UNTAPPED POTENTIAL

Programs take aim at women’s underrepresentation in tech

BY KARA HARTNETT

omen represent an untapped labor mar

W ket needed to ll out the Nashville technology workforce. e Greater Nashville Technology Council reported there was a more than 1,500-person labor decit in technology jobs in the region in 2014 — and the sector has grown 30 percent since then. In 2018, the number of tech jobs in Middle Tennessee, dened here as Davidson and 14 surrounding counties, totaled 49,465, according to research by Middle Tennessee State University Professor Amy Harris. at was an increase of 7.3 percent from the mark of 2017 and grew the tech sector’s share of all jobs in the region to nearly 4.3 percent.

Women’s representation in those roles is not growing at the same rate, however. Females make up half of the population and 48.6 percent of the overall workforce, but they held just 36 percent of Middle Tennessee tech jobs in 2018.

Still, Middle Tennessee is actually ahead of the curve nationally. While there is still a long way to go to reach gender parity by tapping a talent pool needed to ll job decits, the number of women represented in the region’s tech workforce was 3.2 percentage points ahead of the national average.

Prior to the dramatic economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, technology jobs in Middle Tennessee were projected to grow 15 percent by 2023, beating the national average by six points. According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, new additions to the labor force will be able to ll only about 30 percent of those jobs, making it necessary for the Nashville region and many others to tap talent pools not already making their way into the IT jobs pipeline.

Local colleges and universities house nearly 125,000 students in the surrounding area but only 6,000 of them are enrolled in tech-related majors. And women aren’t well represented in that group: e National Center for Education Statistics says women earn more than 61 percent of associate degrees and 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees across all U.S. post-secondary schools, but those numbers fall dramatically when analyzing tech programs: Only 20 percent of graduates are female. e diversity picture drawn by recent admissions data is even more bleak. Of all technology degrees sought in 2018, only 2 percent were from Black women, 1.8 percent were from Hispanic women, 3.5 percent from Asian women and 0.0002 percent from Native-American women. e education system isn’t the only driver of workforce equity, but it certainly is a basis for development. e Tech Council has been working to ll the labor decit by adding to the region’s technology education initiatives and community outreach work. Its Apprenti Tennessee program was born with the mission to ll mid-tier tech jobs through apprenticeship programs built for compatible workers despite their educational background — with an extra focus on recruiting women, minorities and military veterans to diversify the local workforce. e council also oers summer camps and internship programs for high school and college-level students, reaching deeper into the future of Nashville’s workforce and driving students’ interest in tech before they choose their post-secondary specializations.

Women in Technology in Tennessee, a community-based organization founded 20 years ago to support women in the technology sector, provides programming and leadership development for members and companies seeking to drive gender equity. e group also launched a mentorship program in partnership with Lipscomb University and MTSU that pairs professional women technologists with female undergraduate students to keep them engaged in the science.

According to recent workforce development research, girls typically become interested in STEM futures around the age of 11 but many lose interest by age 14, citing a lack of mentorship and gender inequality as the main contributing factors. WiTT’s mentorship program looks to change that, and last November, the program enjoyed record enrollment.

‘Part of the secret sauce of that is that we’ve got a community here that is committed to improving on the status quo.’

AMY HARRIS, MTSU

UNEVEN PROGRESS

A 2019 study of 26 tech occupations across Middle Tennessee showed that women hold 36 percent of all jobs in the sector. Here’s how women are represented in the three top-paying job categories, which have salaries at least 40 percent greater than the overall median of about $72,100.

Computer and information systems managers Median salary: $114,800 Percent women: 29.8%

Marketing managers Median salary: $109,000 Percent women: 48%

Computer network architects Median salary: $101,600 Percent women: 15.6%

Source: MTSU Department of Information Systems & Analytics

“I’m always just intensely proud of the dedication and commitment of the tech community here to improving gender representation,” Harris says. “You won’t get this looking just at the numbers, but there’s just a dierent culture here. I think tech in general gets a bad reputation because of a lot of the stereotypes that come from Silicon Valley, and I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t those cultural elements here. But it is dierent and better here.”

