The air outside was crisp, and the red carpet line stretched all the way to Third Avenue.
Inside the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, more than 630 people had come to celebrate Nashville’s founders, and they dressed like they meant it: cowboy hats, custom suits, sparkly dresses. The first applications for the 2026 NEXT Awards arrived in February. On Monday night, October 19, eight months of work came together in one very loud room.
The champagne wall was poured at 5:15 and empty by 6:00, which tells you most of what you need to know about the mood.
A city that shows up for its founders
Mayor Freddie O’Connell pointed to the partnerships and the community that make it all work. Backstage, he said why it matters to him that the EC is “a key partner organization to Metro”: the goal is a city where “if you start a business here, it is more likely to succeed here than in most other places in the country.”
“We are doing everything we can in the mayor’s office to support our small business and entrepreneurial landscape,” he added. “We’ve got some new public policy. Stay tuned for that stuff.”
Bounding up the stairs
Then the winners started coming. Each one was handed an award on the way up the stairs, turned back to face the crowd, and waved. The room screamed. Most of the winners never heard their walk-up songs over the noise in their own heads.
Chelsea Moubarak, the first winner of the night, was out of breath and still jumping when she got backstage. Gina Sicilia said that when her name was called, “I don’t think I heard anything but my own heartbeat.” Anna Skates walked up to the theme from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and when we asked about it, it was, as her interviewer put it, a blur.
The winners, in their own words
Retail and Restaurant: Chelsea Moubarak, Chelsea Friday Furniture
Moubarak was laid off from a tech job in 2023. On a Friday afternoon that December, she says, “something inside of me just shifted,” and she named her business, Chelsea Friday Furniture, after the day. She started by buying new furniture that big retailers had written off, driving 26-foot trucks herself and selling out of her house. “When you return something to Amazon or Wayfair, even because you didn’t like the color, it actually doesn’t get restocked,” she said. “It gets sent to a liquidator.”
Business and Professional Services: Jimmy Speyer, GlassHouse
To understand the home service businesses he builds software for, Speyer bought a window-washing franchise and lived their problems firsthand. GlassHouse now helps those businesses reach homeowners directly instead of paying Google for every lead. His family picked Nashville on instinct: “We drove in one day and we just felt like we were driving home.”
Music, Sports, Gaming and Entertainment: JamJuice
Logan Renneker, JamJuice‘s head of business development, accepted for the company, which helps hospitality businesses book live musicians. “We grow fast because the product is great,” he said. “It’s just that simple.” The company signed its 65th client days before the awards and now operates in five states. Nashville made the climb easier, he said: “It’s very easy to start a business here, and it’s very easy to grow a business.”
Healthcare and Life Sciences: Watershed Wellness COOP
Melisse Prusinski, Collins Hohne and Kalaway Voss run Watershed Wellness COOP, a worker-owned wellness cooperative where every practitioner gets a vote and a share of the profits. One founder traced it back to the COVID shutdown: “It was a dream that I had, actually, during the COVID shutdown, that we would come together for integrative health.” The logic is simple: “If practitioners are healthy and well, they are able to give care that sustains.” What’s next? “We’re ready to just get back to the play.” As they left the interview area, they offered an invitation: “Follow the water.”
Social Enterprise: Anna Skates, The Department of Curious Things
Skates founded The Department of Curious Things, which runs book clubs, a creative writing camp and a converted yellow shuttle bus that works as a mobile creative studio, all built on one belief. “I think we live in a world that sees children as this cute commodity, and often sometimes an inconvenience even,” she said. She ran her book clubs for free for years, then started charging, and enrollment tripled. Parents told her, “You are worth a million bucks, and what you do for our kids is invaluable. Please keep taking our money.”
Technology and AI: Matt Hertz, Third Person
Hertz calls Third Person the NerdWallet for supply chain, a place where e-commerce brands find shipping, fulfillment and packaging partners. He built it from his own frustration as an operator: “We were looking on Google, and we were going down Facebook and Reddit threads to try to find these partners.” He says the company is profitable, has grown more than 400 percent over the last couple of years, and now has ten employees.
Consumer Goods: Gina Sicilia, Gina’s Skinny Italian
Sicilia toured internationally as a singer and songwriter until the pandemic. She never planned on a food business, but her low-carb Italian line, Gina’s Skinny Italian, is now on grocery shelves and sold nationwide on Amazon. Two decades of music turned out to be her training ground: “The cold calling, just being fearless, and always feeling like I have nothing to lose.”
The EC has been part of her story from early on. Sam Davidson, the EC’s CEO, remembers being a couple of months into the job when he was asked to judge pitches for the Arts and Business Council. Sicilia showed up with low-carb Italian. “That can sell. That can make money, people,” he recalled thinking. He asked if she had an EC membership, and she did. “She leveraged the free membership, and then we can’t get rid of you, which is fun,” Davidson said backstage. Sicilia’s answer: “I won’t leave.” She called the EC “a game changer for me.”
Real Estate and Construction: Justin Koziol, Aera Systems
Koziol’s company, Aera Systems, is building a modular system for faster, healthier, more sustainable homes. Its first community is eight passive-house homes in Bellevue, with deliveries starting in 2027. The long game is a bigger factory and a dent in Nashville’s housing costs. “We’re going to be able to build homes faster and therefore drive the cost of housing down,” he said.
Two surprises
Two awards are revealed on stage, and no one knows the recipient until the moment it happens. Both honor people who made other founders’ lives easier.
The David H. Furse Mentor Award went to Kathy Casey, who runs the mentoring and consulting firm Green Peaks. She traced her mentoring to a simple idea: “The early part of your life is about aspiration and the second part of your life is about impact.” She sees the same spirit in Nashville’s songwriting rooms. “It’s not win-lose. It’s win-win. And we can all win.”
