 at Murphy Road as the city’s most important stretch of urban street.

That approximately 3.5-mile segment bustles with Lower Broad’s honky-tonks, Whole Foods, the Cathedral of the Incarnation (arguably Nashville’s most historically noteworthy religious building), multiple buildings home to restaurants and offices, Vanderbilt University and Centennial Park.

It is a roughly 35-block span that can rival those high-profile streets found in similar mid-sized cities.

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LEADERS

In contrast, there are some — and perhaps more than folks realize — who contend that the span of Broadway/21st Avenue South from 16th Avenue to Interstate 440 at Woodlawn Drive is almost as vibrant and vital to the city.

The segment offers both Vanderbilt University (with the Peabody campus a highlight) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Hillsboro Village (with the Belcourt Theatre basically positioned on 21st) and a Kroger.

Like its aforementioned and better-known sister street, Broadway/21st Ave. South (the segment highlighted here covers about three miles) also offers office buildings and some food and beverage businesses of note.

Lastly — and clearly worth noting — this 21st Avenue South segment transitions into Hillsboro Road once it snakes south of I-440, leading its motorists into the extremely popular Green Hills.

Regardless of one’s views regarding the comparisons and contrasts of West End and 21st avenues, the latter is a street of significance. Yet, it is that street’s segment from Portland Avenue on the north to I-440 on the south that needs some improvements, according to urban placemaking experts the Post interviewed for this article.

The roughly 0.8-mile span is marred by multiple flaws and “underachieving buildings,” the sources say. For example, six of seven buildings located on 21st’s east side between Portland and Bernard avenues offer surface parking “severing” them from the street in a suburban (i.e., vehicle-accommodating) manner. One of those buildings, located at 2020 21st Ave. S., is a nondescript modernist structure for which the bland design contrasts jarringly with the traditional former homes (and now offices) to its north side.

This specific segment is simply one of many that are not fully urban in their form and function and, thus, less than ideal for a street deserving of better.

Asked what buildings located within the 0.8mile stretch need to be razed and replaced, Mark Hollingsworth, president of the local chapter of international placemaking message board urbanplanet.org, is blunt in his response.

“I suppose at least half of them that were built in the 1970s and 1980s could go,” he notes.

“But I seriously doubt that’s going to happen.”

Hollingsworth says the type of building perhaps most needed along the stretch is one that accommodates a live music venue.

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“When Belmont United Methodist Church was struggling [compared to previous times] about 25 years ago, I thought at the time the sanctuary would make an excellent performance hall,” he says. “But the church seems to have rebounded.

“I know the Belcourt once did live shows occasionally, but I’m talking a club that is fully live performance-oriented,” Hollingsworth adds.

There are multiple empty lots on which such a building could, in theory, be constructed. For example, the parcel located at the southwest corner of West Linden and 21st Avenue (2401 21st) has sat empty for a few years now. It previously offered a two-story office building.

Hollingsworth notes the empty triangular lot located at the northeast corner of the intersection of 21st and Portland Avenue (the point at which Magnolia Boulevard veers to the northeast) would be well suited for a new building.

Metro Government owns the 0.4-acre lot.

Similarly, Metro owns a triangular lot nearby at 1923 20th Ave. S. and also Saint Bernard Park at 2025 21st Ave. S., a green space Hollingsworth contends is in need of an update — perhaps with a public art piece.

In the fall of 2018, the Metro Planning Department, with citizen input, worked on possible changes to land-use policy and a potential urban design overlay along 21st from Hillsboro Village to I-440. Participants rated the following (on a scale of one to 10) as the most important themes: mobility and land-use (both 8.5), the character of the corridor’s buildings (7.6) and stormwater management (5.4).

The objectives of the community study were as follows: • Evaluate opportunities for green space and open space through redevelopment.

• Evaluate programming and enhancements for St. Bernard Park.

• Protect the integrity of Saint Bernard Park through appropriate redevelopment on adjacent private property.

• Plan for 440 greenway connections.

• Consider standards and procedures that incorporate street trees into the design of the streetscape.

• Address stormwater needs through use of permeable surfaces and other innovative techniques.

A key element of the future improvement of the stretch involves The Kinnard’s Building,

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The Kinnard’s Building

located at the southeast corner of the intersection of 21st and Blair Boulevard.

Many contend that intersection is the single-most important of those found within the stretch.

Incorporating some elements of 1960s brutalist design, the four-story structure is hampered by various flaws — horizontal slits for windows, a bland color scheme, a tired and faded red awning and a modest-sized main entrance. But The Kinnard’s Building’s appropriate height and bulk, and a quirky form and function could prove helpful if it were to ever be updated.

Gary Gaston, CEO of the Nashville Civic Design Center, says the pedestrian-focused character of 21st Avenue South — which renders, he notes, Hillsboro Village “such a welcoming and walkable stretch” of the city — “degrades and becomes ever increasingly car-centric as one nears I-440, where people are rarely seen walking along the lonely sidewalks.”

Gaston says Blair Boulevard and 21st is a “critical intersection” that could be improved so as to yield an “important and active node.”

“Any new developments undertaken farther south would be well served to try and recreate the scale, rhythm and patterns of safe, engaged pedestrian design experiences found in the heart of the Village,” he says.

One such development is Linden Row, located at 2400 21st Ave. Under construction via an LLC comprising local developers Steve Armistead and Jared Bradley and Washington, D.C.-based Tim Morris, the 38-townhome development sits on the site previously home to The Catholic Diocese of Nashville.

Linden Row is being developed in two phases, with the residences in Phase 1 to be priced from $1 million to $1.22 million and housed in two buildings.

Linden Row is expected to be the type of development Gaston feels is needed south of the 21st and Blair intersection. That roughly four-block stretch lacks buildings, as he notes, that activate the street with pedestrians.

For example, the aforementioned lot located at the southwest corner of West Linden and 21st previously offered a modernist office building but has sat empty for a few years now. Spanning 1.5 acres, the parcel is the largest located within the stretch, notwithstanding the site of residential building Enclave at Hillsboro Village.

Nashville’s Carell family owns the property at West Linden and 21st, with the family not known for its willingness to sell empty sites for redevelopment — as evidenced by its various downtown parcels used for surface parking.

“Since it is eight blocks south of the primary Hillsboro Village retail/restaurant area, I could see a two to three-story mixed-use building with some ground-level retail/restaurant space at that site,” Hollingsworth says. “And any future building will need to be brick.”

Phil Ryan, an affiliate broker with Village Commercial Real Estate and a long-time resident of the Hillsboro-West End neighborhood, says both residents and property owners should be considered regarding any future change on the street.

“These two constituencies are strongly interested in positive change for this segment of 21st, and especially the narrowest piece between I-440 and Blair,” Ryan says.

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B

B 38 LDG ,50 90 0S 0 F

LD 40, G 850 000 SF

BLD 90, G 700 000 SF

‘Any density [on 21st Avenue South] needs to be accompanied by solid improvements to the infrastructure.’

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LD 40, G 800 000 SF

BLDG 600 120,000 SF

TOM CASH, METRO COUNCILMEMBER

For example, Ryan says many neighbors in the area want pedestrian crosswalks south of Blair (there are none), the point at which the five-lane 21st narrows to four lanes.

“It’s currently all about the auto,” he notes. “The neighbors would like to see a variety of transportation modes, including crosswalks, as long as the changes don’t yield cut-throughs for motorists on the side streets.”

Many commercial property owners are open to having their sites redeveloped, but might want buildings that offers more density and uses than is currently the case, Ryan adds. Clearly — and with the neighbors to be considered — creating change is a “balancing act,” he says.

Beyond what people want and don’t want, 21st offers various strengths that often go overlooked. For example, the buildings home to retailer Friedman’s Army Navy Store, law firm MHPS, restaurant J. Christopher’s, law firm Freeman & Fuson — each of which is located between Bernard Avenue and Blair Boulevard — are underrated in their form and function.

Likewise, the brick structure accommodating both Village Real Estate Services and Core Development at 2206 21st Ave. S., though basic, offers a clean symmetry and well-defined entrance.

Many locals speak positively about the Kroger building at 21st and Blair, pointing to its width-

to-height proportionality, materials, color scheme and corner piece (with a clock) as attractive.

Still, the stretch needs work.

Metro Councilmember Tom Cash, in whose District 18 the street runs, said the previously mentioned meetings yielded two themes: 1. better infrastructure — including wider sidewalks, crosswalks between Blair and Woodlawn and more trees; and 2. uses that might make the stretch more engaging, including, for example, light retail (“more local businesses like much-loved Brown’s Diner and Hillsboro Hardware”).

“There wasn’t a solid consensus on appropriate density increases, but there was some agreement that any density needs to be accompanied by solid improvements to the infrastructure I mentioned,” he says.

Cash says business and property owners feel the area located near Magnolia/Acklen could use more neighborhood maintenance and, possibly, mixed-use buildings on its east side, as Hollingworth notes, too.

Cash knows to transform the stretch will require years — and likely yield varying opinions.

As such, he takes a practical approach to the matter.

“I’m not going to suggest any specific buildings that need to be razed or refurbished,” he says, “though I think some variety and deviation from the 1970s-style office buildings would be welcomed.”

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THIS POINT IN TIME Real estate pros on the state of the market and what they expect in the coming months

BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE

Six months after the COVID-19 pandemic reached Nashville in earnest, it’s clear that it’s had a noticeable impact on the region’s real estate market. Office space has been vacated and the retail sector has been severely scarred. On the following pages, seasoned local leaders from the development, leasing, design and construction spheres talk about that and other trends they’ve observed since the confusing days of late winter. They also discuss what they think might happen later this year and into 2021. Points of agreement?

Most significantly, it’s not as bad as feared. And perhaps most frustratingly, we still don’t have clarity about a lot of important things.

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DANIEL MEIGS

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‘The trend that has benefited Nashville will accelerate’ Eakin Partners’ Barry Smith sees office absorption returning to normal pretty quickly

hings are slow. Companies are understandably afraid to make a five-, seven- or 10-year commitment if they don’t know what they’ll look like, how many people they’ll have and when they’ll all work in the office again. But some people are thinking about thinking about it. If they’re facing a lease expiration, they have to do something, even if it’s signing on for shorter-term leases.

Some offices are putting in place partitions or having people working from every other cubicle. We’ve seen the amount of sublease space come up; some companies are consolidating spaces but what’s different from other times is that we’re just not seeing anyone kicking the tires. I don’t think we’ll see office environments get back to what was normal until about a year from now. We might be back at 75 percent early next year.

