“You’re not serious.”
That was the verdict. A few months after a layoff, 15 years into her career, Nancy Stabell decided to hang out her own shingle, printed business cards, set up a Gmail account, and proudly handed a card to a friend who runs a PR firm in town.
Her friend looked at it and said, “You’re not serious. You have a Gmail account. You’re not serious about it. Come back and see me when you’re serious.”
Nancy was hurt. Then she realized her friend was right. “I was hedging my bets,” she tells host Sam Davidson on the latest episode of Circle Back. “And you’re never going to be successful as an entrepreneur if you’re not both feet in.”
She bought a domain. Today she runs her own firm and has spent more than a decade helping Nashville founders build, scale and sell their companies. The road there is anything but a straight line.
Four generations of lawyers, and one grandfather who was “always in something”
Sam opens every episode by asking who the first entrepreneur was that a guest ever knew. For Nancy, it was her grandfather, a builder, developer and investor in Chattanooga. “He was always in something, doing something, buying something, and just creating energy.”
Her father’s side ran to law. Nancy is the fourth of five generations to practice. She told her dad in third grade that she’d be a lawyer. Her mother’s side were home builders and entrepreneurs. “I’ve kind of married the two family lines in what I do.”
Before any of that, she worked behind the counter at the Captain D’s on Abbott Martin in Green Hills. She was, in her words, “relieved of drive-through duties.”
Nothing went to plan, and that was the training
Nancy’s path ran through a business degree at Ole Miss, a job selling computers at the very start of the internet, an MBA, and an entrepreneurial law program at UT. Then her father died suddenly on the first day of her last semester of law school. She put her career second and stabilized her life first.
When she landed at a law firm, she ended up as the only corporate associate in a nine-person office. There was no one a few years ahead of her to ask. She learned by doing deals, from buying and selling restaurant franchises to five years of legal work on the Schermerhorn.
Sam asks whether anything was going to plan up to that point. “No,” she says. “You want to hear God laugh, tell him your plan.”
The “big D decide”
Nancy has a name for the moments when life forces a choice. She calls them the “big D decide.”
One came during a big-firm job financing hospital systems, in the middle of the financial crisis. Family emergencies piled up at year end, when she was supposed to be “billing like crazy.” She stepped back and asked, “Am I walking my talk?”
The biggest one came after a layoff. The next morning, for the first time in her life, she had nowhere to be. Then she remembered it was Valentine’s Day, and there was a party at her son’s preschool. When she walked in, “his little eyes just got so big because his mom never came to these things.”
She decided that whatever came next had to include moments like that one.
A borrowed closet and three meetings a day
What came next started in a closet. A contact in town offered her a tiny office for three months, free. She didn’t know email marketing tools existed, so she announced her new firm by emailing everyone she knew, 25 addresses at a time from Outlook. Some people got the announcement seven to 10 times.
One of them, a former client from her first firm, finally called and offered to buy her a cup of coffee. That coffee turned into a file that generated work for about 10 years.
Her system for building the business was simple. Talk to three people a day, about anything. Keep doing it. “I just kept doing that for two or three years until I had a full book.”
Why she won’t just “write it up”
Nancy says at least 40% of her job, and maybe half, is helping clients understand their own businesses. Clients sometimes send her a request and say, “Just write it up.” She pushes back.
“I don’t want to just be a scribe. I need to understand how your business works.”
Her closing advice for anyone facing their own fork in the road is just as direct. “I’m always happier when I can bet on myself than someone else.” Then make a plan, and know what you’re signing. She sees too many founders who signed documents they didn’t understand and “set themselves up for failure.”
What you’ll hear in the full episode
There’s a lot more in the conversation. Nancy explains why she believes entrepreneurs become “a little bit feral” and can never go back. She talks about how owning her own firm let her care for her mother through cancer with “absolutely no regrets.” And she describes what Nashville has to get right on affordability and workforce over the next 10 years to stay a city where entrepreneurs can thrive.
Watch the full Circle Back episode with Nancy Stabell on YouTube, premiering Monday, November 9. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Circle Back is brought to you by the Beth and Randy Chase family, in partnership with the Nashville Post.
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