This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

It's Your Business with Michael Aikens is brought to you by WCTE, PBS, and the Tennessee Tech Center for Rural Innovation, with funding provided by the Rural Reimagine Grand Challenge and the Tennessee Rural Development Fund.

Some aspiring entrepreneurs are intimidated at the prospect of actually stepping out and making that first big move to starting their own business.

But what they fail to realize is that they don't have to do it alone.

There are many resources and entrepreneurs out there, especially right here in the Upper Cumberland, that know what it takes to start a business and are there to guide and direct them on their entrepreneurial journey.

And that is what this show is all about.

We hope you will see that the dream of owning your own business is not as intimidating as it may seem.

[♪♪] Part of owning a business is growing that business.

And Jodi Pitts, CEO of Magnolia Strategy in Cookeville, Tennessee, saw how important that aspect of entrepreneurship can be.

So she started her own business centered around helping established businesses reach their potential by providing a structured strategy for growth that is practical, actionable, and aligned with how those businesses actually operate.

We're in Cookeville, Tennessee, talking with Jodi Pitts, founder of Magnolia Strategy.

Jodi, welcome to the show.

Hey, Michael, thanks for having me.

Well, it's been a long time coming.

I'm so glad that you're on the show today.

So first question for you, Magnolia strategy.

What are you all about?

What do you do?

So at a really high level, what we do is we look at a business and help them understand what's working, what's not working and what's missing.

And then we fix those things.

A lot of people think that they have a marketing problem, that they really have more of a systems issue.

And so we like to look at the business holistically and see how everything is working together marketing, sales, operations and customer service.

And then we like to craft that in a way that helps them to create predictable and continual revenue increases for their business.

Now, I'm sure you probably can't talk about specific names of businesses that you have, but what types of businesses do you find yourself working with?

We primarily work with, businesses that are in the 2 to $15 million in revenue per year range, and we don't have an industry vertical.

We're really working with a lot of different businesses right now, but we work really well with service business.

You know, HVAC companies, places like that.

We also work really well with engineering and specialty engineering firms, a little bit of manufacturing.

I mean, we're kind of all over the place right now.

We go where the need is.

So walk me through.

Let's say I've got a business.

I need your help.

How do I find you?

But moreover, what am I actually going to ask you?

What am I going to expect when I come through the door?

Well, the way that we get started with a lot of businesses is they come to us because they know that something is broken or they're kind of at a growth cap.

They know that they want to grow, but they don't necessarily have the internal business structure to grow.

And then they also know that they need a little bit of marketing help.

And so when they come in we follow a really specific plan.

We are a strategy company through and through to the core.

And so a lot of what we will do is start with diagnostics.

We firmly believe that you should not be advising companies to do marketing blindly.

We need to know your business.

We need to understand it.

We need to understand how it works from the inside out, before we can really tell you where you should be spending money.

So Magnolia has been around for five years, right?

Yes.

But you've been in the business of business for quite some time, so let's take it way back before even Magnolia started.

Tell us a little bit about how you got here.

What does your training look like?

What is your experience look like.

And then we'll take it from the business aspect.

Yeah.

You know, mine, like many other people's story, is not necessarily sequential.

I started at WCTE Central Tennessee PBS.

I was working with them, handling a lot of different things.

And I was doing particularly community outreach events and fundraising.

And Avery said to me, you have to be able to market the events that you're running because we're small and we don't have a whole marketing team.

At that point, I really hated marketing.

I actually didn't like it at all, which is a lot of times how we found our career path, right?

We're forced to do something.

And so I started doing it.

Then, I left WCTE and worked in private IT for a little while.

And while I was there, the owner said to me, listen, I want to position this business potentially for sale.

Can you help me with my systems and my processes and just the business as a whole?

And so we started working on business systems, operational efficiency, but also the marketing and sales.

And that's when it really started to click for me that there's this greater need to connect the business as a whole.