Nashville will definitely be a benefactor from this pandemic in the long term. If you’re in a Tier 1 city, you’re working on the 40th floor and you’re having to worry about taking the elevator and the number of people in the building and the ingress and egrees. And then you go home to your 60th-floor condo. You won’t have that anywhere near as much here. It’s the same trend that has benefited Nashville for a long time now but I think it will accelerate.

I think we’ll be back on our previous trend line by late 2021 or early 2022, depending on just when we’ll get a vaccine. Nashville still has a cheaper cost of living than these big cities and our rents are still below Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and even Austin now.

Sure, it’s a double-edged sword that we have more space being built right now than we have historically. But I expect we’ll see that get absorbed at a pretty normal pace.”

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‘We are not seeing a stampede’ Colliers CEO and market leader Janet Miller says a lot of clients are still finding their bearings

“I

think we’re going to see two or three more quarters of decline. We’re not naive enough to think we’re done. So many clients just don’t know what to do at this point. The best we can do is help them understand the situation and work with data rather than emotion.

The fundamentals of Nashville have not changed. I still believe the long-term outlook for this city is as strong as it ever was. Navigating from here to there will be the trick. We have a lot of slogging to do over the next year. All you can do in the middle of this is make the best choice for your company this day that you can possibly can.

That said, we have seen some unexpected bright spots and there has been lots of activity. I look at retail. I would think my team would be miserable right now but they’re as busy as they can be.

Yes, you do have some property owners who are running into trouble, but you have lot of buyers who are still desperate to get into Nashville.

On the office side, it always helps to compare where we are to past recessions. Space for sublease is about 2.5 percent right now; that is the same as the height of the last recession. So that says, yes, companies have been severely impacted but maybe not to the level we would’ve thought in March. We’re probably not done yet, but we also are not

Janet Miller

seeing a stampede to exit space.

And there will be offsetting factors.

We’re just not going to see people elbow to elbow anymore. There will be a drop in space needs and how we use our space but companies will still have a need for community and creativity. I don’t think corporate America is going to give that up.

When it comes to new development: Before COVID, we were seeing some very bold out-of-town developers coming and preparing to build all spec. I have a hunch those developers will still want to be in Nashville but that we won’t see 100 percent spec. I think we’ll go back to what we’ve always seen: You need a good bit of pre-leasing before you start.

I certainly don’t see people canceling projects. Think about the mindset: Any development has a 10- to 20-year horizon. To make decisions based on one year is just not prudent. When you’re spending $100 million on an office building, it’s going to be a long-term project.

That said, job growth is the thing that drives all of this, and it’s going to take time for us to get back lost jobs. The Chamber team has done a really good job with their forecasts and they see us getting back to level in about a year. So we’ll have lost a year to this — but so will everyone else.”

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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79%

‘You’ll see a lot of space coming to market’ Conseco Group owner Phil Pace expects his construction pipeline to stay active

thought we’d be through this by now but we have a long way to go. I’m seeing a cautious apprehension about moving forward. Projects that have had their lending approved and their permits secured?

They’re moving forward. But a lot of people are asking, “Do we really want to sink soft costs into projects until we know what the world will look like?” A lot of clients are also hoping prices come down for some commodities.

We’re seeing a pullback on condo and large multifamily projects. Retail was already really slow long before the virus hit and restaurants are struggling across the board. But things are changing big time with their operations. Look at the Chick-fil-A on Church Street: It’s a giant kitchen, there is no place to sit down and you pay with plastic only. In a post-COVID

“I

of large companies responding to a CBRE survey in June said the importance of the physical office will decrease slightly or remain the same after the COVID crisis

70%

Phil Pace

world, I think we’ll see more of those.

I don’t think our construction pipeline will run dry by early ’21. It’ll be like 2008, when we redid 20 McDonald’s restaurants in four months and remodeled every Chick-fil-A in the market. I don’t see things drying up until money becomes more expensive. But everyone is working harder and doing more due diligence before committing to a deal.

With office space, we’re already seeing changes across the board. Large employers are not only rethinking their space needs. They’re already downsizing their space. They’re saying, “Telecommuting is working.” It’s serious enough that large office employers are actively seeking brokers to put their space on the market. I think you’ll see a lot of space coming to market by the fourth quarter.?

of CBRE respondents said at least a portion of their workforces would be allowed to work remotely full-time

73%

of CBRE respondents expect flexible office space will play some role in their future real estate plans

5.8%

The Deloitte Center for Financial Services this summer said health and safety measures — design enhancements, cleaning services, thermal scanners, air filters and more — will increase the cost of managing office properties by nearly 6 percent, per square foot

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Mike Manous

‘I would’ve expected construction costs to retreat’ Manous Design’ Mike Manous has seen little in the way of wait-and-see

“W Dane Peachee

‘I’m not seeing lease rates come down’ Dane Peachee of tenant representation firm CREA thinks another factor will actually lift rent costs

onditions today are a fair amount better than I would’ve predicted in March or April. There’s still a fair amount of activity; we’re working on several possible deals that we would have been in the normal course of business. And there are not nearly as many empty properties as I’d have expected, or as much sublease space.

Is that a matter of not yet? I think there’s still a possibility of that. But the market here has been so strong for so long that I think we

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are just more resilient to challenges than the overall national economy. A lot of that is attributable to the health care sector and developers here are also a little more conservative.

They typically don’t overbuild.

I don’t think we really know yet how companies will answer the big office space questions. My guess is some companies will require more space for separation while others could end up keeping the same amount of space but give employees the option to work permanently from home. You’re also seeing more hoteling of office space.

We haven’t seen any major price reductions for office space. Most landlords have only offered some incentives such as free rent or more for tenant buildout. I’ve got my eye out for broader signs of rates coming down and checking frequently — especially on transactions that are taking a little while to get closed — but I’m not seeing it. If anything, existing tenants in Nashville are going to have their rent go up because of this huge property tax increase.”

e’re still heavily involved with tornado recovery work, especially here in Wilson County but also in Sumner and Metro. We’re busier than we’ve ever been and we’re getting calls for new work almost daily. It has not slowed down one iota. I was really expecting people to pull back and take a wait-and-see attitude. But it could be that it’s kind of a downtime for people and they’re investing in the future.

One thing we are seeing is that people are really struggling with governmental approvals. Several communities are in disarray, with some people working on a week then off a week — which means not answering their emails for a week.

I would’ve expected construction costs to retreat a bit. Lumber prices, especially, have escalated hugely.

Usually, we see that after a couple of storms have hit the coasts but now we’re seeing the effect of producers shutting down their mills for a while in the spring. I fear the home building market is so hot that we’re going to start to see people pull back because of those costs. These are very interesting dynamics and not what I expected.

We could get a repeat of ’07-’08, when things were going great and then all of a sudden, everything stopped.

I don’t see anything in the tea leaves to say that’ll happen but I’m watching things.”

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A few trends that may occur post-pandemic include a greater focus on health, an increase in the home being the base for living, working and playing, the emergence of new consumers and a tendency toward frugality — a la people who grew up during the Great Depression. With time, entrepreneurial people will figure out how to creatively reuse vacant space. That has happened time and time again. Public spaces, particularly how pedestrians experience a neighborhood at street level, will probably become even more important going forward. In the meantime, we should do all we can to help each other move through this challenging period in our lives.

THREE QUESTIONS

John Tirrill Atlanta developer with Nashville roots ponders post-COVID urban placemaking

JOHN TIRRILL is senior partner at Atlanta-based META Real Estate Partners. He has deep roots in Nashville, with his late grandfather having once worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist at what is now Metro General Hospital.

META was formed when Worthington Hyde Partners and SWH Partners merged in October 2019. The latter has garnered headlines the past eight years or so for its work in Nashville.

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How do Nashville’s urban districts that offer mixed-use buildings — and that are suitable for more — adjust to a post-COVID-19 world related to restaurants, retail, bars, cafes, etc.?

And relatedly, how do developers create true urban places if full urban elements cannot be a part of that mix? The several key sectors of tenants of successful mixed-use urban buildings have been severely impacted by the pandemic. What the future holds is, at best, an educated guess. Past global events of the scale of COVID-19 have been catalyst for significant social, economic and/or political changes.

For example, it is unfortunately likely that a number of restaurants, retailers and entertainment-oriented businesses will fail over the next year or two. We are beginning to see the emergence of the influence of Gen Z as they move into adulthood and a decline in the impact of the Baby Boom generation as its members transition into retirement. Today’s reality raises more questions than answers.

META Real Estate Partners is also invested in Atlanta, Charlotte, Charleston, Huntsville and Memphis. Compare and contrast those markets to Nashville. We endeavor to invest in a diverse group of markets throughout the Southeast and are drawn to each city for different reasons. Atlanta is the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the country with a diverse and large economy. Charlotte is the Southeast’s banking hub. Charleston is a seaport city and popular tourist destination with an emerging tech and venture capital start-up community. Huntsville is enjoying significant growth in professional, scientific and technical services in addition to a robust manufacturing sector. Memphis’ downtown and in-town neighborhoods are enjoying a resurgence, particularly in the city’s Medical District.

Nashville’s growth has been in the national headlines for nearly a decade. It has long been known as the state capital, Music City, the Athens of the South and a place with an economy that is not dependent upon one sector for its growth. The diversity of Nashville’s interest and points of view have been the catalyst to create a great community.

On the comparison theme, how does urban Nashville — and how its build-out is progressing — compare in 2020 to, say, in 2011 — i.e., the beginning of the city’s second boom of this century? Overall, Nashville is doing a very good job managing its growth. It is important for Nashville to continue to involve its citizens in updating the vision and plan for Nashville as it grows. Creating incentives to develop affordable mixed-income housing and quality public spaces for all to enjoy should always be a priority.

When Nashvillians and the development community work together, the outcomes are almost always better than if they fight. It is important that all involved listen to and understand each other’s ideas, concerns, opportunities and challenges. The best developments typically involve leaders who have mastered the art of compromise in a healthy and inclusive way.

DANIEL MEIGS

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‘A game of dominoes’ Dowdle Construction reinvents former lumber mill in The Nations with office, retail space

BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS

he Nations has seen an impressive list of noteworthy projects since the Great Recession ended.

And now Nashville-based Dowdle Construction Group is nearing completion of the conversion of a two-story, 80,000-square-foot former lumber mill, a project that ranks highly on that list — if anything due to its sheer size.

Once finished by late September, Silo Studios — to sit at the intersection of Centennial Boulevard and 54th Avenue North and to be part of the overall Silo Bend community — will offer retail and office space.

Charleston, South Carolina-based development company Flyway owns the building, having paid $3.8 million for it in May 2017.

Dowdle, in partnership with Southeast Venture (which is handling design work), began reinventing the former industrial lumber mill — located near the iconic and mural-adorned silo in The Nations — in March 2019.

