Building Wealth, Building Community

Bailey (pictured third from right) works with team during the ALI Hack-A-Thon (2021) Credit: Russ Campbell Photography

Story by Clea Simon

Sallie Bailey (ALI ’21) understands that entrepreneurs don’t only build businesses, they build communities. Having served in financial leadership positions at several industrial companies, most recently as executive vice president and CFO of building products manufacturer Louisiana-Pacific Corp, she has set out to help fund emerging and startup companies from underestimated communities, with the goal of building generational wealth for those communities.

Bailey, who prefers the term “underestimated” to “undervalued” or “undercapitalized” (or the dated “underprivileged”) to describe the entrepreneurs she seeks to fund, looks at the optimism and energy of these go-getters. “’Underestimated’ has a feeling of hope to it,” she said.

Hope – and ingenuity – are key to her impact investing projects, many of which are particular to their communities. For example, she points out a mobile notary for whom she facilitated funding. While Bailey and her peers can access notaries at their banks, she explains, this is a option that not all share. Serving communities without readily accessible notaries, including people who were hospitalized (especially during the pandemic), one entrepreneur set herself up as “the Uber of notaries,” said Bailey. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

In helping entrepreneurs lift their communities, Bailey is looking to boost her own adopted home. “I wanted my project to be centered on Nashville,” said Bailey, who moved to that city in 2011. Active in area nonprofits, she recently served as chair of the YWCA board and was the past chair of the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee board. “I was very focused on doing something that would positively impact the Middle Tennessee community,” she said. “As a part of that – as I thought about ‘How can I improve the community?’ – I began to think about using my philanthropic dollars towards what I would consider stewardship. And that led me to think about impact investing.”

The seeds for this project were planted during her time at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, specifically during a field class on impact investing at the Harvard Business School. That course provided the framework for a class Bailey now teaches at the Owen School of Graduate Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where the ALI Fellow, who has an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, is an adjunct professor.

Again, community made this possible, as Bailey reached out first to the chancellor of Vanderbilt and then to a lawyer friend who does pro bono work and who introduced her to Corner to Corner, a group that has trained over 1,400 Black entrepreneurs in Middle Tennessee. Working with Corner to Corner and ImpactAssets, an impact-investing company that handles the actual loans, Bailey has now facilitated loans to seven entrepreneurs, with more to come.

“In the process of writing our Nashville-centric business school cases, we’ve found a couple of really amazing social impact entrepreneurial activities in town,” she said. For example, she names Citizen Kitchens, a commercial-grade kitchen that rents out space to food truck owners and other aspiring restauranteurs who cannot afford their own space yet. “I've been in business my entire career,” she explained. “I've always been what I would call an operating CFO. I dig into the details of understanding the drivers of profitability, and that gives me some insight into how hard it is to actually be an entrepreneur.”

Being part of the ALI community, she says, has brought her “a tremendous amount of credibility.”  

It's a combination of having had a very successful business career along with having spent 18 months in Cambridge focusing on what I was going to do to make Nashville a better place and, very specifically, to help create generational wealth for underestimated communities.”

To do this, she continues, she often has to step back. “The skillset that I bring is listening and being present,” she said. “I am spending time and resources on communities that need people to spend time and resources helping them. Not telling them what to do but helping them achieve their goals.”

Although she remains focused on Nashville, Bailey hopes to inspire others to partner with a university and help fund entrepreneurs from underestimated communities in their own towns. “I hope it sparks interest in someone to say, ‘I could do that too,’” she said.