Linus Hall is the Owner of Yazoo Brewing Co., which produces several different beers, including the Pale Ale pictured here on the bottling line.

Running a craft brewery requires a personal touch, but few pour themselves into the job like Linus Hall. His Nashville-based Yazoo Brewing Co., which has expanded its reach across the Southeast since opening in 2003, is as much a testament to his handcrafted approach to beer making as it is to the larger aesthetic and philosophy that guide his decisions as a business owner.

“You go down the beer aisle of any grocery store, and it’s mostly run-of-the-mill brands in boring metallic blue cans,” he says. “We try to go in the opposite direction with our brewery by being offbeat and memorable.”

Named for the river that winds its way past Hall’s hometown of Vicksburg, Miss., Yazoo produces nine different types of beer, including a rotating seasonal variety. Several of them have labels featuring paintings by his wife, Lila. “Even though we ended up in Nashville, we wanted to reflect our Mississippi roots in our name and image,” he says. “It’s about capturing that Delta folk-art feel.”

Distinctive as it is, the branding explains only part of Yazoo’s growing popularity. From the outset Hall knew that success hinged not only on the quality of his beer, for which he turned to the American Brewer’s Guild for a craft-brewing course, but also on the quality of his business plan. For the latter he enrolled in the Vanderbilt Executive MBA program, which he says gave him a strong foundation in strategy and operations, as well as a better understanding of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Nearly 10 years into it, Hall still gets a heady feeling from being in charge of the business he’s built from the ground up. It’s not unlike the warm sense of satisfaction that his patrons feel after sampling one of Yazoo’s fresh drafts.

“If you don’t get a thrill from what you’re doing, you’re not going to make it,” he says. “For me that thrill is walking into the taproom on a busy night and seeing customers enjoying our beer and having great conversations.

“Beer brings people together, but good beer makes them happier.”

Sarah Trahern, pictured here in the production control room at GAC TV, oversees the network’s strategic planning and day-to-day operations.

Sarah Trahern grew up in a home of divergent musical tastes. Her father used to sing old country standards to her in the crib, while her mother encouraged her to take classical violin lessons throughout childhood. Trahern admits an appreciation for a wide range of music these days, but it’s telling that after 12 years of violin she decided to switch to the banjo in high school. The twang of country music won out, and though she didn’t realize it at the time, Nashville was already beckoning.

After graduating from Georgetown University and covering politics for C-SPAN in Washington, D.C., she decided to pursue her interests in music and television in Nashville, where today she is the General Manager and Senior Vice President at Great American Country (GAC), a country music television network. Since her hiring in 2005, GAC has more than doubled its reach to nearly 60 million households.

“Country is unique in that it really is the soundtrack for a lot of America,” she says. “There’s pretty broad appeal. It’s not just niche music anymore.”

Trahern, who oversees GAC’s strategic planning and day-to-day operations, including programming and production, was named to Billboard magazine’s list of the top 30 women in music in 2010. She credits Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program for much of her recent professional success.

“It really rounded out my management experience to be exposed to leaders in a variety of fields outside of my own,” she says. “Also my experiences in the strategy course—developing numerous analytical plans and having to defend them in front of the class—have been quite valuable in my current position.”

If Trahern had to pick one of her proudest moments as a manager, it would be the telethon she helped GAC organize just days after the floods struck Middle Tennessee last May. The commercial-free, three-hour concert featured some of the top acts in country and raised nearly $2 million for flood victims.

“We’re a ratings-driven business,” she says, “but sometimes doing the right thing is what’s most important.”

See photos from the flood relief concert.

Tasha Ross (left) and Lindsay Beckner offer a variety of vegan and gluten-free baked goods at FiddleCakes.

“Baking is all about chemistry,” says Lindsay Beckner, who co-owns FiddleCakes, a Nashville-based bakery, cafe and catering business that can accommodate box lunches for 30 or cupcakes for 500. “You have to be very exact. There’s little room for error.”

Beckner may be referring to what determines a successful recipe for, say, a muffin or a scone, but she could just as well be talking about what determines a successful business, like the one she and fellow co-owner Tasha Ross have built during the past year.