You know, the top of your funnel should contact with your sales, which should connect with how you're servicing customers and how you get referrals.

And it should be a cyclical thing.

So you've got all this experience.

The light bulb has come on.

You said, you know what?

I'll stick it out on my own and we'll start Magnolia.

Walk me through what?

That process for the last five years has actually looked like from the entrepreneur herself.

Well, I can tell you that it did not look how I thought it would look, which I think is the journey of most entrepreneurs.

We started really as a tactical marketing company, which is where a lot of marketing companies are servicing clients.

But like I said, we saw this greater need.

And so we just gradually started evolving into bigger projects, more of a holistic business approach.

And then we developed out, a system where we're helping to diagnose the problems for the business as a whole and then put out the tactical stuff afterwards.

So let's talk about personal Jodi for a little bit.

You have kids.

You've got a husband.

You are busy and active in the community.

You do all kinds of things.

How do you manage being the businesswoman, the entrepreneur with home life?

What does that look like?

Well, I think that that's a challenge, right?

If I'm being honest, it's a challenge for everybody.

How do we balance everything in our lives?

And the biggest thing for me has just been to give myself some grace.

You know, I know that it's okay if my house isn't clean.

One week, or it's okay if things take a little longer than I anticipated.

So just giving myself grace.

But I'm actually very intentional about everything that I do.

I start with a grounded routine.

In the morning, I get up, have my coffee, I go outside, I try to put my feet in the grass, and I pray every morning.

And I start with a structured routine and just being intentional and trying to show up for people that depend on you in the right way is really important.

I got to ask you to.

You're a woman entrepreneur.

How does that make you feel?

Proud.

Honestly, you know, marketing and any business in general is really hard.

Business is hard.

It's hard to be an entrepreneur because you're doing all of the things you're wearing, all of the hats.

You know, you're doing much more than whatever the core skill set of your business is.

So how do you expand yourself to do all of those things?

I'm a lifelong learner.

I never stop learning.

I always want to be absorbing new information and and just trying to make myself the best version that I can be for tomorrow.

So speaking to any entrepreneur that's out there, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to them?

My biggest advice would be to, take a step back from your business and look at how it's actually running.

Busy doesn't always mean productive.

And so you can't measure your business by how busy you are.

Those things should be equating into real impact.

And also, as a business owner, the business should be serving you, not the other way around.

The business should serve your personal goals, and all of your business goals should align with your personal goals as an owner.

One of my favorite questions to ask started this about five years ago.

You've learned a lot since then.

Looking back to when it all started to where you are right now, what do you know right now that you wish that you knew then?

What would you tell yourself then?

The biggest piece of advice I would give myself is that it's okay to not have everything figured out in the beginning.

Our business has seen, you know, different iterations of itself, and that's okay.

It's okay to follow the market.

It's okay to rebuild.

It's okay to restructure.

And sometimes you're building the plane while you're flying it, you know?

But seize opportunities, I think Jeff Bezos said, if you're not a little bit afraid.

Every day in your business, you're doing something wrong.

And that's very much how it is to be an entrepreneur.

So I want to pick up on what you just said about being afraid.

How do you deal with being afraid?

Being an entrepreneur is kind of scary, isn't it?

How do you how do you deal with that on a day to day or long term basis?

You know, I lean a lot on my staff.

My staff is incredible.

And so we're really great at each of us has a core skill set.

And just leveraging that to make ourselves as a business as good as we can be.

But on a personal level, you know, imposter syndrome and, you know, feeling of inadequacy, those all come with owning a business.

That's just part of it.

But I'm a firm believer in iron sharpens iron.

And so if you can be around the other business owners that help elevate you, that help, you know, promote your brand and your business and just really love on you as a person, it helps to make it a little less scary.

So last question for you.

Let's look to the future.

What do you think the future holds in store for you?

I would love to have a standalone building.

I would love to be working with clients who are growing and expanding our footprint across the southeast region.