Harris says the most successful diversity initiatives come from private businesses themselves. In Nashville, she points to AllianceBernstein and Asurion as companies that have shown a big commitment to bridging the gender divide in tech jobs. As with many other diversity initiatives, such strategies can also be highly profitable: A recent Bloomberg study found female-led private technology companies are more capital-ecient, achieve 35 percent higher returns on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent more revenue than male-owned tech companies.

While growth projections have mostly been thrown out the window amid the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19, Harris says the tech sector has remained strong relative to other industries. As growth returns to Middle Tennessee, she hopes the community will continue breaking down societal divides and recruiting a diverse workforce in which innovation can thrive.

“e numbers show we are at a minimum consistent and in some ways ahead of gender representation,” she says. “But I also think that part of the secret sauce of that is that we’ve got a community here that is committed to improving on the status quo.”

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CHANGE AT WARP SPEED

Local tales of the rapid journey from shock to adaptation to recovery

No one could escape the jolt of mid-March. Sure, we could see the COVID-19 pandemic on the horizon, but few of us expected its arrival to be so sudden or its e ects to be so brutal. In the course of a month, the Middle Tennessee economy lost an eighth of its jobs and entire industries were forced to reconsider much of what they do.

On the following pages are a few stories of how local companies — in retail, technology, health care and manufacturing — did just that. Their case studies showcase the agility and the bravery to try new things, confi dence in their teams and plans — whatever plans were needed in the moment — and compassionate and purposeful leaders charting a way through the storm. We hope you’ll fi nd some inspiration in their stories as you (re)write your own.

BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE, KARA HARTNETT AND MATT BLOIS

Doing the next right thing

Faced with wrenching changes, here’s how four local companies adapted to the COVID world

BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE

resh Technology CEO Shaun Shan

F kel was walking the aisles of a Costco the second Saturday of March when his phone buzzed. One of his sales reps sent word that his phone was verily glowing with customers asking about the company’s to-go ordering systems. e growing awareness of COVID-19 had rapidly turned into a very tangible threat as many restaurant operators found themselves under dine-in shutdown orders from one day to the next.

“We organized a Sunday meeting to prioritize,” Shankel says. “Early the next week, all hell broke loose.”

By the end of that middle week of March, many restaurant brands had seen their sales fall up to 80 percent year over year. ey were burning cash and looking for anything to bring in even a bare minimum of orders. So while the people at Fresh Technology market and service software for every aspect of a restaurant’s operations, the vast majority of their customers and prospects suddenly were interested only in being able to take online orders for pick-up or delivery.

Shankel and his team scrambled their jets. Technologists were reassigned from rening Fresh Technology’s broader system to focus on the to-go oering, including adding the ability for clients to sell alcohol through that channel. New team members were hired even as the company — facing a steep revenue drop like so many of its customers — sought to preserve cash by deferring executives’ pay and cutting spending elsewhere. Strategic conversations became tactical, previously medium-term goals became right-now priorities and scenarios were drawn up and quickly redrawn.

“ere were many models. So many models,” says Shankel, who has led Fresh Technology since the company aligned with his former venture, ToGo Technologies, in 2017. “Our guiding question was, ‘What’s the next right thing?’ e interactions were somewhat beautiful. Everybody was developing our strategy on the y.” e hustle paid o and, by mid-May, the day-to-day manic pressure was beginning to ease — thanks in part to a pending investment by veteran local investor Joe Maxwell of FINTOP Capital. Shankel says Fresh Technology is in the midst of adding “a couple of thousand” restaurant locations to its previous customer base of about 5,000. It has added about 10 people to a team that totaled 40 at the start of the year and will hire that many again in the short term. By mid-2021, the plan is to be at 80 employees.