The idea of opening a bakery started with Ross, but the pieces did not fall into place until Professor of Accounting Germain Böer introduced her to Beckner, a fellow Vanderbilt alumna who was working in finance and catering on the side. Ross and Beckner clicked, and their business plan came together quickly: They opened FiddleCakes just five months after their initial meeting.

“Coming from an HOP [human and organizational performance] background at Owen, I knew one of the toughest things would be building a team,” says Ross, who previously worked for a startup software company. “Fortunately we found that we share the same vision.”

An important part of that vision is providing customers with tasty vegan and gluten-free meals. Demand for the latter has grown in recent years as more doctors prescribe restricted diets for those suffering from conditions like autism and celiac disease, the autoimmune disorder caused by gluten proteins in certain grains.

Forgoing eggs and traditional flour makes Ross and Beckner’s task of operating their bakery all the more challenging. “The recipes are much more temperamental than they would be otherwise,” Beckner explains. “Sometimes the mixes don’t rise, and you have to start over again.” The challenge, though, as they see it, is well worth the effort.

“It makes all the difference when, for example, a parent whose child suffers from celiac disease thanks you personally,” Ross says. “Running a successful business is rewarding, but having a social impact on top of that is even better.”

Durégo Lewis (second from right) with team members Lee Austin, Lyn Wilson, Robin English and Sara McKissick

Being part of a team is second nature to Durégo Lewis. Whether playing football for Vanderbilt in the mid-’90s or collaborating with classmates in the Executive MBA program a decade later, he has had plenty of opportunities to work with others toward a common goal. Yet nothing has crystallized the importance of those earlier experiences quite like his current endeavor: launching DURÉGO™, a business that is an events facility and a future showroom for exotic cars and other luxury goods.

“By myself there’s no way that I would be sitting here. This company is the result of being around smart people,” he says. “I’m only as good as the people on my team.”

That team includes a couple of names familiar to the Owen community—Associate Dean of Executive Education Tami Fassinger and Dr. Jim Jirjis, EMBA’06, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt. Both serve on the company’s advisory board. Lewis credits them and his other associates with helping him hone his business concept.

“This company looks nothing like what I thought it’d be, and I’m proud of that. They poked holes in that original business plan—pointing out all the things that could make it weak,” he says.

Earlier this year Lewis opened the doors to his 8,400-square-foot events facility in Brentwood, Tenn. Aside from hosting wedding receptions and corporate gatherings, the space will serve, he hopes, as a “mouthpiece for what’s coming two-doors down”—the yet-to-be-opened showroom specializing in exotic cars, including Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Bentleys, exquisite jewelry and hard-to-find luxury handbags.

Among the advantages of selling multiple brands, Lewis explains, is that his company can offer a more robust product selection. “Think of it like a hand,” he says. “Each finger—or brand—is fragile by itself, but when you put them together as a fist, they’re strong.”

While Lewis may be referring to a specific business model, perhaps there’s no better analogy for the team he’s assembled at DURÉGO. Together they’re stronger than he would have been had he decided to go it alone.

Baseball agent Bo McKinnis has represented 89 major leaguers, including former Vanderbilt pitcher David Price.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ bestselling book about the Oakland A’s, there is a passage in which J.P. Ricciardi, the General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, talks with an unnamed baseball agent. That agent, it turns out, is Owen alumnus James “Bo” McKinnis, the President of McKinnis Sports Management in Nashville. Unlike some in his line of work, McKinnis does not mind going unnoticed. In fact, that is exactly how he likes it.

“From day one I’ve wanted my players to be the stars. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he explains. “When I meet folks and tell them what I do, they’re a little surprised. That just shows that I’m doing my business the right way.”

While McKinnis enjoys anonymity outside the game, his name is well-regarded within it. Over the course of his career he has represented 89 major leaguers, including David Price, the former Vanderbilt pitcher and No. 1 pick of the Tampa Bay Rays. That success, he says, can be attributed to a piece of advice that pitcher Jeff Brantley offered him when first starting out: “Don’t contact the players. If you do a good job, they will come to you.”