I'd love to have a beautiful space that we could welcome people into, you know, to use for events and be having interns.

I love having interns and mentoring the next generation of talent.

I think all of those things are really high on our radar.

Well, it sounds to me like you're well positioned for that.

I wish you all the best.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, it's a pleasure.

[♪♪] The restaurant business can be daunting.

And Jay Albrecht found that out when he started his restaurant, Seven Senses.

But through trial and error and hard work, Seven Senses thrived and has become a vital part of the historic West side of Cookeville, Tennessee.

And now Jay has used his experience with Seven Senses and has opened another restaurant called Savor right across the street.

And he's seeing much of the same success in this new endeavor as well.

[♪♪] We're here in Cookeville, Tennessee, talking with local restaurateur and community leader Jay Allbrecht.

Jay, a big welcome to the show.

No, thank you very much.

It's great to be here with you.

And, I appreciate you having me, Michael.

Of course.

Well, so let's start out with the basics.

You own restaurants.

Tell us a little bit about the restaurants that you own and what are they all about?

Started, about 13 years ago with seven senses.

And, when we opened up, it was really all about southern comfort food, American food.

Just trying to give people a new option in town at that point.

And of course, here we are 13 years later, and we've expanded across the street to savor Cookeville, which which actually took over the Seven Senses menu.

We've, made a few changes here and there, but mostly it's the same menu you had at Seven Senses, gave us a chance to come back across the street just a few months later, and we were able to put a different menu in place for lunch and a dinner menu is on its way soon as well.

So thinking back 13 years ago, you thought I could do a restaurant.

What really made you think I want to do this?

And really, how did you get started down that path?

It's really funny because I always said, you know, you're out eating, you're out doing your thing.

And, I always said I never wanted to be in the restaurant business.

I see how hard it is.

People are challenging in every way.

And and I didn't really want to do that.

But Cookeville, back in 2013, needed something else.

It needed to start the growth process.

And, you had Crawdaddys.

That was a mainstay then already, amongst the locally owned restaurants.

So you got Spanky's across town a little ways, and then you, Father Toms was brand new.

Other than that, you didn't have a lot of locally owned restaurants.

So this was just an opportunity to kind of expand the quality of life options and food options in particular in downtown Cookeville from a locally owned perspective.

And, just kind of, start a new path.

And, and I think now you look at it today and I'd like to think we were at least a small part of getting everything going in the right direction with everything that we have now.

And, I'm just so pleased with what the West Side and downtown Cookeville looks like today.

Did you have any experience in this?

Had you been in the restaurant industry?

I mean, how do you come up with a menu?

How do you come up with a location?

How do you how do you do this?

Yeah.

The location was easy.

I'll start there because it was, sort of right across the street from Crawdaddys.

And my thinking was, from a business perspective, at the very least, we're going to get the run over from them, but they can't handle.

So there's come over and check us out while, you know, if we can't get into Crawdaddys.

And wanted to be a part of this side of town so that that part was easy, the other, really comes down to, well, I had no experience, so I had to learn a brand new business.

That was really that was the hardest part of all of it was learning the restaurant business.

I'd been in newspapers.

I've been in marketing and publishing, and, public relations and that kind of thing.

I thought I could handle the marketingside of it, but I don't know how to run a restaurant.

And, learning on the fly and learning the hard way was a big part of starting this process back in 2013 and getting to where we are today.

Well, you know, I've talked to people in the past that thought, you know, what can make a great hamburger or a pizza or whatever.

I think I can open a restaurant.

It's not at all just that.

I mean, the food obviously is a very important aspect, but there's so much that goes on behind the scenes.

For those that don't know, tell us, what do we really not know that goes on behind the scenes?

Well, it's a it's a very complex, organism if you will, you have marketing, you have distribution, you have, you have manufacturing, you have customer service, you have quality control.

All of those things are built into this business, and it's a lot of other businesses.

