GREGG GARNER | HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Businesses Designed to Create Work, Build Skill, and Fund Service
Overview
Gregg Garner's entrepreneurial thinking didn't begin with his first for-profit businesses in 2011. He drafted commercial business plans as early as 2003, though the timing wasn't right and the plans went unused. Inspired by what he saw in Mexico and Africa in the late 1990s, he was already thinking about job creation and commercial development. Even the nonprofits he started in the 1990s carried an entrepreneurial edge, built on the idea that Development meant helping people move from need toward self-sufficiency and capable work, a value Garner traces to his own reading of the Gospels.
What changed in 2011 was the opportunity, not the idea: a serious accident during a tour in East Africa interrupted UnNamed Servant's international touring and disrupted a revenue stream the band's concerts had generated for years of programming. National touring continued after 2012.
Garner spent roughly two months bedridden after the accident. What followed wasn't some existential reckoning. It was practical: the band could no longer tour to fund the work, so it was time to act on the plans he'd been sitting on for years.
His answer was an initial group of five companies: MCH Nashville, a construction business; NOVA Birth Services, founded by Tara Garner; Details Nashville, a staffing and hospitality service (which would later expand into corporate and wedding event media); Center Street Recording Studios; and Next Level Nannies, an early venture that didn’t really get off the ground.
Those five businesses became the seed of more than a dozen companies that emerged over the next several years. Across his career, Garner has helped start more than fifty nonprofit programs and businesses altogether. Up until the fall of 2025, Garner was the founder, co-founder and owner or co-owner of more than twenty-five companies, spanning construction, health care, hospitality, food service, media, technology, professional services such as accounting and HR, real estate, wellness, and tourism.
THREE OBJECTIVES, REPEATED
Garner has described three objectives, always in the same order, recurring in venture after venture. The first was to create jobs. The second was to make sure those were the kind of jobs that built real-world skills: healthcare, construction, hospitality, accounting, managing people, documentary media, solving problems under pressure, the same skills a person would need for community development work, so that experience gained behind a counter in Nashville could carry directly into the developing communities the organization served abroad. The third was to generate revenue that could help support the nonprofit organizations, with profits contributing to educational and development work.
This archive documents the entrepreneurial history running from the 2011 accident through the years Garner led these companies. It does not track which of them he still owns, manages, or advises today; current business activity, along with any advisory or consulting work Garner has taken on more recently, belongs to a separate, ongoing professional chapter addressed on GreggDGarner.com rather than in this historical record.
SEPARATE COMPANIES, NOT ONE ENTERPRISE
None of these businesses operated as a division of a single combined company. Each was separately formed, with its own tax identification number, bank accounts, filings, and governance or ownership structure, and separate management. Each entity had its own team and culture.
Garner's own role varied by venture: he founded some outright, co-founded or co-owned others, ran at least one that another family member had started, and partnered with or advised still others. In the ventures where he had a partner, his goal was to help that partner's technical expertise grow into a commercialized framework that could become a sustainable institution. In the businesses he owned without a partner, his objectives were the same three: create jobs, develop skills, fund development work.
That variation is not incidental to the record; it is the record. A founder-owner relationship to MCH Nashville does not describe his relationship to NOVA Birth Services, which Tara Garner founded and which Garner helped implement and operate alongside her from its earliest days, any more than his advisory role in one venture describes his ownership stake in another.
CONSTRUCTION AND PROPERTY
MCH Nashville, licensed across plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and general contracting work, was among the first businesses Garner started after the 2011 accident, and as a result of its management and a very talented team, it placed second in three separate categories, electrician, plumber, and general contractor or builder, in the Nashville Scene's 2021 Best of Nashville Readers' Poll, a rare instance of a single company placing across three distinct trade categories in the same year.
The GJXMI Group operated as a holding and property-management company, and Garner separately co-founded a Nashville real estate brokerage with a business partner, giving the portfolio a way to hold and manage property directly.
HEALTH, BIRTH SERVICES, AND WELLNESS
NOVA Birth Services, founded by Tara Garner, a childbirth educator and doula with a background in social work, grew into an established Nashville provider of childbirth education and doula support; Garner helped implement and operate the business alongside her from its earliest days, yet she was the visionary and impassioned anchor of the institution.
NOVA placed among the recognized birth-services providers in the 2021 Best of Nashville poll and also ranked second to Vanderbilt Women’s Hospital in Nashville Parenting Magazine, both independent measures of the reputation the business had built under Tara’s leadership.
Hopewell Family Care extended the entrepreneurial portfolio into primary health care, and the Soma Wellness Group added a dedicated wellness practice, rounding out a health-and-wellness cluster that ran from childbirth support through general primary care.