As counterintuitive as that sounds, the strategy has worked because, as McKinnis puts it, “The best scouts are a player’s teammates.” He adds, “That’s why I let my players bring clients to me. They know what I’m looking for and who will represent me well.”

McKinnis admits he never intended to become an agent. His very first client—a player on the Mississippi State baseball team that he helped manage as an undergrad—had to talk him into the idea. Even years later when he was at Owen, he seemed set on pursuing a career on Wall Street. The game, however, never loosened its grip on him. The skills that he honed while earning an MBA—negotiating, accounting and entrepreneurship, among others—ended up laying the foundation for what he does today.

“God gave me two loves—business and baseball—and I’ve been able to put them together,” he says. “It’s the best of both worlds.”

Vinyl records are enjoying a resurgence thanks to Ashworth and United Record Pressing.

Cris Ashworth likes to say that he saw Elvis every day. Not in person, that is, but on the press at United Record Pressing, a vinyl record manufacturing company that he owned for 10 years until health problems forced him to step away. “Elvis was always good for a couple hundred thousand records. It was just amazing to me,” he recalls.

What’s perhaps more amazing is that he’s not talking about the 1960s or ’70s, but rather the past year or two. Like “The King,” who had a famous comeback of his own, vinyl records are enjoying a resurgence, thanks in no small part to Ashworth and United. In 2008, 1.88 million newly pressed LPs were sold in the United States—a jump of nearly 900,000 units from the year before.

Ashworth, an accountant by training, admits that he didn’t have the slightest inkling about record manufacturing when he purchased the Nashville-based company in 1999. But he did have a keen understanding of trends, which he credits to his education at Owen. “Being able to decide if it’s the right time to do something is really important. I found that my timing was not bad,” he says.

Not bad indeed. Although there were plenty of doubters, Ashworth saw an opportunity to re-energize the company and the market as a whole. He initiated cost-saving measures and expanded United’s manufacturing capabilities to include both 45s and LPs. He also created a Web site to appeal to a younger generation of customers, including musicians looking to get noticed—“the kids in a garage who have a dream,” as Ashworth calls them. Today United produces up to 40,000 records a day and owns most of the market share.

Though not a musician himself, Ashworth is a kindred spirit to those kids in the garage. He understands what it’s like to pursue a dream and has advice for anyone who wants to do the same: “Don’t wait too long. Get the experience under your belt and get your tickets punched.”

Or as Elvis used to sing, “It’s now or never.”

Kimberly Jackson was inspired to enter the wine business after helping found Owen’s wine appreciation club, Cork and Barrel.

Every bottle of wine has a story to tell. It’s a story written as much by Mother Nature—through the soil, climate and grapes themselves—as it is by the human hand that crafts the finished product. Kimberly Jackson, MBA’01, has learned this firsthand as President of JAX Vineyards, a boutique California winery she runs with her brother, Trent. 

“When people decide to buy a bottle of wine, of course they want quality, but they also want to know how the wine is made. They want names and labels that they can identify with, and it’s a very personal thing,” she says.

Bringing the JAX story to a broader audience is Jackson’s mission at the moment. So far she’s succeeded in landing distribution deals for her wine across the nation. JAX also has gotten a boost from fortuitous product placement on HBO’s hit show Entourage, as well as a recent appearance on Wine Spectator magazine’s “Ten Wineries to Watch” list. 

Ask Jackson the secret to JAX’s success and she’s quick to point to the land where the cabernet grapes are grown. The property in Calistoga is home to 40-year-old vines—some of the oldest in Napa Valley. Although the vines don’t yield nearly as many grapes as younger ones do, their deep roots allow them to grow without irrigation. The resulting fruit is dense, thick-skinned and rich in flavor. “Our grapes work a little harder to survive,” as Jackson puts it.

Jackson herself knows a thing or two about working hard to survive. Starting a business from scratch has required her to wear many different hats—from marketing to forecasting to invoicing and operations—but she credits Owen with giving her the framework and confidence to succeed.

And that’s all the more reason to root for JAX Vineyards. It’s an underdog story that many can identify with. A story just waiting to be uncorked.