But then you have the people come in the door and all the different requests that you have, the modifications on menu items.

And you're trying to do all of that and a very, very tight deadline.

It's very, very difficult to keep all those pieces working in the right, in the right way.

And, and as efficiently as possible.

And then you throw into that, equipment malfunctions, building issues, whether it's plumbing or electrical or any of those things becomes an immediate emergency because we almost we have to have almost all of those things at any given time to operate the way that we need to operate, to let people in the door and to be able to satisfy them.

So you're kind of on pins and needles every day you open and you're hoping that everybody shows up to work.

You're hoping that all the equipment works and then you're hoping that everything just goes smoothly.

And it and then you kick start it all over again the next day.

And the number one thing for me, though, that keeps me on pins and needles.

I mean, I know my people, I can manage people, I can't manage the equipment side of it and what might go wrong and what we have to work around, and that that's what really frustrating.

It's not like your copier going down in your office, and you just don't make copies for a day.

If if we have a cooler go down or a frier go down or another important piece of equipment, we probably can't operate that day.

And so it changes.

It changes your mindset on doing business and how important all those things are.

You know, I hear entrepreneurs say all the time on the show where you're married to the business.

So how are you effectively splitting yourself between these two businesses?

Well, I have good people.

Number one, it takes good people to be able to expand a business and to be able to do the things that you want to do.

And, you know, we had a structure in place and we had, a good team of people in place.

And so you, you feel like you it's fairly easy to, to just replicate that, especially when it's right across the street and we're not going across town where we don't have a lot of travel involved.

It's not really a logistical challenge.

So that was number one for me was when the building across the street came available that now houses Savor Cookeville, it seemed like the easiest possible proposition for expansion.

If there was going to be one.

And, so I jumped on it and we I guess the rest is history.

So one thing that I'm always amazed about any business, but particularly the restaurant industry, how are you dealing with inventory?

Your inventory.

It can't just sit on a shelf.

Right?

Right.

You've got to get it out there.

How do you manage inventory and how are you doing that twice.

So the number one thing there is having history.

We learned very quickly what the expectations are, how many people we think are coming in the door.

And so we're able to manage that after a little bit of time, we're able to manage that.

A lot of restaurants fail quickly.

Within that first year or so because they simply can't cash flow.

They go through so much money when they first open the doors, because they have to have so much inventory that some of it ends up going to waste because it doesn't get used and they don't want to run out of food.

So you make sure you have enough food.

So it's hard to manage that in the beginning.

You have to you have to be able to persevere through that first few months, at least in order to to get to where you have the history to where you can, you can guess better about what the needs are going to be.

And obviously, in our world, yeah, we're we're trying to eliminate as much waste as possible.

But you always have some waste and there's no way to get that exactly right.

We have a, computer system that gives us a complete product list of everything that's sold.

And then when we're going through our ordering, about three times a week, we make sure that we're kind of comparing notes and seeing what's sold.

What do we need?

What were the sales trends or what are we what do we need for next week or next month?

In talking to other entrepreneurs Maybe somebody is watching this show right now and they're thinking, you know, I could start a business, whether it's a restaurant or anything else.

What advice would you give to them?

I would say do your homework, talk to other experts in the field, talk to community leaders.

Really get a feel for what that community is all about.

And what the demand might be, what the market looks like in general.

Just get it.

Get a good feel for that first.

And foremost.

And secondly, make sure that you know what your mission is and how you're going to fulfill that mission.

Make sure that you've got that down to a pinpoint and you only deviate from that if after you do your research, you find that you have to and that's fine to deviate, but don't get sidetracked.

Don't let the squirrels get in the way.

Actually follow through on what your intent was, because it's probably a good idea to start with, just, see it through and make sure, but make sure you're doing it the right way, all the way through.

So the last question for you, what does the future hold for Seven and Savor?

Well, you know, we're always adjusting with the times.

And part of that answer is going to be what happens with prices.

You know, and and how does that look.