Dowdle is experienced with adaptive reuse projects, with its resume including L&L Market on Charlotte Avenue, The 1865 on 21st Avenue North, Hi-Fi Clyde’s on Church Street, Martin’s BBQ in SoBro and Olive & Sinclair in East Nashville.

The Post talked with Glynn Dowdle, company president and principal, to get his insights regarding specific elements of the project.

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ERIC ENGLAND

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Stabilization

Preservation

Location

Dowdle says a main challenge included the fact that when the lumber milling company moved in 2006, it removed some of its heavy equipment, creating holes in the roof and sides of the building. The structure then sat abandoned for 13 years and suffered extensive water damage.

“This made it extremely difficult to determine the true extent of the damage and understand what would need to be replaced,” he says. “It wasn’t until we started removing some elements of the building that we could get a clearer picture of the work that lay ahead. It became like a game of dominoes. We’d remove something only to uncover another issue.”

Dowdle says that preserving as much of the original materials as possible and “telling the building’s story” was extremely important to Flyway. Some equipment from the building’s lumber mill days had been left behind, and Flyway decided to incorporate those elements.

“We extracted the two pieces of equipment, which weighed over 34,000 pounds each (that’s the equivalent of about 10 Toyota Camrys), had them cleaned and painted and brought back to the site,” he says. “Both will be on display — one inside the building and the other in one of the outdoor spaces — with signage explaining their original use in the old lumber mill.”

Silo Studios is one of the largest old-school bow truss structures in Nashville — an 80,000-square-foot building spanning 137 feet from one side to the other and with no intermediate structures or columns in between. The entire roof system is bearing on the outside walls.

“While we’ve worked on smaller bow truss buildings, like the one that houses (restaurant) Adele’s in The Gulch, it was a privilege to be involved in the effort to restore such a unique space,” Dowdle says.

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Overcoming frustration All major adaptive reuse construction projects come with frustrations and, as Dowdle says, “it’s a given” that such work isn’t always going to go as planned.

That truth is “amplified” when restoring an older building, he adds. In this case, the infrastructure related to water management had to be both bolstered and supplemented (at far left).

“At Silo Studios, we had to keep adjusting and moving forward in spite of daily changes or challenges,” he notes. “Thanks to the regular interaction we had with the team of experts we were working with, we were able to ensure a solid product.”

Restoration Dowdle says Flyway wanted to salvage as much of the original tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring as possible (at left).

“Despite the majority of it having been water damaged — with other areas that had been soaked with oil that dripped from the machines or covered in an ungodly amount of sawdust and dirt — we were ultimately able to save and restore enough to cover the floor in the main lobby,” he says.

Collaboration Silo Studios will feature a few elements that lend themselves to versatility for future usage, such as the outdoor space (pictured at top).

“With all of its challenges and constant adjustments, this project showed us once again that it takes more than just individual star players who are experts in their field to have a successful project,” Dowdle says.

“It takes everyone — the owner, designer, engineer and contractor — working together as a team to truly complete a complex project like this successfully.”

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Still in the works The pandemic won’t stop plans to turn more of Cool Springs into a quasi-urban, walkable district

BY MATT BLOIS

early a quarter century ago, crops covered an adjacent field as construction started on what is now the Carothers Building. It was the first major office project in Cool Springs and would long house Primus Financial Services. It rose as most of the surrounding land was agricultural and the internet was brand new.

A few years later, the dot-com bust slowed down the U.S. economy, but other office buildings were popping up in Cool Springs. The real boom started in 2005 when the Japanese carmaker Nissan decided to build its North American headquarters on Carothers Parkway, paving the way for a string of major corporate headquarters. Nissan finished its offices in 2008. That year, the financial crisis devastated the global economy. By 2009, unemployment in the county climbed to 7.5 percent.

However, development in Cool Springs exploded over the next decade. Boyle Investment developed its Meridian complex and Jackson National, Ramsey Solutions, Schneider Electric and Mars Petcare all opened or added to large offices in the area. More recently, medical device manufacturer Medacta, car maker Mitsubishi and Spirit Airlines all announced major office projects.

Cool Springs is now in its third recession since transforming into a regional office hub, but developers say the area is poised to weather this one just as it did the others. The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing back construction timelines but could end up making the area even more attractive as companies and employees based in cities look for more space in the suburbs.

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Workers from dense, expensive cities searching for a lower cost of living have been migrating to the Nashville area for a long time. Between 2013 and 2017 alone, more than 2,000 people moved to Williamson County from the Los Angeles, Chicago and Phoenix areas.

In the midst of the virus outbreak, several developers are moving forward with projects that promise to further change swaths of Cool Springs into a quasi-urban, walkable business district filled with restaurants, shops and other amenities. Glenn McGehee, president of Franklin developer SouthStar, estimates the coronavirus outbreak has pushed back by about six months the timeline for his company’s Aureum development at the southwest corner of Carothers and McEwen Drive.

“We’re very excited about the future. Is it going to happen as fast as we would have told you it was going to happen? … We had hoped to already be moving dirt there,” McGehee says.

“That’s just a product of our environment. It’s not because the site’s not a good site.”

Aureum will eventually include 480 apartments, 750,000 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space and 700 hotel rooms. McGehee hopes to start construction by early 2021. He says some tenants are skittish because of the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus but he doesn’t expect

that to last. He sees the pandemic forcing companies in dense cities to reconsider their offices, which could benefit areas like Williamson County — and he’s not alone.

“This pandemic is only going to accelerate that trend,” MarketStreet Enterprises Development Director Dirk Melton said. “The population growth of Williamson County is going to be gangbusters. There’s no reason to believe that’s going to be any different today than we thought six months ago. We need to be in a position to respond to that in the development community.”

MarketStreet — the master developer of The Gulch neighborhood in downtown Nashville — aims to do that with its East Works District in Cool Springs. The firm plans to build 500,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of retail and restaurants and 600 hotel rooms around the Carothers Building, the same property that was surrounded by crops in 1994.

Melton says MarketStreet hopes to draw on the company’s experience in The Gulch to create a walkable neighborhood packed with restaurants and stores.

“People only want to park their car once.

They want to have amenities at their doorstep,” he says. “That’s probably the most successful aspects of The Gulch. You’ve got close to 80 different restaurants, retailers and enter-

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tainment venues … The Cool Springs project will be a smaller microcosm of that.”

Melton says East Works will also be less dense than the Gulch, with lots of open space. His team doesn’t expect the first phase of construction to start until the fall of next year. Between now and then, MarketStreet will have to determine what to build in the first phase — not an easy task in the middle of global pandemic.

“Our job as developers is to build what people want, in the location that they want it at the price they’re willing to pay,” Melton says. “With the pandemic, it’s very, very early in the process of trying to discern what the global changes to commercial real estate look like.”

By the time MarketStreet delivers the first phase of East Works, the COVID pandemic will be over. But it’s not clear whether office spaces will look the same. At SouthStar, McGehee says it’s probably too early to know what the health crisis means for office development.

“I don’t think people are in a real rush to totally redesign the way we do offices,” he says. “I think there is this wait-and-see. Certainly, con-

versations are being had after going through a pandemic: ‘What does the next one look like?

How can we be better prepared?’ Those are conversations that are going into design.”

Melton agrees that it’s hard to predict how offices will change, but he imagines that companies may prioritize collaborative space over offices and workers might only spend a few days a week on site.

“That’s when the meetings happen, that’s when the collaborations happen,” he says. “The physical space has to respond to what that is rather than having a floor full of desks.”

North Carolina-based developer Highwoods Properties still plans to build up to 1.4 million square feet of office space in the Ovation development already underway but progress is currently stalled. A co-developer has failed to build the retail and residential portion of the project, which makes it hard to market new office space.

Despite the delays, Highwoods Senior Vice President Brian Reames says he’s optimistic about the future of the Cool Springs office market. Even with rising vacancy rates — which hit

double digits even before the virus outbreak — Cool Springs remains a good place to build.

“Cool Springs has really never experienced a vacancy rate like that, but it’s because there’s a lot of building going on to respond to the energy,” Reames sys. “It’s a great submarket, and it’ll just be a matter of time before it’s back.”

According to research firm Avison Young, the vacancy rate for office space in Cool Springs rose from 7.1 percent in the second quarter of 2018 to more than 10 percent at the end of 2019 and nearly 16 percent in the middle of this year.

Melton says the task of anticipating trends in office development is like a hockey player moving to where the puck is going to be. Getting there too early means climbing vacancy rates and wasted resources. Getting there too late means a missed opportunity.

“We’re hopeful to get, just like everybody else, more visibility about how the market’s responding to the situation we’re in right now. It’s changing week by week,” he says. “Hopefully, when it’s time to go we’ll be ready to go, too.”

VITALS

PAT E N T S T R AD E MAR KS C O PYR I G H T S T R AD E S ECR E T S CYB E RS ECUR I T Y T EC H N O LO GY L AW I P L I T I G AT I O N

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Steeling for the next surge Hospital leaders, designers look to learn from the system’s response to COVID

BY KARA HARTNETT

n some aspects, there’s no more certainty about the future of health care than there was a few months ago before COVID-19 arrived. While handling the immediate needs of patients and providers, the industry also has stepped back to take stock of its ability to initiate changes and direct money to projects where consumer behavior is demanding more urgent action — think the broad implementation of telehealth and a greater shift to home health services for aging adults.

Many consumers are still keeping their distance from their health care as the pandemic drags on,

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both by switching to telehealth or by postponing or altogether abandoning needed care. But when activity returns to normal in a post-COVID environment, the hospitals they visit will likely look different in several ways. It quickly became clear this spring that hospitals across the country were not prepared for a health crisis on the scale of the pandemic and that change is needed if the nation’s health care system is to better respond to similar events in the future.

The number of beds in any given hospital is typically based on the peak demand for those beds over the course of a year. That’s why during some flu seasons, hospitals typically operate at 100 percent of their capacity. But this spring showed that adverse health events impacting communities on a broad scale require an extra level of response. As cities and states issued shut-in mandates and sought to stock up on supplies, medical equipment, testing materials and more, many also built possible surge sites in parking garages, community centers and tents outside. Authorities also loosened licensing restrictions and sought help from clinicians in retirement while recruiting medical students to staff testing sites.

VITALS

‘This is just about getting ready for the next time this will occur.’

RANDY KEISER, TURNER CONSTRUCTION

Many of these measures were taken on the fly and the response could have been streamlined and more effective with better preparation. That lesson will also be incorporated into hospital blueprints. The central idea: Build for typical market demand but have the ability to rapidly add capacity in the face of another public health emergency.