HOSPITALITY, FOOD, AND SHARED SPACE
Details Nashville built a staffing and hospitality service that, according to Garner, grew to serve a substantial roster of clients, and specifically some big names in Nashville like Vanderbilt, the Omni, the Hermitage, and other top venues in the greater Nashville area. By 2017, another entity called Nyumba Food Services housed two further ventures: NyumBarista, a coffee shop, and Califarmia, an award-winning food-truck business that was recognized in the Best Food Truck category of the 2021 Best of Nashville poll, and in many foodie-blogger polls over the years.
Garner also helped a baker he knew develop the LA Bread Company, a venture that did not become profitable, but that he has described as worthwhile regardless, on the theory that helping a skilled and talented person test a business is valuable even when the business itself does not survive.
MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY, AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Center Street Recording Studios, part of the first wave of post-2011 ventures, gave musicians and producers dedicated studio space; Center Street Media, discussed at greater length on this site's Arts & Media page, later expanded that work into video and broadcast production.
Beginning in 2018, as the number of organizations and businesses under Garner's leadership grew, he broadened the enterprise model again, starting a further group of operational companies to provide accounting, human resources, media, and technology services to the wider portfolio, along with a separate consulting firm and additional ventures in sports, entertainment, and online commerce; several of these remain identified here only by category rather than by name, at Garner's request, to avoid exposing their current owners or operators to unrelated reputational spillover.
That same year, 2018, also produced the beginnings of the real estate brokerage and wellness partnerships described elsewhere on this page. Both began alongside a broader push to formalize business operational functions such as accounting, HR, media, tech and similar operational support, which previously ran informally inside the individual ventures they served.
CONSUMER GOODS AND INTERNATIONAL TOURISM
Ash-n-Clay (a business Garner did not found, but acquired an ownership interest in and helped to commercialize) and a handful of other e-commerce and craft-goods ventures rounded out the earlier consumer-facing side of the portfolio, with very mixed results; not every venture Garner started became a lasting business, and he has treated the ones that didn’t as part of a genuine entrepreneurial record, rather than acting as though they didn’t happen at all. In 2023, he opened a 12-acre African safari lodge, right on the edge of the national game reserve, extending decades of work in East Africa into international hospitality and tourism; at his request, the lodge is not named here.
WHAT THE BUSINESSES WERE FOR
Garner has resisted describing any of these ventures purely as commercial success stories. Jobs were the plainest measure: Institute graduates and members of the surrounding community found work in construction, hospitality, food service, and administration that was structured, deliberately, to teach skills useful for community development: budgeting, customer service, supervision, logistics, skills as useful on an international development team as behind a coffee counter in Old Hickory.
A number of the businesses never became reliably profitable, and Garner has said he considers the unsuccessful ventures like an online e-commerce store called “XanderCook”, and even NyumBarista’s Old Hickory Village location, or the attempt to extend math worksheet creation to international workers and teachers, as much a part of the entrepreneurial record as MCH Nashville's or Hopewell Family Care’s steadier growth, because the objective was never solely financial; it was always about the people.
The three objectives, jobs, the specific skills those jobs built, and revenue directed back to the nonprofit organizations, were meant to operate together in every venture; a business that only generated revenue, without building usable skill, would have missed the point.
RECOGNITION
In the Nashville Scene's 2021 Best of Nashville Readers' Poll, organizations and businesses associated with Garner's wider body of work received sixteen top-three placements across education, nonprofit service, the arts, construction, food service, birth services, photography, and media.
The Academy accounted for four of those placements, spanning its private, elementary, middle, and high school categories; MCH Nashville placed in electrician, plumbing, and general-contractor categories; The Arts at Center Street and its affiliated theatre company placed in local-theatre categories; and Global Outreach Developments International, a summer camp program, Califarmia, Details Nashville, NOVA Birth Services, a media company, Hopewell Family Care, and educator Robert Muñoz each received recognition as well. The result reflects sixteen top-three placements across ten organizations, businesses, and one individual.
Read against the entrepreneurial record as a whole, the poll results are just a snapshot of a single year rather than a summary of it: many ventures never appeared in a readers' poll at all, including several that quietly employed people for years without any public recognition, and several more that closed without ever generating the kind of local visibility a poll placement reflects.
ENTERPRISE AS INSTITUTION BUILDING
Read individually, the businesses look like an unusually varied portfolio, a construction company beside a coffee shop beside a media company beside a safari lodge.
Read together, against the accident that accelerated their launch and the three objectives Garner returned to across every industry he entered, they read as an extension of the same mind and vision that produced the Institute and the Academy: building a structure sturdy enough to hold people, give them useful work, and outlast the circumstance that made it necessary.
Garner has said he thinks of the entrepreneurial record less as a business career contributing to his CV, and more as the creation of venues where people's passions and skills could collide into meaningful work. A construction company met a need for skilled work and safe housing. A food truck met a need for both a paycheck and a product people wanted to buy. A media company met a need for young people with technical talent to have somewhere to use it. No two ventures were run the same way, and not all of them succeeded, but the underlying logic held constant across more than a decade and more than two dozen companies.