memphis
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Greg Christopher and the value of staying close to the pipes
He joined Mueller Industries in 1992 and became CEO in 2008. His career offers a view of industrial leadership measured in factory capacity, customer relationships and the patience to keep investing.
Brian J. Stephens and the School Nobody Thought to Sell
He once chose a school because of its librarian. Now the Caissa K12 founder helps public schools explain what families might otherwise never discover.
Kayla Rodriguez Graff and the case for choosing Memphis
She went to San Francisco to start a company. In Memphis, the SweetBio co-founder found room for a business, a family, and a larger idea of what success could look like.
Richard Lewis and the art of keeping the coach in the game
The former college basketball player built Redwood Services around owners who still wanted to run their businesses. His wager: a bigger team works better when people have a reason to stay on the court.
CTSI-Global finds the money hiding in your freight bills
A freight invoice can reveal more than an overcharge. CTSI-Global uses it to expose costly shipping habits - and help companies change them.
The Memphis Agency That Put the Grown-Ups Back in the Room
Sullivan sells a scarce agency commodity: experienced people who remain close to the work. From Memphis basketball to a global industrial merger, the same promise keeps turning complicated stories into campaigns people can actually use.
Caissa K12 and the Campaign for the Empty Desk
Public schools once waited for families to arrive. Caissa K12 treats every empty desk like an undecided voter - and only gets paid when the student comes back.
Epicenter Memphis Has a Better Opening Pitch: Meet Your Next Customer
The Memphis nonprofit connects founders to buyers, investors and industry expertise. Its bet is that the next promising startup may begin with a problem a local company already needs solved.
The $1.5 Billion Business Behind the Knock at Your Door
American Residential Services turned leaky pipes, failed furnaces and midnight air-conditioning calls into a national machine. Now the operator behind ARS/Rescue Rooter is pairing local technicians with centralized scale - and AI in the tool bag.
First Horizon Bank
First Horizon has spent 162 years learning a difficult banking trick: how to get bigger without becoming distant. Its wager is that Southern customers still want a banker who knows the market - plus the balance sheet, software and specialists of an $84.4 billion institution.
Erin Pryor
She holds a college kills record, once planned to play pro volleyball in Europe, and walked into a bank in 2010 knowing nothing about banking. Today she runs marketing and client experience for a $80-billion regional institution.
Varsity Spirit
Varsity Spirit is the dominant force in cheerleading and dance, a Memphis-based company that designs and manufactures team uniforms and apparel, runs training camps and clinics, and produces the sport's biggest competitions. Founded in 1974 by Jeff Webb, it grew from a summer camp operation into a vertically integrated business - apparel, camps, competitions, and governing-body partnerships - that touches more than a million athletes each year. It operates as a division of Varsity Brands, owned by KKR.
Nicole Lauchaire
Nicole Lauchaire is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Retail/D2C at Varsity Spirit, the Memphis-based company at the center of competitive cheerleading and dance. A former high school and Florida State cheerleader who drove to Memphis in a Honda Civic to take a lower-paying camp-adjacent job, she has spent roughly 24 years full time (29 counting her camp-instructor years) building the brand: the 2007 re-brand, the launch of Varsity TV, the St. Jude partnership, and the company's social and PR presence. She is one of the rare women to hold a C-suite title in sports, a TEDxMemphis speaker on reinventing your life, and a marathon-running, mountain-hiking adventurer who preaches saying yes.
Kayla Rodriguez Graff
Kayla Rodriguez Graff is the co-founder and CEO of SweetBio, a Memphis-based medical device company bioengineering Manuka honey, collagen, and hydroxyapatite into FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered wound care products (APIS and VERIS). She runs the company with her brother, scientist Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, and has raised more than $10M to expand access to affordable wound care, especially in communities hit hardest by diabetes.
Taylor Pearson
Taylor Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny Fund, a multi-strategy long volatility and tail-risk hedge fund whose sub-advisors manage over $10 billion in client assets. Before building Mutiny, he wrote 'The End of Jobs' (2015), an Amazon #1 bestseller translated into five languages that argued entrepreneurship had become safer than employment. He runs 'Interesting Times,' a monthly newsletter for 27,000+ founders, investors, and executives exploring complex systems, finance, and the future of work. A former college football offensive lineman who once marched for Bolivian workers' rights in Argentina, Pearson cold-called his way into digital marketing at minimum wage before buying a software company and eventually co-founding a hedge fund - all while living across eight countries.
Stephen Hackett
Stephen Hackett is a Memphis-based writer, podcaster, and co-founder of Relay FM - one of the most respected independent podcast networks in the Apple world. Through his blog 512 Pixels (running since 2008), his flagship podcast Connected, and co-hosting Mac Power Users, he has built a career at the intersection of Apple history, hardware archaeology, and independent publishing. He is also the driving force behind Relay FM's annual St. Jude Children's Research Hospital fundraiser, which has raised nearly $5 million - a cause deeply personal to him after his son Josiah survived pediatric brain cancer treated at St. Jude.