“A big trend in hospitals is remodeling them so they have plenty of capacity in their oxygen and they have surge capacity so in case of an emergency you can set up a screen with two patients in one room,” says Randy Keiser, a vice president and national health care director at Turner Construction in Nashville. “It’s a discussion we are having: Can we increase the capacity of hospitals in a surge situation by 50 percent? Can we have rooms that we can switch to double occupancy?”

Such flexibility would extend beyond patient rooms, Keiser says, into common areas and office spaces around the hospital. This would allow facilities to scale up their bed volumes without having to use outside locations that are more difficult to properly staff. It would also make the process of activating and deactivating surge capacity during a pandemic a lot easier since everything needed to do so would be built into the building’s design.

The first project Keiser worked on that included this type of feature was a renovation of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston early this year. Executives at the famous facility invested in an in-caseof-emergency project that would require additional beds and oxygen supplies.

“To price that up for a new project? I kinda shook my head and thought, ‘Geez, I have never heard of that before. That seems to be a waste of money, myself,’” Keiser says. “But no more than two months later, the pandemic came out and I thought, ‘Man, you guys must have one heck of a crystal ball.’ I’ve been doing this for 40 years and I had never heard of that until January. Come to find out that would have been really helpful in a lot of hospitals.”

Since then, Keiser says his team has had lots of discussions with hospital chains about including surge capacity in new projects or renovating facilities to bulk up for future health crises. That could look like what Vanderbilt University Medical Center leaders did this spring when they revamped part of a parking garage to serve as a testing center and triage space in case a surge in regional COVID-19 cases exceeded their bed counts. Or it could, as James Albert of architecture and design firm Hord Coplan Macht wrote for Healthcare Design magazine this spring, building better surge infrastructure at outpatient centers or laying the utility groundwork for temporary nearby triage facilities that could be built quickly.

“Frankly, this is just about getting ready for the next time this will occur,” Keiser of Turner Construction says. “It may be this fall with the second surge or maybe five years from now [with] a new pandemic.”

A built-in safety net — other features being explored include reimagining common spaces and waiting rooms, new ventilation strategies to circulate in outside air for infection control and general walking guides like those grocery stores have adopted to regulate traffic and human-to-human contact — could be the difference between adequately managing future events and widespread shutdowns that cripple economic activity. While much work is still needed to fix other parts of the nation’s response to the pandemic, hospital designers are working to ensure their clients are better prepared to take on future health crises.

“I would find it hard to believe that any hospital would have been in a diversion mode if they had the capacity to expand by 50 percent,” Keiser says.

“Right now in the United States, there are less than a million beds. If you took 50 percent of those rooms and made them semi-private instead of private, you would have 1.5 million beds. That would make a huge difference in the ability to handle another pandemic of similar size.”

With the resources & the personalized service approach of support clients of any size now and in the future.

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VITALS

How COVID could lead to satisfied patients The maturation of telehealth will play a key role

BY KARA HARTNETT

ore than half of people in the UnitM ed States avoid seeking health care because they find the system convoluted and expensive, according to a recent poll conducted by Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index in partnership with Nashville-based Change Healthcare. A big part of the solution is going to involve care organizations tapping into new digital services to bring them back.

“When half of consumers say they’re avoiding care because the system is too hard to deal with, one could argue that, in a digital economy, the effort required to find, access and pay for care is a social determinant of health,” says William Krause, vice president of Connected Consumer Health at Change Healthcare.

Conducted in May, the survey included 1,945 adults across the country of various generations and with various insurance plans or lack thereof. Their message was clear, say survey administrators: Consumers want health plans and providers to simplify the experience, end the fragmentation and create a one-stopshop digital solution for accessing, scheduling and paying for health care. Organizations that capitalize on these demands now will gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace — and it’s already unfolding.

“What we are seeing on the organizational side is obviously a shift to more digital interactions in terms of care delivery but also in terms of the piece of the patient experience that extends beyond clinician-patient interaction,” Alicia

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Daugherty, managing director for the Market Innovation Center and Service Line Strategy Advisor programs for Advisory Board, tells the Post.

More than 80 percent of survey respondents said they believe shopping for health care should be as easy as shopping for other common services, with 76 percent — mostly baby boomers, who are projected to account for about $260 billion of Medicare’s annual acute-care costs by 2030 — saying they wish there was a single place they could shop for health care.

Similarly, more than seven out of 10 respondents said they want their insurance and health care providers to communicate more via modern, online platforms and 85 percent think it should be as easy to compare health care costs as it is with other services.

In total, two-thirds of consumers surveyed said finding, accessing and paying for care is cumbersome. The COVID-19 pandemic made things even more difficult for patients and doctors but regulators lifted many restrictions that led to major changes. Clinics and hospitals adopted online scheduling platforms that improved communication. The digitization part of this equation still comes with some fragmentation, according to Daugherty, because many providers have invested in technologies that don’t communicate with each other — yet.

“In the interest of time and agility, that integration, while it would be great to have, isn’t as much of a priority. So they are taking a little bit more of a piecemeal approach,” Daugherty says.

“I think connecting all of it is the next step.”

The team at Complete Health Care, which operates two clinics in Nashville, has seen its efforts to digitize its work pay off during the pandemic. Having put in place in 2018 technologies that allow the practice to run completely paperless, owner Ty Babcock says the transition to care delivery under COVID was rather seamless. Complete was able to establish pop-up care sites and drive-thru testing — it was one of the few private clinics in the area to do so — because its scheduling system was already online.

Being two steps ahead on that front has allowed Babcock and his team to build new revenue streams from consulting on best practices for reopening. The practice this summer also accounted for nearly 10 percent of Davidson County’s COVID tests. All of this was made possible by making health care more

FRUSTRATIONS AND A WISH LIST

75%

of consumers believe “Telehealth is the future of medicine”

81%

believe “Shopping for health care should be as easy as shopping for other common services”

56%

agreed “The health care experience is so bad today I know people who will do anything to avoid care”

67%

said “Finding a good doctor is like finding a needle in a haystack”

68%

said “I often don’t know how much a medical treatment / appointment costs until months after the fact”

Source: The Harris Poll and Change Healthcare

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SAVE THE DATE accessible, easier to understand and user-friendly, Babcock says.

“We have tried to take every friction point that we can outside of the patient experience,” he says.

“That really is what allowed us to go so quickly to the curbside treatment and virtual waiting room because you are able to do all of the paperwork in your car or at home.

What we found is removing those friction points is what has allowed us to not delay their care.”

A key cog in the system’s evolution Telehealth looks to be a big factor in improving patients’ experience. In the Harris/Change survey, three of four consumers said they believe telehealth is “the future of medicine.” About one in five said they used telehealth for the first time due to the pandemic and 65 percent plan to use it more often.

Many providers are meeting them there: With regulatory relief as a tailwind, organizations were able to flex their digital muscles to ramp up virtual doctor visits like never before. That allowed them to collect data and patient feedback to bring to insurer contract negotiations — where upcoming decisions on reimbursement will be critical to the future of telehealth.

So far, providers are reporting positive feedback. Patients are more likely to keep their appointments thanks to increased accessibility and are reporting clinical outcomes similar to in-person visits. Eight in 10 consumers now say COVID has made telehealth an indispensable part of the health care system. But will the entire industry buy in?

“My sense is that, because this pandemic has really introduced consumers to the idea of digital health care, they and their em-

ployers are going to begin wanting that to be something that is part of their package,” Daugherty says. “We may see employers more willing to cover virtual care for a greater number of services.”

Babcock estimates full implementation of telehealth in primary care could reach up to 70 percent of all patient visits, but that looks to be a long shot. Some organizations have said the extent of insurance coverage will dictate whether they adopt the technology while others say telehealth is worth it even if reimbursements aren’t at the same level as in-person visits. This would certainly be the case for government-sponsored insurance programs such as Medicaid, which typically cover transportation costs associated with health care.

Babcock also worries that telehealth could evolve into a large corporate model that, if not managed appropriately, might have patients log in to speak with doctors with whom they do not have an established relationship and where doctors don’t have good insights into their medical histories. Trust is a crucial factor in the accuracy of diagnoses and overall quality of care and patients are more likely to disclose their struggles to a physician or nurse with whom they’ve worked before.

This is why it will be vital for independent clinics and health organizations to take strides with technological advancements as the industry evolves under the strain of the pandemic. If smaller players don’t commit, they’ll be left behind.

“There’s going to be enough demand,” Babcock says. “But if you aren’t doing it pretty well, it’s going to be difficult to stay in business and relevant because I think people are going to expect that to be at least an option.”

The Post will again host a group of local health IT leaders for an insightful discussion on how tech is reshaping Middle Tennessee’s massive health care sector.

Details coming soon!

10.15.20 11 – NOON

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L El eAaDdEeRr Ss

Best-laid plans Local universities face up to the COVID-19 pandemic

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

n the wake of the Great Recession a decade ago, the leaders of Cumberland University, a small private college in Lebanon, were forced to cut costs like so many businesses and households around the country. That meant no more retirement matching for faculty and staff, no pay raises and a workforce reduction.

Now, faced with the most abrupt economic interruption in generations, Cumberland management has deemed none of those measures necessary, at least for now.

“The full impact of the coronavirus pandemic remains to be seen economically,” says Paul Stumb, president of the university.

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This fall, the college is actually expecting increased enrollment. While Stumb expects some international students will be unable to return to campus, he says some local students are opting to attend Cumberland rather than leave the state or the region, especially as other schools pivot to online-only instruction.

Cumberland has established a hybrid model of learning, where most students will attend half of their classes in person and watch the other half online in order to reduce the number of people in any given classroom.

Like other area colleges, Cumberland has no plans to adjust its curriculum due to the pandemic, either as part of economic contraction or as a distance-learning pivot.

“At this time, MTSU has no plans to eliminate degrees, programs or departments due to the COVID pandemic,” says Middle Tennessee State University Provost Mark Byrnes. “We have, however, restructured our fall course schedule to observe social distancing guidelines while giving maximum on-campus access to courses that include hands-on activities that are crucial in meeting learning outcomes.”

In Murfreesboro, MTSU has nearly 10

times as many students as Cumberland, and it’s part of a larger state network of universities. That size and layer of bureaucracy create both boons and barriers for a university facing the unprecedented pandemic.

Fisk University in Nashville has fewer than 1,000 students (up slightly from the prior year, though not as much of an increase as expected). Fisk Chief of Staff Joseph Watkins acknowledges that larger institutions including MTSU and the University of Tennessee have more resources on campus, such as their own medical school or a more robust internal stable of experts.

“The pros and cons almost reach an equilibrium,” Watkins says. “The pros are that we can move faster. It means we can communicate a singular message easier. The radius we have to hit is smaller. The drawbacks of being smaller is that we don’t have a medical school or a nursing apparatus here so we have to rely so heavily upon our partners, which are Meharry Medical College or other institutions. That’s what slows us down. We can create all these plans but we can’t necessarily effectuate them all without a partner.”

