“When you’re in the middle of the battle, to be policy-driven is smart, to be politically-driven is dangerous.”  - Jeremy Faison Few people have had a closer seat to the important issues, drama, and national and international garnering headlines involving Tennessee politics than Representative Jeremy Faison, Chairman of the Tennessee House Republican Caucus. Representative Faison discusses what drew him into politics and what it’s like to be a leader of a party now enjoying a supermajority. In a Paul Harvey fashion, Faison weighs in with the “rest of the story” on the alleged complai ..read more

“It’s already a presidential race and lots of people are going to come out and vote for the President…however, we know…that about 18% of the people who go into that booth don’t keep going down the ballot… If you’re in the voting booth, don’t stop… Make your vote count all the way down.”  -Megan Barry In a hotly anticipated interview, Climbing the Charts sits down with former Nashville Mayor Megan Barry. Barry served as Nashville’s seventh mayor and was the first woman ever elected to the office. Barry’s tenure as Music City’s mayor, however, was marked by almost Biblical highs and lows. M ..read more

“It’s a diverse world. Companies sell products to consumers that are very diverse. Their teams and technical talent should reflect the communities that they sell products to.” – Dr. Isaac Yao Addae Dr. Isaac Addae is a man with many hats – first-generation Ghanaian American, computer engineer, strategist, business professor, entrepreneur, investor, and author of “Black Boy Fly: Embracing My Ancestry, Blackness, and Purpose in the African Diaspora.”  Isaac also served as the Treasurer for Freddie O’Connell’s mayoral campaign, and now has agreed to wear yet another hat as the “Small and Min ..read more

“If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. But if you teach a woman how to fish, she feeds the village for a lifetime. The ripple effect that women entrepreneurs have on communities and the global economy is phenomenal.” — Sherry Deutschmann   Climbing the Charts sits down with Sherry Stewart Deutschmann, a serial entrepreneur, a sought-after speaker, a highly coveted board member, and the bestselling author of “Lunch with Lucy: Maximize Profits by Investing in Your People.”  But it is Sherry’s role as the founder of BrainTrust, wh ..read more

Former Mayor Karl Dean was known to ask, rhetorically and always in good humor, what Nashville would be without music (answer: Birmingham), but he could have substituted “the Ingrams” for music and arrived at the same punchline.  There are few beloved things in Music City without fingerprints, known and unknown, that in some way trace back or connect to the Ingram family.  While Martha Ingram was the driving force behind, among many other things, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, her son John, who now serves as Chairman of Ingram Industries, i ..read more

In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra famously proclaimed Jack Daniel’s the “nectar of the gods.”  Sales doubled, the warehouses emptied, and Mr. Daniel’s “nectar” was on allocation for the next twenty-five years.  In 2013, a state law in Tennessee established a legal definition of “Tennessee Whiskey” for the first time, better known as the “Lincoln County Process.”  While a few whiskey nerds followed the arcane legal and political developments that paved the way for official “Tennessee Whiskey,” on November 4, 2015 the worlds of music and Tennessee whiskey would again collide when Justin ..read more

In this episode, Climbing the Charts sits down with Republican Representative Todd Warner (District 92) and Democratic Representative Aftyn Behn (District 51). Aftyn, increasingly described as the “AOC of Tennessee,” the youngest woman elected to the Tennessee House, is poised to be a fearless advocate for progressive values. Todd, by contrast, is the “Unapologetic Conservative,” a successful business and family man who is devoted to protecting and furthering traditional, conservative values and constitutional freedoms.  These two, who had previously never met, go head-to-head on mat ..read more

On July 21, 2006, the New York Times published an article entitled: “Creating Demand for City Living in Nashville.”  The piece’s author, Lisa Chamberlain, noted that at that time, the frenzied pace of downtown residential development was slowing in major cities like New York and Chicago, but in cities like Nashville, “where no residential population had existed, people are suddenly hungry for an urban lifestyle and are willing to pay for it.”  Just three years prior to the publication of this article, there were all of 10 units for sale in downtown Nashville, but then something happe ..read more

For the launch of Episode 1 of Season 3, Climbing the Charts sat down with Sam Davidson, who on June 28, 2023, was announced as Jane Allen’s successor as the next CEO of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (EC).  Sam hit the ground running in this high visibility, high impact new role, which he describes on his Linkedin profile as: “Working to make Nashville the most entrepreneurial city in America.”   For more than a decade, the EC has connected entrepreneurs with critical resources to create, launch, and grow businesses, and has become a centerpiece of the connective tissue and busin ..read more

Early voting begins 20 days before an election and typically ends 5 days before Election Day.  Translated to the current election for Nashville Mayor and other local runoff elections, that means early voting started August 25th and will run until September 9th, with Election Day being September 14th. In the general election, which took place on Thursday, August 3rd,  101,245 votes were cast.  Councilmember O’Connell garnered 27,470 votes, or 27.13%, while Alice Rolli placed 2nd with 17,186 votes, which was good for 20.21% of the total vote.  But, with no candidate earning m ..read more