“It was intense. It’s all still intense,” Shankel says.

Reacting and changing at’s saying something for Fresh Technology and its Fresh Hospitality cousin. Matt Bodnar, chairman of Fresh Technology’s board and a partner in Fresh Hospitality — where he led the company’s investments in Vui’s Kitchen and e Grilled Cheeserie, among others — says his team has long emphasized being agile and unafraid to make bold choices. In his words, the organization has “a rapid decision cadence” while also being prepared (and humble enough) to back out of a plan or change plans if the market sends feedback that it should.

“Yes, you should know you general direction,” Bodnar says, “But we don’t get mired in analysis paralysis. We’ve seen organizations large and small do that and we’ve seen the consequences when they don’t act.”

‘Everybody’s reacting and changing. I was thinking all the time that I need to be a steady hand on the tiller.’

SHAUN SHANKEL

What is today Fresh Technology began being built in the early days of Fresh Hospitality, when that company was developing Jim ’N Nick’s and Taziki’s. Software that was designed to make restaurants’ back oces — inventory and labor, for instance — run more smoothly was expanded to include customer-facing features. ink of the tablet-based systems that today handle the ordering and payment at Fresh concepts. e overarching aim is simple: Bring some of the technology and eciency traditionally reserved for large chains to operators of a small number of restaurants. Tech insiders call this simpli- cation — using one vendor for what in the past might have been three systems clumsily glued together — “collapsing the stack.” at unied package of services is one of the things that attracted Maxwell, who specializes in investing in back-end nancial technologies, to Fresh Technology when the two parties began to talk last year. Even before the pandemic, one of Maxwell’s main investment themes was that many businesses, even enterprise-level organizations, no longer have the skill set or, more importantly, the time to gradually digitize their systems.

“e time frame has denitely accelerated,” Maxwell says. “Large companies are coming to [Fresh] because they have no time to do it themselves.”

And when they do, Shankel and his team are now better steeled and prepared to balance individual organizations’ requests with their broader product goals. Fresh Technology’s CEO says the COVID experience has helped him “step out of the trenches more” and be as transparent as ever about the company’s goals and priorities. He says he realized he and the company’s other leaders needed to be on camera a lot as the pandemic changed life. at meant more expansive weekly check-ins with a team that was already dispersed at a handful of oces around the country and maintaining a steady stream of progress reports.

“Everybody’s reacting and changing,” he says. “I was thinking all the time that I need to be a steady hand on the tiller. After the initial shock, the message was always, ‘We’re gonna come out on the other side of this.’”

Looking ahead, Bodnar sees the upheaval from COVID’s shock as a classic opportunity-from-crisis moment, a chance for Fresh Technology to build wallet share among its newly acquired clients — which include its biggest-yet operator. e priority now is to press the advantage and use the knowledge acquired in recent months.

“I’ve learned we are even more nimble than we thought we were. We have some great people who have done a great job being exible and adaptable,” he says. “You need this weird mix of humility and decisiveness — and then be able to acknowledge if you’re wrong. But sitting and waiting for the right thing to do? ere’s no time for that.”

Brennan Mason

Creating connections

BY KARA HARTNETT

On March 19, two weeks after the first case of COVID-19 was identified in Tennessee, health care data integration company Bridge Connector began helping health care facilities integrate data points related to the virus into their electronic health records and clinical systems — free of cost.

Data about the spread of COVID-19 was severely lacking at the time. State oŽcials were reporting only confirmed cases and didn’t yet have the ability to tally the number of tests being administered at hospitals or the number of COVID-specific patients who were filling hospital beds. The situation called for an overhaul of how various health care clinical systems were talking to each so that public health oŽcials could better understand the impact the virus was having.