ERIC ENGLAND

LEADERS

Like Cumberland, Fisk is implementing a hybrid instructional model. But the two differ in that the Nashville college is dividing the fall semester into two sessions. For the first half of the term, freshmen and a handful of other students will be on campus. They will then switch with upperclassmen for the second half. Students must record a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival at Fisk and again after two weeks of on-campus isolation.

“We want to make sure our freshmen get accultured to Fisk in the same way that previous generations of Fiskites have,” Watkins says. “We felt that was the best way to make sure everyone had an opportunity to come to campus.”

None of these arrangements is ideal. University administrators, students and faculty, absent a deadly pandemic, would largely prefer to return for on-campus instruction. Leaders at both Fisk and Cumberland are confident that they have prepared for the fall semester

as much as possible by working with health experts and with peers in the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association. But that doesn’t mean the return to campus comes without risk — or inconvenience.

“Nobody really likes this but I think everybody understands it,” says Cumberland’s Stumb. “There’s still a lot of unknowns associated with this disease, so we can’t just say we’re not worried about students. But the truth is we’re much more concerned about the people our students might come in contact with — elderly faculty and staff, and students’ families.”

And while COVID’s effects may be tempered in younger student populations, administrators believe they are key to a successful adapted semester. Stumb says the university has a “social contract” with its students and is asking them to wear masks and engage with a daily health screening app. At Fisk, Watkins says leaders are trying to emphasize “shared responsibility” to students.

“We are easily able to communicate that to faculty and staff because there’s more control of faculty and staff,” Watkins says. “But for our students, especially if they’re freshmen just coming from high school, I don’t know if they understand that what they do individually impacts every single one of us. We’ve really been trying to stress to them that this is a shared responsibility. If you all work with us, we can have a semester that’s successful.”

As the past several months have proven, coronavirus has made long-term planning difficult. Circumstances change rapidly, upending best-practices guidance nearly overnight in some cases.

Most college administrators blanch at the prospect of changing instructional and residential plans in the middle of a semester, or on the eve of it, but COVID has forced their hand.

“Agility: We have adopted that as our mantra for this year. We just have to be agile,” says Stumb.

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LEADERS

Our Most Powerful Women program returns this year with another terrific group of women leaders from Middle Tennessee’s business and nonprofit worlds. On the following pages, we introduce you to Jane Allen, Mignon Francois, Shanna Jackson and Becca Stevens. They will gather Sept. 16 for a wide-ranging discussion on leadership and career growth that you’ll be able to attend virtually.

You can buy your ticket at nashvillemostpowerfulwomen.com.

As we did last year, we have teamed Most Powerful Women with the Model Behavior program from our colleagues at Nfocus. You can meet this year’s Model Behavior honorees on pages 42 and 43 and read more about the nonprofit causes dear to them at nfocusnashville.com.

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DANIEL MEIGS

LEADERS

mignon francois Founder and owner, The Cupcake Collection

Was there any advice that you received when you started that really stuck with you and inspired you? I often say that it was rap lyrics that changed my life. The lyrics are from a collaboration Kanye West and Jay-Z did called “Otis.” One particular lyric said, “They ain’t seen me ‘cause I pulled up in my other Benz / Last week I was in my other other Benz,” and I just thought, “Wow, he has options and they’re luxurious!” And I just asked God, “Why?” And I felt that urging on my spirit that said, “Are you willing to do what he does to get what you have?” At that point, I knew work was going to be required of me.

Is there a piece of advice that you give to other leaders when they come to you for guidance? I always tell people that the ideas they have are not their own. If you realize that the ideas are really not yours, that they were dropped to you, you would hold them differently. It wouldn’t be as hard to get that thing started if you knew that you were just being asked to take care of it, if you were being asked to steward over it. God himself is asking to collaborate in this with you.

I like to say it like this: If the creator of a party invited you to an all-white party but specifically called you and said, “I want you to wear orange to my party,” when you get to the party you’re gonna wear that orange in all your glory, knowing that you must be special. And I think that’s what happens in business and entrepreneurship and leadership. You’re singled out and you’ve been asked to steward over a gift. When we see it that way, I think, it could take some of the fear of failure out of it.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge facing women in leadership today? I think we discount ourselves and our experiences.

I say this all the time: I was a stay-at-home mom and I liked to call myself a household manager. Because that’s exactly what I was doing. I was managing seven people’s lives.

And I think that we discount those experiences, especially when we’re going back into the workforce and saying, “What do I have to offer?” You’ve definitely got something to offer.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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LEADERS

becca stevens

Founder, Thistle Farms

How would you say your leadership style has evolved over time? I have learned to let go so I can keep evolving.

New things come when we make space.

What have you learned about how to lead during the COVID pandemic? We have to dig deep into our creative side so that pivoting doesn’t make us dizzy. I am going back to my most basic principles that called me to this work.

Will you bring anything about the way you run an organization during the pandemic into the post-pandemic world? I hope I can bring more gratitude and humility. I also hope I can bring all I have learned about systematic racism into the communities that I serve.

What’s the best leadership advice you received early in your career? Do small things with great love and big things will emerge if we are paying attention.

What advice would you give those looking to become an active mentor? Walk alongside people, don’t try and lead them. We can be great leaders as we walk with people and respect their journey.

What’s the most common piece of advice you find yourself giving other leaders? Trust your work more than your inspiration. Inspiration comes and goes, but faithfully executing the dayto-day tasks is how we bear fruit. The inspiration will come.

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LEADERS

shanna jackson President, Nashville State Community College

What has come relatively easy for you during this odd pandemic time? What has been difficult? I have always been adaptable to change.

Therefore, I have viewed this uncharted time as an opportunity to transform and enhance the support Nashville State can provide to our new and returning students. Without question, the most difficult aspect is not knowing when the pandemic will end and the impact it will have on our students and community.

Who was an important mentor and what’s the most lasting tenet that person left you?

My mother, Carol, has been and still is my most important mentor. She instilled in me at an early age that I should never let my gender or the color of my skin stop me from being successful. That has allowed me, even through difficult challenges, to never stop striving toward achieving my goals.

What’s the most common piece of advice you find yourself giving other leaders? Adversity is going to happen; how you respond as a leader is critical. It is important to view every challenge as an opportunity to innovate and transform, and to make the organization better.

Can you tell us about a pivotal moment or decision you made that helped advance your career? Around 2003, I decided I wanted to become a community college president. I boldly asked my president at Vol State, Dr. Warren Nichols (who was fairly new), to be my mentor.

Over the years, that mentorship became foundational in understanding the experiences and skills I needed to acquire to reach my goal.

How would you say your leadership style and strengths have evolved over time? The most significant evolution occurred when I began to lead leaders. You realize that not everyone wants to be, or should be, led the same way. Even in my role today, I am evolving and adapting to the needs of those I lead, in order to provide an environment for them to thrive and be successful.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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LEADERS

jane allen

CEO, Nashville Entrepreneur Center How would you say your leadership style and strengths have evolved over time? I set high expectations for the business/organization and for the employees. Yet, I am fortunate to have and continue to work with talented people who know well how to do their jobs. They bring me in when they have a problem, then we work through it together. I trust people to do what they need to do.

In the beginning, I felt the need to be involved in most everything and work closely on most everything. This was limiting to the business, the people and myself.

What is the biggest challenge facing women in leadership? Based on my experience, it is often loneliness — a longing to spend time with friends and colleagues. Between the time spent with the business/organization and the time spent with family (both of which I always wanted to do), there was not much time left for peers with whom I could talk or share experiences and ideas.

Who was an important mentor and what’s the most lasting tenet that person left you? U.S. District Judge Edward H. Johnstone taught me that it’s good to ask why, to think for yourself and to work to keep the playing field level.

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What have you learned about how to lead during the COVID pandemic? The importance of communicating and the reality that home and business are now intertwined. Thus, you need to consider things other than the employee, such as how their family is doing, talking through barriers for getting work done and how they are handling stress, anxiety and fears.

How do you think you’ll lead differently once we’ve put the pandemic behind us? In some ways, the same — lead by example and help those with whom I am fortunate to work with expand and grow professionally — while at the same time hopefully a bit more patient knowing that everyone is processing and absorbing this pandemic in different ways.

LEADERS

ESTEEMED COMPANY For nearly a decade, we’ve been honored to bring together area women leaders for candid and inspiring conversations about leading, mentoring and paving the way for others.

Here’s who preceded this year’s class and where they worked at the time.

2011 Sharon Hurt, Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership Ellen Lehman, Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee Jenneen Kaufman, Tennessee Titans Linda Rebrovick, Consensus Point Claire Tucker, CapStar Bank

2012 Megan Barry, Premier Agenia Clark, Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee Aileen Katcher, Katcher Vaughn & Bailey Dawn Rudolph, Saint Thomas Health

2013 Jacky Akbari, Nashville Career Advancement Center Sherry Stewart Deutschmann, LetterLogic Stacey Garrett, Bone McAllester Norton Janet Miller, Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce

2014 Lisa Boggs, Bridgestone Americas Glenda Glover, Tennessee State University Heather Rowan, TriStar Centennial Medical Center Sally Williams, Ryman Auditorium

2015 Paula Lovell, Lovell Communications Joelle Phillips, AT&T Renata Soto, Conexión Americas Christie Wilson, The Wilson Group Real Estate Services

2016 Tammy Hawes, Virsys12 Beth Hoeg, Trinisys Nicole Tremblett, HCA Healthcare Rachel Werner, Built Technologies

2019 Maneet Chauhan, Morph Hospitality Jane MacLeod, Checkwood Mekesha Montgomery, Frost Brown Todd Sharon Roberson, YWCA Nashville & Middle Tennessee Carol Yochem, First Horizon Bank

RESILIENCE

Nashville is a resilient city filled with risk-takers. 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. nashvillechamber.com

LEADERS

The Nashville Post salutes the Nfocus 2020 Model Behavior honorees

Perri duGard Owens

Emerald Mitchell

Tina Doniger

Julieanna Huddle

Nashville Children's Theatre

Moves and Grooves

To learn more about these dynamic philanthropists and the causes dear to their hearts, pick up the September issue of Nfocus or visit nfocusnashville.com

Community Resource Center

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CASA Nashville

DANIEL MEIGS

LEADERS

Martha Silva

Karen Moore

Sara Morgan

Tara Scarlett

Mary Flipse

Nancy Keil

Conexión Américas

Nashville Zoo

Project Redesign

Renewal House

You Have the Power

Second Harvest

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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SPORTS

Shifting gears Next year’s Superspeedway race could be the tip of the iceberg for NASCAR’s return to the region

BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER

t’s been nearly a decade since NASCAR last held a race in Nashville. And it has been almost four decades since the city last saw a top-level Cup Series race.

