Michael Burcham and the business of opening doors

Michael Burcham had a CEO’s title and a coffee-making assignment. In the early days of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, the furniture was borrowed, money was tight, and the founding chief executive also took out the trash. The city’s aspiring founders needed somewhere to go. First, somebody had to make the place usable.

“I was the CEO, but I also took out the trash and made the coffee.” The sentence contains a reasonably complete job description for starting something. It also supplies a useful introduction to Burcham, whose career has moved between running companies, teaching students and helping other people become capable of doing both.

Cheap rent, borrowed chairs

The Center began operating in 2010, with Burcham serving as its founding President and CEO until 2015. He had initially supported the project as a donor and board member. He understood the difficulty it was meant to address: his own experience of building companies had included having to look outside Nashville for capital.

The first Broadway space had been flooded. Cheap rent made it workable; the team supplied the cleanup. Later came a much more complicated property: a historic trolley barn requiring careful renovation. The Center eventually moved into its permanent home debt-free in 2013. An institution devoted to getting businesses started had needed a considerable amount of starting itself.

There is something pleasingly unglamorous about that sequence. The organization promising to help founders first had to find premises, marshal support and solve its own practical problems. Advice about getting on with the work carried a little more weight when the person offering it could point to the borrowed chairs.

A French horn and a way out

Burcham’s explanation of why mentorship matters begins in rural Mississippi. He grew up near Booneville, on a farm outside the city. In his account of school, humor helped cover feelings of inadequacy. Two teachers intervened in ways that gave encouragement a practical shape.

His science teacher, Mrs. Beard, pushed him to take his ability seriously and backed that challenge with tutoring, competitions and science fairs. His music teacher, Mr. Lockhart, helped him become good enough at the French horn to earn a music scholarship. Academic funding and military service also helped make college possible.

The details give the familiar story of a supportive teacher some useful specificity. Somebody noticed a student. Somebody spent time. An instrument became a way to help pay for an education. The assistance arrived with things to do, and doing them enlarged the choices available.

That history helps explain the attention Burcham gives to developing people. He has described the influence of his first business mentor, too: conversations left him with questions to consider and more to learn. In his telling, the value of the relationship survived the meeting. The other person’s time became a stimulus for his own work.

The calendar problem

By 2012, Burcham was describing a constraint that anyone generous with advice eventually encounters. There are only so many people one person can meet in a day. He approached the limit as an entrepreneur might approach a bottleneck in a company: find a way to expand the capacity.

The result was training for mentors and master mentors. Experienced entrepreneurs could learn how to help others, and those people could carry the work further. He traveled to train hundreds of mentors. The White House recognized his entrepreneurship mentoring in 2012; he also helped lead Startup Tennessee and later co-chaired the national innovation and entrepreneurship advisory council from 2014 to 2016.

“As an entrepreneur, I grow things.”

Michael Burcham, 2012

The phrase applies neatly to a company. Applied to a mentor network, it becomes a question about how useful experience travels. A founder needs help interpreting a decision, while the experienced person needs enough restraint to let the founder think. Training creates a chance to make that exchange more dependable.

The customer gets a vote

At Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, that exchange becomes coursework. Burcham is Professor of the Practice of Management and Faculty Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship. In Creating and Launching the Venture, Executive MBA students take an idea through a sequence of tests before putting it before investors.

He began teaching in 1997 and joined Vanderbilt’s faculty in 2003. The classroom therefore runs through this career alongside the companies. For Burcham, developing a business and developing a person’s capacity to lead one have been overlapping assignments for years.

Teams identify a problem, define the customer, conduct interviews and work through competition and financial models. Deliverables arrive every two weeks. Eventually, months of investigation must fit into a ten-minute pitch. The process gives an attractive idea several opportunities to encounter an awkward fact.

Students have described being required to talk with actual decision-makers and explain revenue, costs and pricing. Those requirements bring a particular kind of friction into the classroom. A founder may like an idea very much. A prospective customer remains entitled to be unmoved.

Teaching entrepreneurship this way gives uncertainty somewhere to go. It becomes an interview to arrange, a number to examine or an assumption to revise. The founder still has to choose, but the choice can rest on more than enthusiasm. That is a modest promise for a course, and a demanding one to keep.

A plan that can change its mind

Burcham’s current position at Shore Capital Partners is Chief of Strategy, Research & Talent Development. He guides teams supporting the firm’s portfolio companies. His operating background includes leading three investor-backed businesses to exits; the assignment now includes helping other leadership teams build and execute their plans.

He began working with Shore in 2011 and formally joined as an Executive Partner in 2019. The connection between strategy and teaching is visible in his description of an annual planning review. Teams should revisit what worked, what failed and which assumptions no longer fit the market.

He has warned that plans can drift by a few degrees each year. Over time, the distance becomes consequential. The observation is particularly useful because it gives revision a proper place in management. A plan can be thoughtfully made and still require attention as customers, competitors and the business itself change.

That is also a fairly humane way to organize a difficult conversation. A team can examine an assumption together. What did we expect? What happened? What should change? The questions make space for learning without requiring everyone to pretend the original spreadsheet had foretold the future.

A useful person in the boardroom

His description of serving as a lead independent director begins with the executive’s authority. The CEO remains responsible for running the company. An experienced director can contribute perspective from having encountered similar difficulties, explain what happened and help the CEO reach an informed decision.

Trust takes repeated contact. Burcham describes showing up consistently, listening and asking questions before offering his own thoughts. A new relationship does not become useful simply because both people have impressive biographies. The CEO has to learn that the person across the table can be relied upon.

In a January 2026 discussion with Bill Clendenen and Charlie Talbot, the work of a board member was again examined through preparation, behavior and support for management. The emphasis reaches beyond attendance at a meeting. Directors need to understand the business well enough to contribute when the conversation becomes specific.

There is a recurring discipline here: allow the person doing the job to develop judgment. A mentor, professor or director can supply context and ask a difficult question. Taking the decision away would also take away the opportunity to learn how to make it.

A gold record, no singing required

Fortunately, the personal record contains objects more entertaining than a strategic plan. Nashville gave Burcham a gold record for his contribution to the city’s entrepreneurial community. His Vanderbilt students gave him a bobblehead, dressed in the suit and pale shirt he regarded as his working uniform.

Both gifts have the advantage of being hard to confuse with another certificate. They also suggest the different communities around him: a city accustomed to recognizing music, and students familiar enough with a professor to miniaturize his wardrobe.

His public timeline makes room for sailing, travel and a long-desired visit to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. These are small details, but welcome ones. A life spent helping people form businesses can still contain the simple pleasure of watching enormous balloons go past.

The room he helped assemble

On October 21, 2024, Burcham was inducted into Nashville’s Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame at the NEXT Awards. The ceremony took place at Schermerhorn Symphony Center. He had helped create the awards years earlier; now he was among the people being recognized.

He described the induction as his “It’s a Wonderful Life” moment. The comparison makes sense for someone whose work has spread through other people’s companies and careers. For an evening, some of those connections were gathered in one room, and the contribution became easier to see.

His writing continues the same effort. In The Art of Startup Failure, he pairs accounts of failure with comparable examples of success, drawing on experiences he has encountered and anonymizing failure stories. The intention is practical: help a founder notice a dangerous decision early enough to do something about it.

The chairs, at least, no longer need borrowing. The question that made them necessary remains available to each new class, company and founder: what would help this person take the next step? Burcham has spent a substantial part of his career making room for the answer.