We have to adapt, as we need to and, we don't want to, I want to keep things the way they are.

And, and add dinner to Seven as soon as possible.

Keep going strong at Savor and add some new menu items, change it up a little bit, give people something new.

But we also have to be looking at the economy and the environment that we're working in and figure out what what can people afford and what do people want.

The long and the short answer is, is, I don't know for sure, because we are always looking at what those adjustments might need to be.

Well, this has been a great conversation.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you very much, Michael.

Appreciate it.

[♪♪] The final segment for today's episode is a little different.

After six seasons and 96 interviews from across the Upper Cumberland Today's season finale also marks the final episode of It's Your Business.

Over the past six years, we've had the opportunity to travel all across the Upper Cumberland, meeting small business owners, stepping into their shops, their offices and workspaces, and hearing the stories behind what they do.

And as we bring this series to a close, I thought it was important to reflect on where it started, how it grew, and what these stories have meant.

When we launched Its Your Business six years ago, we were in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic.

It was a time of real uncertainty, especially for small businesses.

The original goal of the show was to spotlight how local business owners were innovating just to stay afloat during incredibly challenging circumstances, and what we found were people who refused to stop moving forward.

Entrepreneurs who pivoted quickly reimagine their services and adapted to constant change.

Those early episodes were about resilience and survival, and about reminding people that even during uncertain times, small businesses in the Upper Cumberland were finding ways to endure.

And as the pandemic eased and our communities reopened, the show evolved and the focus shifted from survival to growth, from short term problem solving to long term vision.

We began intentionally sharing entrepreneur stories with the hope that someone watching at home might see these journeys and think, if they can do it, maybe I can too.

And one thing became very clear over time small business does not look just one way.

It comes in many shapes, sizes and faces.

Some business owners we met had everything mapped out.

Others admitted they figured things out as they went.

But across those differences, there were common threads.

Nearly all talked about the level of commitment it takes.

Many shared that they didn't have every answer at the beginning, but they were willing to learn, adapt, and evolve alongside their customers.

And most emphasized that business ownership is not static.

It's a constant process of adjusting to meet real needs.

Each episode of It's Your Business featured two small business stories, but the third segment was always intentional, highlighting the local resources available to entrepreneurs in the Upper Cumberland because building a business can be rewarding, but it can also be overwhelming and no one should have to figure it out all alone.

Organizations like the Biz Foundry, the Tennessee Small Business Development Center, Tennessee Tech University Center for Rural Evolution, the Tennessee Rural Development Fund, and the Upper Cumberland Development District, and many more play a vital role right here in this region.

From start up guidance and one on one coaching to technical assistance, interns, affordable capital and specialized support, these organizations exist to help businesses not only start, but to grow.

And that kind of support matters, especially in a rural region like ours.

As we close out this series, I want to personally say how much I've truly enjoyed hosting It's Your Business sitting down with business owners, hearing their stories, learning about their challenges and successes.

It's been very meaningful work.

These conversations reinforce just how important small businesses are to our communities, and to the overall vitality of the Upper Cumberland.

I'm grateful to every business owner who shared their time and trusted us with their story, and I'm thankful for the viewers who tuned in and supported this series over the years.

Finally, I want to thank WCTE, our local PBS station and our sponsors, the Tennessee Rural Development Fund and Tennessee Tech University's Rural Reimagined Grand Challenge for making a show like this possible WCTE brings local stories, education and community focused programing into the homes across the region.

Supporting local PBS means supporting the ability to tell stories like these, stories that reflect who we are and where we live.

Thank you for watching.

It's Your Business and thank you for continuing to support local programing on WCTE and signing off for the final time.

I'm Michael Aikens.

[♪♪] It's Your Business with Michael Aikens is brought to you by WCTE, PBS and the Tennessee Tech Center for Rural Innovation, with funding provided by the Rural Reimagine Grand Challenge and the Tennessee Rural Development Fund.

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.