Between April 2001 and July 2011, the Nashville Superspeedway in Wilson County’s Gladeville community hosted 21 races of the NASCAR Xfinity Series, NASCAR’s second-level racing circuit that showcased many of the sport’s stars before they became household names. Carl Edwards, who has since retired, was a five-time Xfinity winner at the track while superstar racers Brad Keselowski,

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Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Clint Bowyer were making names for themselves a decade and some change ago.

They and other NASCAR Cup Series stars will return next June as part of a surprise fouryear deal announced in June.

“We were seeing those guys as they were coming up before their prime,” says Chase McCabe, co-host of Darren, Daunic & Chase on ESPN 102.5-FM. “Now that they’re in their prime and competing for and winning championships, it’ll be huge to have them back as a part of the Cup Series.”

The 1.33-mile Superspeedway concrete track was completed in 2001 by Dover Motorsports Inc. and, in addition to Xfinity races, also hosted NASCAR’s truck series and IndyCar races through 2011. But, says former Tennessean racing reporter Larry Woody, not having NASCAR’s flagship series on the calendar meant the other races couldn’t keep the track afloat as a business. The Indy cars didn’t return after 2008 and the Xfinity and Truck series left after 2011.

Dover executives soon after said they would close the track and have since sold about 377 acres they owned around the track to development company Panattoni. But they’ve kept the track itself in game shape, so to speak.

“I was given a tour [this summer] by some of the Dover people and the place looks like it hadn’t changed in 10 years,” Woody says. “As far as I could tell, there really wouldn’t have to be much done in terms of preparations. When the Superspeedway was built, it was a state-ofthe-art track. Now, if it’s successful next year and they sell 30,000 seats, they could immediately start adding more seats.”

The average attendance at a Cup Series race hovered around 61,000 before the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Somewhere between $8 million and $10 million will be spent to prepare the venue for 2021’s race and more could follow should the demand require an expansion. The absence of high-level auto racing in Music City appears to have helped grow fans’ appetite, and the city’s growth as a travel destination helped lead NASCAR to

SPORTS

bring its annual awards banquet downtown last year and return races to the Superspeedway.

“We are excited to bring NASCAR racing back to Nashville, a place where the passion for our sport runs deep,” NASCAR President Steve Phelps said in June when announcing the 20212024 races. “The Nashville market is a vital one for our sport.”

Bringing Cup Series racing to the Superspeedway — “I thought that train had left the station,” Woody says — could also prove to be a catalyst for the region’s other prominent track. The cityowned Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway held 42 Cup Series from 1958 to 1984, the last one a Geoff Bodine win. Nearly 35 years later, executives of Speedway Motorsports Inc. — which owns eight of the sport’s best-known tracks, including Bristol Motor Speedway — approached the city with a $60 million public-private spending plan to upgrade and expand the historic 0.6-mile track in Wedgewood-Houston, which first held a race in 1904.

The SMI plan would look to tie the track’s infrastructure to that of the adjacent Nashville SC stadium being built. Mayor John Cooper has said he is looking for a “holistic” redevelopment of the entire Fairgrounds property but hasn’t committed to SMI’s plan in any way.

“It’s huge because it would be unique in showing NASCAR’s commitment to Nashville,” McCabe says of SMI’s proposal.

“The fact that NASCAR would

be willing to go to two different tracks in the same market with two different ownership groups just shows you how important this city is to them.

“If fans want this to happen, they need to go out to the Superspeedway. That makes that decision that much easier once the work on the Fairgrounds that needs to be done is done. NASCAR would be like, ’Sure, we’ll hold two different races at two different places because the fans want it.’”

Should their plan come to fruition — and that’s a big if given Metro’s finances and the overall economic picture — SMI executives would be expected to first bring Xfinity and Truck Series races to the Fairgrounds. But an investment as big as the $60 million being floated would only really pay off with a Cup race. And Woody says that’s a very long shot.

“I don’t think the Fairgrounds has a prayer of getting a Cup race,” he says. “It’s too old, it’s land-locked, surrounded by schools and neighborhoods and would take millions and millions of dollars to get access roads in there, so the Fairgrounds never had a chance to get a Cup race back, in my opinion.

“They had Cup races until 1984 until NASCAR pulled the races then. It was almost impossible back then when the Fairgrounds only seated about 20,000 people. It was a great track in its era, and it’s still a great track for local racing. But in terms of hosting a Cup race, it doesn’t have a chance.”

SPORTS

bring its annual awards banquet downtown last year and return races to the Superspeedway.

“We are excited to bring NASCAR racing back to Nashville, a place where the passion for our sport runs deep,” NASCAR President Steve Phelps said in June when announcing the 20212024 races. “The Nashville market is a vital one for our sport.”

Bringing Cup Series racing to the Superspeedway — “I thought that train had left the station,” Woody says — could also prove to be a catalyst for the region’s other prominent track. The cityowned Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway held 42 Cup Series from 1958 to 1984, the last one a Geoff Bodine win. Nearly 35 years later, executives of Speedway Motorsports Inc. — which owns eight of the sport’s best-known tracks, including Bristol Motor Speedway — approached the city with a $60 million public-private spending plan to upgrade and expand the historic 0.6-mile track in Wedgewood-Houston, which first held a race in 1904.

The SMI plan would look to tie the track’s infrastructure to that of the adjacent Nashville SC stadium being built. Mayor John Cooper has said he is looking for a “holistic” redevelopment of the entire Fairgrounds property but hasn’t committed to SMI’s plan in any way.

“It’s huge because it would be unique in showing NASCAR’s commitment to Nashville,” McCabe says of SMI’s proposal.

“The fact that NASCAR would

be willing to go to two different tracks in the same market with two different ownership groups just shows you how important this city is to them.

“If fans want this to happen, they need to go out to the Superspeedway. That makes that decision that much easier once the work on the Fairgrounds that needs to be done is done. NASCAR would be like, ’Sure, we’ll hold two different races at two different places because the fans want it.’”

Should their plan come to fruition — and that’s a big if given Metro’s finances and the overall economic picture — SMI executives would be expected to first bring Xfinity and Truck Series races to the Fairgrounds. But an investment as big as the $60 million being floated would only really pay off with a Cup race. And Woody says that’s a very long shot.

“I don’t think the Fairgrounds has a prayer of getting a Cup race,” he says. “It’s too old, it’s land-locked, surrounded by schools and neighborhoods and would take millions and millions of dollars to get access roads in there, so the Fairgrounds never had a chance to get a Cup race back, in my opinion.

“They had Cup races until 1984 until NASCAR pulled the races then. It was almost impossible back then when the Fairgrounds only seated about 20,000 people. It was a great track in its era, and it’s still a great track for local racing. But in terms of hosting a Cup race, it doesn’t have a chance.”

Pinnacle Financial Partners would like to congratulate Jane Allen and the 2020 Most Powerful Women honorees.

JANE ALLEN CEO, Nashville Entrepreneur Center

Pinnacle Financial Partners are proud to be EC Partners.

TECHIE

Raising capital during the pandemic Creativity, diligence can help entrepreneurs close deals

BY CHRIS SLOAN

very business needs capital. Even in normal times, raising money from outside investors is time-consuming and challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced an entirely new set of challenges, both with tighter cash flows and with trying to raise outside money in a once-in-alifetime economic environment.

Despite the pandemic, investors are still investing and private investment activity has not really decreased much since the pandemic started. This article suggests a few strategies for entrepreneurs to consider when raising money during these challenging times.

E

Build an investable business The core attributes of an investable business are no different now than they have ever been.

Investors may describe their criteria in different ways, but most involve some variation of these four Ms: model, market, management and momentum.

Model refers to a scalable business model that meets an important customer need. Market refers to the size of the market opportunity. Momentum refers to the successes and milestones that have already been achieved.

Last but not least, management refers to the leadership team that will be tasked with running the business.

Investors often will tell you that, of these four “equal” criteria, the last is more equal than the rest. Whatever the case, if you have a fundamental flaw in your business, either address it before you try to raise money or at least have a well-developed plan in place for you to address it once you have the capital. This is even more true during times such as these. If it’s easy for an investor to say no, they probably will.

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Lower the valuation Once you have found interested investors, how can you close the deal? Hopefully, the deal will follow a normal course and result in relatively normal terms. However, if you need to provide extra incentives for an investor to close the deal, or invest a larger sum of money, what options do you have?

The first, and most obvious, is to lower the agreed valuation. In other words, reduce the purchase price so that investors get more bang for their buck. If the investment is in preferred stock, other possible strategies include shifting from a non-participating preferred to a participating preferred or a capped participating preferred stock, offering more favorable terms for pro rata investment rights or other adjustments to the preferred stock rights and preferences.

If the investment is in common stock, another strategy might be to offer some of the rights typically reserved for a preferred stock investment, such as a board seat, pro rata rights or rights of first refusal.

Other terms to consider If the investment is in a convertible note (or similar convertible instrument, such as a SAFE or a KISS), terms that could be adjusted in the investors’ favor include a higher interest rate, a higher discount and a lower cap. As with an investment in common stock, some of the same rights associated with a preferred stock investment might also be enticing for a convertible investor. It may also be possible to entice investors by offering more favorable terms to those who commit at an earlier date or commit to invest a larger amount.

The pandemic has created challenges for all of us. That’s no different for entrepreneurs.

However, by applying the same creative, problem-solving mindset that they apply to building a business, entrepreneurs can still raise capital even in this challenging environment.

Chris Sloan is a shareholder at Baker Donelson and chair of the firm’s Emerging Companies Group. He focuses his practice on startups and other emerging businesses and also handles complex software and other IT transactions for small and large companies. csloan@bakerdonelson.com

‘The core attributes of an investable business are no different now than they have ever been.’

CHRIS SLOAN, BAKER DONELSON

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‘There are now more betterquality opportunities’ The Nashville Capital Network’s Sid Chambless takes stock after his team’s 50th investment

he Nashville Capital Network this summer hit a notable milestone: Some 17 years after being launched to pool growth capital for early-stage ventures in and near Middle Tennessee, it invested in its 50th company, Atlanta-based healthy food venture ModifyHealth. The organization has put to work about $81 million since 2003 and its portfolio companies have combined to subsequently raise more than $980 million from other investors. Executive Director and Managing Partner Sid Chambless, who has been there from the beginning, spoke to Post Editor Geert De Lombaerde about the state of affairs in venture capital and what’s next for the NCN.