Nashville-based Bridge Connector specializes in getting various technology platforms within hospitals and other facilities to integrate their knowledge. Incorporating new data streams in health care can often be challenging, says Chief Marketing OŽcer Brennan Mason, but his team was able to pull o’ this project in a matter of weeks.

“It’s really this network of connections that covers hundreds of di’erent systems,” Mason says. “We can kind of pick and choose which systems need to be connected and make those connections faster than before.”

Bridge Connector was able to link up the COVID data without diverting resources from its core operations, investing in new technology or contracting with extra technicians.

“Everyone was just really bought in with how important this was.” Mason says. “There were a lot of people doing some crazy hours to almost treat that like a second job. It was really the human piece that let us do this and stay on track.”

The Bridge Connector team initially said it would o’er its new service for free for six months, but Mason says the company is in talks about extending that timeline as the pandemic persists and comprehensive data becomes more important than ever. The organizations that took advantage of the company’s o’er were already clients, but recruiting new business wasn’t the sole purpose for the program.

“We didn’t just want to sit on the sidelines,” Mason says.

The beginning of a shift

BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE

ike so many other businesses,

L the arrival of COVID-19 momentarily stunned Ozark Riverz Manufacturing. As the economy went into lockdown, many retail, food and beverage, and education customers of the Murfreesboro-based maker of self-contained hand-washing stations put orders on hold or canceled commitments.

“We honestly didn’t know what was going to happen,” says founder and CEO Martin Watts, whose team was researching just what it would take to be deemed an essential business under COVID’s restrictions. “en the phones started going o like popcorn.”

It turns out Ozark River, which employs 16 people, had become very essential to government agencies, hospitals and other organizations suddenly highly aware of the need for better hygiene practices. Orders were ying in for 200 or 300 stations — previously, a good-sized contract was 50 units — and clients and prospects wanted turnaround times faster than Ozark River could deliver.

Watts and his team took a breath, gathered their thoughts and rallied suppliers to ensure they could deliver needed parts. en it was time to turn to the KISS principle: ey whittled their lineup options from 45 featuring a range of colors and counter styles to just four: white, black and two types of stainless steel. at helped them lower their prices from more than $1,500 per station to less than $1,000 while boosting output to about 40 per day if suppliers could keep up.

Out went shipments to pop-up hospitals — 120 stations were sent to the Javits Center in New York City — as well as other health care facilities in the Northeast, home builders elsewhere and mining companies in Canada.

“We just had to use logic and not overpromise,” Watts says of the surge.

More than three months after the initial COVID shock, Watts and his team are still cranking out stations at beyond their normal maximum capacity, and he is investing in equipment to grow output. More than 900 units are in the pipeline and Watts expects to run his operation six days a week through at least mid-August. at’s not counting possible new contracts with school districts, big-name retailers and large employers eager to safely bring back their workers and customers. New public health standards are being shaped and they look to be a long-term boon for Ozark River.

“It’s kind of mind-bending,” Watts says. “It’s been good to be a part of the solution, to feel essential. e team recognized the urgency and it’s given them great purpose.”

On the fast track

BY MATT BLOIS

Acompany in Franklin that normally builds miniature power plants this spring changed gears to design a simple ventilator to help hospitals handle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enexor, led by founder and CEO Lee Jestings, began distributing its new product after receiving emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June. The idea to transition the company’s manufacturing lines came from a doctor in a developing country who had previously partnered with Enexor to bring electricity to remote communities. Who was in desperate need of ventilators in the face of the coronavirus.

In less than a month — and after consulting with doctors and respiratory therapists — the Enexor’s ventilator’s design was complete. Its simple design allows hospitals to easily store the machines without needing to continually recalibrate them.

Initially, the company hoped to provide its ventilators to the doctors in developing countries that initially requested them during this outbreak or in future pandemics. However, Jestings says the company has received lots of immediate interest from within the United States as well.

“We’re half the cost of anything else and it’s easy to store,” he says of the domestic interest. “Those are the same traits that are good if you’re in the middle of the Dominican Republic as well.”