The Darrell Freeman Award went to Sharon Reynolds, founder and CEO of DevMar Manufacturing, which develops patented, sustainable pathogen-remediation technologies. She brought her granddaughter to watch. “I want to show her absolutely what’s possible,” Reynolds said. Asked what was on her heart, she said, “just absolute joy and just being thankful.” Freeman, the late Hall of Famer who built Zycron and spent years mentoring other founders, would have understood. Reynolds remembered him this way: “He would just knock down any door for someone if that’s what it took to help them.”
Three founding teams enter the Hall of Fame
The Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame welcomed three founding teams. In the words of Sam Davidson, the EC’s CEO, they are the people who “built the bank, the buildings, and the restaurants that turned Nashville into a national city.”
Robert A. McCabe Jr. and Terry Turner opened Pinnacle Financial Partners in October 2000, after the Nashville bank where they had spent their careers was sold to an out-of-state buyer. Max and Ben Goldberg of Strategic Hospitality started Nashville’s craft cocktail scene with The Patterson House in 2009, and in November 2025 the first Michelin Guide for the American South starred three restaurants in Tennessee: Bastion, The Catbird Seat and Locust. All three are theirs. Don and Tracy Hardin built Don Hardin Group out of Tennessee State University’s Business Incubation Center, and chances are you have been inside their work, from Music City Center to the National Museum of African American Music.
In their speech to the crowd, the Goldbergs said they were feeling imposter syndrome and a midlife crisis at the same time. By any measure, they’ve earned the seat.
Entrepreneur of 2026
The last award of the night went to two founders.
Charlie Jordan is the founder and CEO of VITL, an e-prescribing marketplace for cash-pay clinics that now serves more than a thousand practices. “We have a really rare opportunity to define an entire category,” he said. Backstage he had a message for his family: “By no means am I at the top of anything right now, but this is a pretty good vista along the way, and this is what hard work looks like.”
Cynthia Florez co-founded Limo Peruvian Eatery with her husband, Marcio. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, she moved to Nashville at 17 and calls it “a community that is there for everybody.” She did not forget who showed up first. Conexión Américas helped the couple find their footing, and she thanks them every chance she gets: “We are where we are not only because of our employees and our customers, but because of the people that help us from the beginning.”
Back at Cocktails in the Courtyard
After the show, the party moved to Cocktails in the Courtyard, presented by Michael Burcham and Shore Capital Partners with support from Southwest Airlines. For the second year in a row, there was a conga line. People posed in the photo backdrop with their coworkers, and there were hugs and kernels: Nashville hot popcorn, made especially for the night by Kernels Nashville Popcorn. The Cupcake Collection, founded by NEXT co-chair Mignon François, brought sweet potato cupcakes. A DJ shouted out the winners.
Hear it from the winners
Just offstage, the winners sat down for backstage interviews with the Relationary team. They thanked the people around them and told us, in their own words, why they were chosen: the success of their businesses and where they plan to take them next.
Watch the 2026 NEXT Awards backstage interviews
Congratulations to every winner, finalist and inductee.
Thank you to our sponsors
The 2026 NEXT Awards happened because of the sponsors and partners below. Thank you for investing in Nashville’s founders.
- Hero: Amazon
- Luminary: Dr. Michael Burcham and Shore Capital Partners, presenting sponsors of Cocktails in the Courtyard and the Hall of Fame 15th anniversary
- Champion: HealthStream
- Innovation Partner: Launch Tennessee
- Sages: Chezy Video Co., EES Global Events, Vanderbilt University
- Pathfinders: Austermiller Roofing & Construction, LBMC
- Guides: BrainTrust, EO Nashville, Intermedia Intelligent Communications, Kernels Nashville Popcorn, Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Pinnacle Financial Partners, Ricoh, Xerox
- Media Sponsor: Nashville Post
- Finalists’ Toast Sponsor: HCA Healthcare and TriStar Health
- Freeman Award Sponsor: S3 Recycling Solutions
- David H. Furse Mentor Award Sponsor: The Cauble Group
- Balcony and Courtyard: Southwest Airlines; Belmont University, Thomas F. Cone Sr. Center for Entrepreneurship
- Mentors: BNA, BPD Healthcare, The Cupcake Collection, Tennessee Titans Foundation, Nashville SC, James Stephen Turner Family Foundation
- Presenting Sponsor, Retail and Restaurant Award: Legend Australian Wine Imports
- Wine Sponsors: Mt Yengo Wines (sparkling), Minimum (white), Seppeltsfield (rosé), Sunspell (red)
- AI Photography: Morgan Visual Productions
- Advisors and Supporters: CityLiving Group, Continuum Planning Partners, Kevin and Katie Crumbo, Delta Dental of Tennessee, FoxFuel Creative, Harding House Brewing Company, Judith Bright, Killjoy/Noughty, Let There Be Light, Donna Mattick, Tatjana and Bob Paterno, Spire, Studio Bank, Turner Construction Company
- Award Recipient Gift Bags: Michael Burcham Coaching, The Cupcake Collection, Iroquois Steeplechase, Judith Bright, RJ Young, Rolled 4 Ever Ice Cream, Salt Ranch Resort
Apply or nominate for 2027
Most of the winners in this recap started with an application or a nomination. If you are a founder with a story like these, or you know one, applications and nominations for the 2027 NEXT Awards are now open.
- Apply: Start your 2027 NEXT Awards application. It has 43 questions, so set aside some time.
- Nominate: Nominate a founder or company for 2027. It is a short form.
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