T

How has the NCN evolved most notably over the past 17 years? Our core strategy is still the same. We’re in a unique market where there are a large number of very successful entrepreneurs who have an appetite to invest in the next generation and the NCN can do the administrative work of pulling together deals. We refer to what we do as the acceleration round. We’re not going to mash our foot to the floor but what if we hire two more salespeople? Can we grow revenues more quickly?

Early on, it was mostly one lead individual saying, “This is going to be the price and the structure of this deal” and others followed or

didn’t. Now we have so much more data about terms, about the pricing of follow-up rounds and so on. We’re helping our individual investors better price the risk.

There was a lot of chatter in the mid2000s about the dearth of early-stage capital in the region. Has that narrative changed? I wouldn’t say that was ever the core issue. Yes, it was harder then to identify investors who knew how to invest and to help businesses grow. But with each of our funds, we’ve expanded around the edges. The biggest change has been that there are now more better-quality opportunities. More people are coming out of large organizations with great ideas and strong networks and we have more seasoned executives in both software and health IT to help them grow.

And then you look at some of the organizations that have attracted national private equity players. They have put Nashville on the radar for Google Ventures and other large investors. The VC arms of Humana, UnitedHealth and Cigna have all invested with us.

How is COVID changing what you do?

So much of what we do comes down to “Do we believe this team can do what they’re saying they can do?” So COVID has changed how we do our due diligence. We’re doing more background checks, taking a little more time

Sid Chambless

to get comfortable with things. But the ModifyHealth deal, for example, looks very much like it would’ve pre-COVID. Deal flow the last two years had already been a bit slower. A lot of private equity has been raised and invested and recapitalizations are tying up management teams for a few years. So we’re having to wait a little, maybe track people a little longer and look for others who have ideas that are keeping them them up at night.

The best thing for us to do is to stay in constant contact with our people. But what used to be breakfast, lunch or drinks is now Zoom, Zoom and Zoom. The way we fish off our pier has changed.

Does that also impact plans for your next fund? Not so much. The biggest difference for us versus five years ago will be that we’ll be able to point to some pretty meaningful exits. Trilliant Health from our Partners Fund produced an outstanding return for us in less than 24 months and before that, we had Aspire Health and Emma. We have other companies on great trajectories — XOi Technologies, Groups360, Contessa Health, AxiaMed and more. For our next fundraise, we can point to a lot of follow-up transactions and exits.

We’ve invested in eight companies from our most recent fund and we have two more in the queue before the end of the year. In 2021, I’m confident we’ll raise another fund. We’re not going upmarket and we’ll still focus on the capital gap. But we could cut bigger checks — our typical deal has been an average investment of $4 million with the NCN taking half — and still do the same number of deals.

NASHVILLEPOST.COM | FALL 2020

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GORDON: The one thing that we tell all our

customers is that, even if you have a plan, it doesn’t matter if you don’t practice it. You can know every rule of football but if you get on a field with an NFL team, you might get killed.

You have to actually do it.

Traditional table-top exercises typically start with an event already happened: You get a call from the FBI and they say, “We’ve found 500,000 of your customer records on the dark web.” What do you do? We actually simulate the attack happening. We use the analogy of a flight simulator a lot. When you’re practicing anything, you have to create muscle memory.

‘The bad guys aren’t taking a COVID vacation’ Cybersecurity pros talk about what’s current, what’s next and what business leaders should be doing to protect their organizations

ollowing up on a story in our summer magazine about cyberattacks during the spread of COVID-19, the Post hosted a July panel discussion on cybersecurity that featured Debbie Gordon of Cloud Range, Mary-Michael Horowitz of Asylas and Dan Hulen of Cherry Bekaert. Here, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, are some excerpts from that chat, which was moderated

by Post Editor Geert De Lombaerde.

F

DE LOMBAERDE: If you’re a business leader

framing or reframing your thinking on this, where do you begin and who do you involve?

HOROWITZ: You want to involve board members, members of the senior leadership team, any business process owners and of course end users. I would say, “Involve everyone!” The best clients for us are the one whose senior management team are very much involved and understand this and want to do the right thing.

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First, you want to understand what you’re protecting. Where are all the places that your data lives? You can certainly rely on technology for that exercise but you also want to talk to the stewards of the data. You want to talk to your third-party vendors as well to understand how your data is flowing through their networks and that they’re being good stewards of your data.

Then you’ll want to look at the threat landscape. What are the current threats against your crown jewels? Are you going to accept that risk, transfer that risk or mitigate that risk? Then you’ll want to assess your current security programs. Is it worth it to retrofit them or to start fresh? A lot of times, we find that starting fresh is more cost-friendly.

Once you’ve evaluated your organization against a framework, you’ll want to iterate and improve that plan. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it type thing, unfortunately. And I’d be bad at my job if I didn’t highlight the need to practice an incident response plan. It’s very, very important to have some table-top exercises to put that plan to the test. The plan never goes as planned.

HULEN: In terms of incident response, having that plan is absolutely critical. If you wake up first thing in the morning and your entire network is down and all of your machines are encrypted, who are you going to call? Many people really don’t know. It’s not written down or it’s old.

If you do not have cyberliability insurance, I would put that at the top of the list and I would get some good counsel for coverage.

There are a lot of types of insurance out there.

It may cover the introduction of legal counsel.

It may cover some ransom fees you may have to pay. And it may cover some basic forensics.

But it may not include data recovery. So if you have to recover all of your data and you have to start from scratch, that may be one of your most significant costs.

DE LOMBAERDE: How much has changed

in the past few months as so many of us have been working from home? Is security a fundamentally different conversation now?

HULEN: Absolutely. There are a number of new risks. A couple of different things are happening. There’s the use of personal home computers, especially if they’re able to access their materials via the cloud. If you’re not locking down your various cloud systems, that could be a major problem. Obviously, home networks aren’t very secure and there’s plenty of opportunity to jump in. You can also have infected machines on the network. And your personal home computer doesn’t have a local firewall so it’s ready to be compromised.

There’s greater use of corporate VPNs and remote desktop-type technologies out there

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but some of those have been hastily put together. If your IT group has put up a remote desktop and it’s not properly secured and it doesn’t have multi-factor authentication, that just opens up the corporate environment.

Another risk in working from home is the risk of greater downtime. If you have an issue, it’s just so much more difficult now for your IT service folks — either managed services that are outsourced or inside — to try to get to you and help you out.

Similarly, and related to not being in the office: Many corporate machines are not getting patched. The advent of the cloud is changing that game and that’s getting a lot better. I don’t have to be VPNed in. I can get those patches sent down to me.

GORDON: What you’ve been talking about

is very much user-focused. It’s also a much different environment for the cyberdefenders. They’re not sitting in a security operations center with five or 10 people, being able to look at logs and talk about and go through the same type of incident response that they would before they were working at home.

You can’t just lean over to your neighbor and say, “Hey, what do you think about this alert?” You might have to call somebody. And security people, stereotypically, they might not talk a lot and they’re happy being home and we have to force that on them. It’s a lot different when people aren’t in the same room with each other.

DE LOMBAERDE: What have companies gen-

erally been getting better at these last few months?

HOROWITZ: I’ll start with the good. They’ve certainly gotten better at paring back on all the extras and getting back to the fundamentals of running a business. They’ve gotten better at the work-life balance and working remotely from a technology standpoint. I’ve been so impressed with how quickly IT teams were able to pivot to a work-from-home environment.

I know it was clunky and it was weird but it’s 2020; everything’s weird.

But they haven’t gotten better at security.

Some folks don’t necessarily understand that the threats haven’t gone away. The bad guys aren’t taking a COVID vacation, I assure you. It’s almost like they’ve just been waiting for some op-

‘If you do not have cyberliability insurance, I would put that at the top of the list.’

DAN HULEN, CHERRY BEKAERT

portunity like this to pounce. Ransom demands have gone up 33 percent since Q4 of 2019.

It’s not the time to hope that cyberattacks go away. I can’t stress enough the importance of securing that remote workforce. Now that you have it in place and you’re good at it, let’s take a look at how the wheels maybe fell off your security program because now you have a whole new attack surface with your workfrom-home employees.

DE LOMBAERDE : How should companies of

various sizes think about bringing people in house versus contracting out for IT security services?

HOROWITZ: It doesn’t matter what size your organization is. You really need to look at it from a risk perspective to your organization.

I’m from the world of outsourcing so I’ll say that, with the shortage of security professionals, you don’t want to have to worry about hiring someone and it just being a revolving door. And unless you’re someone of equal or greater talent, it’s really difficult to even interview these people, right? But if you hire an organization, you have this agreement in place that they are doing these things for you.

GORDON: There’s a reason the managed security services industry is growing so fast.

There are more than 2.5 million open jobs in cybersecurity and it’s getting worse. The number of threats grows and you can’t just accelerate people’s skills and learning. So companies need to outsource. They don’t know how to interview people, they don’t know what they don’t know and it’s not their skill set.

Technology can’t solve every problem. At the end of the day, people are going to be your

weakest link in the chain. So much has been focused on technology and these thousands and thousands of products, but at the end of the day, all of that is for naught if you don’t have the people who know what they’re doing.

DE LOMBAERDE: Dan, is there a benchmark

for business owners and leaders for how much they should allocate to spending in IT security?

HULEN: There are certainly general benchmarks. Overall, IT spending is about 2.5 to 2.7 percent of revenue. That has gone up over the last 10 years or so from about 2.3 to the 2.7 range. Then you’ve also seen an increase in IT security spending: In 2005, the IT security spend as a percent of the overall IT budget was about 7.5 percent. That’s gone up, as of 2017, to 10.6 percent.

So if I’m a $20 million revenue company and my IT spend on average is about $540,000, the portion of security would be about $60,000. What’s interesting, though, is that, with the advent of cloud services, we’re seeing nascent businesses that are very disruptive to traditional industries and the amount of money that they’re spending on IT is not $540,000. They’re not spending that at all but that $60,000 for security is about right.

DE LOMBAERDE: We’ve received two questions that get at this topic. A lot of organizations are looking at their budgets and where they could cut. Where can people cut back and still be safe?

HOROWITZ: I’m not telling them to stop spending money. It’s something I refuse to do.

They’re already not doing enough, honestly. I get it: All of those is time and money, right? If money and time were infinite, everyone would be as secure as possible, I have no doubt.

Again, these things are not set-it-and-forget-it. You have to keep these things alive and do the things you established in your security program. If you say, “We’re just going to sit it out this year,” then you’ve essentially gone against your plan.