With some regulations having been relaxed, doctors can use the ventilators to treat patients today even though the Enexor equipment hasn’t undergone the same type of FDA review as a fully approved medical device. Scientific evidence must show that the device will be useful in treating COVID-19 to receive emergency approval.

Enexor had begun manufacturing the ventilators by mid-June and was planning to ramp up production. Ventilators might not be the end of of Enexor’s product lineup expansion: Jestings and his team have been pondering the creation of other products to develop a health care portfolio.

“The FDA, in a way, helped us,” he says. “We now know we can get our products FDA approved … We have confidence to bring other products to market.”

We are a community committed to promoting women in technology through scholarships, education, community outreach, and networking.

Join Us In Shaping The Future of Tech

www.wittn.org

All across Middle Tennessee, women in technology are dealing with the same challenges, craving the same opportunities, seeking new ways to grow, and looking for like-minded women to share it with. At WiTT, we connect women with a community that believes in and advocate for them.

Our History

Women in Technology of Tennessee began in 1999 as a small group of female leaders in technology in the Nashville area. Since then, WiTT has expanded to in clude hundreds of members. It grew by word-of-mouth: women telling other women about a community where they can share their experiences, discover development opportunities, and help young women establish their own careers.

Our Mission Through education, networking, scholarships and community outreach, WiTT promotes women in technology and helps carve a path for the next generation. WiTT members contribute to the success of th e amazing women in our community. We are committed to honoring those who have come before us and empowering the ones who will come after. Together, we’ll equip women throughout Middle Tennessee to shape the future of technology.

Our Pillars Education

We believe in learning from one another, sharing our knowledge and experiences, and equipping members to succeed in technology-related roles. Our educationfocused events allow members to expand their expertise and grow in th eir careers. Our WiTT educational events focus on an area of technology and feature a subject matter expert, technology executive from a local company, or a panel of female technology leaders. These meetings are great forums for women to educate themselves and learn more about the subject, while connecting with other successful women in IT.

Connection

Monthly events and regular happy hours give you the chance to meet other women in technology and discover new opportunities. Learn from the experience of women ahead of you in their careers and lend your wisdom to those just starting out.

Outreach

Through community outreach initiatives, we work to get more girls interested in technology —whether that’s introducing them to it for the fi rst time or igniting their existing passion — through coding camps, workshops, internship opportunities, scholarships and more. WiTT gives back to our l ocal community through outreach projects and provides volunteer opportunities for members.

Scholarships We provide scholarships to help high school and college girls, as well as women returning to school, succeed in technologyrelated fi elds. By serving students in Middle Tennessee, we foster the growth of female tech talent and positively infl uence our local workforce. WiTT partners with area businesses and educa tional institutions to oer a wide variety of scholarships. Our scholarships encourage and enable recipients to pursue technology-related careers and contribute to our local community of women in tech. To foster that community, we provide local scholarship recipients with the pportunity to join WiTT at no additional cost.

COMPANY PROFILE

We are a community committed to promoting women in technology through scholarships, education, community outreach, and networking. Whether you want to expand your expertise, connect with other women in tech or donate your time and resources, we invite you to join us in shaping the future oftech.

Women in Technology of Tennessee (WITT) Website www.wittn.org Twitter twitter.com/WiTTNashville

Facebook facebook.com/ WomeninTechnologyofTennessee Learn More membership@wittn.org

SPE C IALT IE S

Education: Our education-focused events allow members to expand their expertise, grow in their careers, and succeed in technology-related roles.

Connection: Monthly events and regular happy hours give you the chance to meet other women in technology and discover new opportunities. Outreach: Through community outreach initiatives, we work to get more girls interested in technology through coding camps, workshops, internship opportunities, scholarships and more Scholarships: We provide scholarships to help high school and college girls, as well as women returning to school, succeed in technology-related fi elds.

CON TAC T