GORDON: There are a lot of companies that

invest in technology that, for lack of a better term, sits on the shelf. One of the things that companies can do to determine where they need

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TECHIE

to cut is to not cut things that are useful. Figure out what’s not useful. Figure out what you may have invested in that you’re not using or that you’re not using to its capacity. If it’s not doing the job for which you bought it, reassess. And that’s when a lot of companies will then go and outsource. They’ll say, “We have all this technology and we don’t know if it’s working. Let’s just scrap it all, cut our losses and outsource.”

HULEN: I want to affirm that. These are sophisticated systems and if you’re not living and breathing them, you don’t have the background and experience of looking for those anomalies and being able to determine what’s good and bad and how to tune the environment. Outsourcing is a huge factor to bring that talent to bear. Becoming an expert in these areas of cybersecurity is not the right application of the money. However, the money still needs to be there.

HOROWITZ: I think a good measure is to

say, “If the people whose data we’re protecting were in this room, what would the conversation be like? Would we be talking in front of them about spending less money protecting the data they assume we’re protecting?”

DE LOMBAERDE: It sounds like everyone is

on the same page about the need to get cyberliability insurance. What does that cost? Is that market mature to get consistent pricing?

HULEN: I don’t think the market is mature.

The insurance companies are absolutely learning what this looks like. I would also say that, if you have a policy with $250,000 in coverage, that’s not enough. We’re talking about millions of dollars of coverage that deals with things like ransomware and especially with the data recovery side.

Some companies unfortunately are buying little policies for a couple hundred dollars a month and that’s just not going to cut it.

Somewhere in the range of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in cyberliability coverage for a $30 to $50 million business is more in line with where it should be.

DE LOMBAERDE: As we start to wrap up,

what should business leaders be thinking about two, three, five years from now?

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‘If it’s not doing the job for which you bought it, reassess.

And that’s when a lot of companies will then go and outsource.’

DEBBIE GORDON, CLOUD RANGE

GORDON: It’s not getting any better. Call me

cynical, but I think we all agree that the threat landscape is growing. This is modern warfare.

A lot of people think a hacker is just some kid sitting in his basement messing with things but it’s much bigger than that. We are going to see things that can affect our power grid and our water and things that we take for granted in life.

HOROWITZ: It’s pretty rare that the victim quickly becomes the wrongdoer, right? But now, when cyberattacks happen, it’s almost immediate that the finger starts to point at the organization to say what were you doing to keep this from happening? And complacency is no longer the excuse that it was even 10 years ago. Then it was, “Who are these crazy children in hoodies attacking these companies?” We know better now.

I’m not selling insurance but I feel like I am.

And I feel like companies regard what we do for them as insurance — and it essentially is.

You have to help them understand what the reality of this is but it feels like you’re selling based on fear, which doesn’t feel good.

But it’s true! You sit across from these really smart folks who have made excellent decisions to grow this business and be successful. But they’ve got their head in the sand for something that could literally bring them to their knees and it just happened to three of their peers last week.

HULEN: On the threat landscape: One thing we’re seeing is more automation and distributed computing and AI-based threats. The bad guys are becoming very, very skilled and cloud-enabled technologies and scripted infrastructures can spin up machines all over the world very quickly and press an attack on a victim.

On the defense side, look for more continuous testing, continuous vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. So we’re not just looking at, “Once a year, we’re going to get the audit done.” Rather, we’re going to continually make sure that our environment is as protected as possible and that our people are becoming those human firewalls.

DE LOMBAERDE: We’ve had one more question come in. “As the parent of a student preparing to go to college and looking at cybersecurity as a career — he’s sitting here with me now — what do you recommend he study?”

GORDON: A lot of schools are now adding cy-

bersecurity as a specific area of focus or a major or they’re having some specialization in computer science. Everyone thinks cybersecurity is a technical career but, really, there’s art and science to it. There’s critical thinking, there’s decision-making and communication. Many CISOs aren’t technical people; they’re leaders.

So even if your school may or may not have a cybersecurity program, it is about being a well-rounded decision maker with good critical thinking and then understanding the fundamentals of cybersecurity. There are so many jobs that cybersecurity could represent.

Not all of them are technical and they’re not all hackers.

HOROWITZ: And make sure he stays on the good side! The bad side, they make a lot of money but you want to keep him over here with the good guys.

HULEN: Coming from a long, strong technical background, I would say computer science focusing on networks and infrastructure security. That’s typically where these things come up out of. But I will absolutely affirm everything Debbie has said. It takes all kinds here on this battleground: business-oriented and security-oriented people. You cannot win without a full complement of people.

FAVORITES

My favorite sports-is-back moment during the pandemic Chase’s Denise Horvath soaks in special times by the diamond

IF COVID HAS REMINDED me of anything, it is to appreciate the little things in life. My family is a sports family. My husband and I both played college sports, and both of our sons, luckily, are just as passionate about it.

After only one baseball practice this spring for my 6-year-old Easton’s team, the Franklin Bombers, our baseball season was canceled. I had no idea at the time how long this would last and how hard it would be for both the kids and the parents alike.

The first social sporting event we were finally able to attend was in late June. It was a hot Saturday morning, and I have to say, we were all excited to be back at the field. In the first game, Easton got a hit and made it to second base. The next batter followed up with another hit to the outfield and Easton had a chance to score.

He rounded third and saw he had to slide to beat the throw. Easton had never had to slide in a game before. He slid into home and the umpire called him safe. He was so excited.

He threw his arms in the air, jumping up and down and grinning from ear to ear. I was grinning from ear to ear, too. The parents were cheering and all the players were giving each other high-fives.

Once you’re a baseball mom, you are always a baseball mom. Moments like that are always special, but now I try to soak them in a little more. I don’t think Easton or I will forget that slide for a long time.

Nashville is a special place that’s been so welcoming to our family. We love the hospitality and the sense of community here.

Going back to the ballpark is my new favorite thing because it put us back in touch with the things we love about our hometown.

Denise Horvath is head of Chase branch banking in Nashville.

ERIC ENGLAND

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INDEX

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS AND PANELISTS

A-C

L-N

Advisory Board 32

Larry Woody 44

Alicia Daugherty 32

Lauren Siler 6

Asylas 48

Manous Design 19

Aureum 28

Mark Byrnes 34

Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz 46

MarketStreet Enterprises 28

Barry Smith 17

Mary-Michael Horowitz 48

Becca Stevens 38

Meharry Medical College 34

Boyle Investment 28

META Real Estate Partners 22

Brian Reames 29

Metro Planning Department 14

CBRE 17 Change Healthcare 32

Middle Tennessee State University 34

Chase Bank 51

Mignon Francois 37

Chase McCabe 44

Mike Manous 19

Cherry Bekaert 48

NASCAR 44

Chris Sloan 46

Nashville Capital Network 47

Cloud Range 48

Nashville Civic Design Center 14

Colliers International 17

Nashville Entrepreneur Center 40

Complete Health Care 32 Conseco Group 18 Cool Springs 28 Corporate Real Estate Advisors 20

PA N ELISTS Debbie Gordon, Cloud Range Mary-Michael Horowitz, Asylas Dan Hulen, Cherry Bekaert S PO N S O R ED BY

Cumberland University 34

Nashville State Community College 39 Nashville Superspeedway 44

P-Z

D-J

Panattoni 44

Dane Peachee 19

Phil Pace 18

Dan Hulen 48

Phil Ryan 14

Debbie Gordon 48

Randy Keiser 31

Denise Horvath 51

Shanna Jackson 39

Dirk Melton 28

Sid Chambless 47

Dowdle Construction Group 25

SouthStar 28

Eakin Partners 17

Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association 35

Earl Swensson Associates 6 Fisk University 34 Flyway 25 Gary Gaston 14 Glenn McGehee 28

I N PA R T N ER S H I P W I T H

Mark Hollingsworth 13

Glynn Dowdle 25 Highwoods Properties 29

Paul Stumb 34

Steve Phelps 45

The Cupcake Collection 37 Thistle Farms 38 Tom Cash 15 Turner Construction 31 Ty Babcock 32

Jane Allen 40

Village Commercial Real Estate 14

Janet Miller 17

William Krause 32

John Cooper 45 John Tirrill 22 Joseph Watkins 34

INDEX

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS AND PANELISTS

A-C

L-N

Advisory Board 32

Larry Woody 44

Alicia Daugherty 32

Lauren Siler 6

Asylas 48

Manous Design 19

Aureum 28

Mark Byrnes 34

Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz 46

MarketStreet Enterprises 28

Barry Smith 17

Mary-Michael Horowitz 48

Becca Stevens 38

Meharry Medical College 34

Boyle Investment 28

META Real Estate Partners 22

Brian Reames 29

Metro Planning Department 14

CBRE 17 Change Healthcare 32

Middle Tennessee State University 34

Chase Bank 51

Mignon Francois 37

Chase McCabe 44

Mike Manous 19

Cherry Bekaert 48

NASCAR 44

Chris Sloan 46

Nashville Capital Network 47

Cloud Range 48

Nashville Civic Design Center 14

Colliers International 17

Nashville Entrepreneur Center 40

Complete Health Care 32 Conseco Group 18 Cool Springs 28 Corporate Real Estate Advisors 20

PA N ELISTS Debbie Gordon, Cloud Range Mary-Michael Horowitz, Asylas Dan Hulen, Cherry Bekaert S PO N S O R ED BY

Cumberland University 34

Nashville State Community College 39 Nashville Superspeedway 44

P-Z

D-J

Panattoni 44

Dane Peachee 19

Phil Pace 18

Dan Hulen 48

Phil Ryan 14

Debbie Gordon 48

Randy Keiser 31

Denise Horvath 51

Shanna Jackson 39

Dirk Melton 28

Sid Chambless 47

Dowdle Construction Group 25

SouthStar 28

Eakin Partners 17

Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association 35

Earl Swensson Associates 6 Fisk University 34 Flyway 25 Gary Gaston 14 Glenn McGehee 28

I N PA R T N ER S H I P W I T H

Mark Hollingsworth 13

Glynn Dowdle 25 Highwoods Properties 29

Paul Stumb 34

Steve Phelps 45

The Cupcake Collection 37 Thistle Farms 38 Tom Cash 15 Turner Construction 31 Ty Babcock 32

Jane Allen 40

Village Commercial Real Estate 14

Janet Miller 17

William Krause 32

John Cooper 45 John Tirrill 22 Joseph Watkins 34

PRESENTED BY

LEADERSHIP LESSONS Join the Post and Nfocus for inspiring stories, touching anecdotes and wise advice from some of the city’s top leaders. Our virtual panel discussion will feed your brain and lift your spirits.

MEET OUR PANEL

Jane Allen

Mignon Francois

Shanna Jackson

Becca Stevens

CEO, Nashville Entrepreneur Center

Founder and CEO, The Cupcake Collection

President, Nashville State Community College

Founder and President, Thistle Farms

09.16.20 NOON - 1:15PM

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