Key Points:
- Fractional Executive Leadership as a Growth Solution: Jonathan Barnes elaborates on how his company, Work Heartily, provides fractional executive leadership for businesses undergoing growth or transformation. This model helps businesses address leadership needs for specific projects or periods without the commitment of full-time hires. He also emphasizes the importance of coaching and leadership in operational, financial, and technological domains.
- Personal and Professional Self-Awareness for Career Transitions: Jonathan discusses the value of self-assessment tools like Working Genius and StrengthsFinder to identify personal strengths, frustrations, and key motivators. He highlights the importance of aligning one’s career choices with personal values and proficiencies, especially for military personnel transitioning to civilian roles.
- Nashville as a Hub for Opportunities and Community: Jonathan paints Nashville as an ideal place to live and work due to its thriving economy, strong sense of community, and openness to newcomers. With opportunities in healthcare, entertainment, and other industries, the city also offers a collaborative and welcoming environment for veterans and their families.
Transcript:
Emily Bose: Welcome back to another episode of Landing Zone Nashville. I’m Emily Bose, one of the managing directors here at Transition Overwatch. Really excited to be speaking with Jonathan Barnes today, who is the founding partner—I was going to say founder, but founding partner—of Work Heartily. Jonathan, so glad to have you here, and thanks for being on the show today.
Jonathan Barnes: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. I love these opportunities to talk through the different challenges in front of people and especially as it relates to who they are and where they’re going, so it’s a lot of fun.
Emily Bose: Absolutely. I’m really excited to dive into our conversation today. Can you give me just the brief overview of what you guys do at Work Heartily and how that ties into your background and what we’re going to talk about today?
Jonathan Barnes: Sure. So, I started Work Heartily four and a half years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic, which was a wonderful time to start a business. Maybe so, maybe not. Started in April of 2020. And really, we focus on helping businesses and organizations work through points of tension, essentially in times of growth, and move through that to transformation. That sounds really cheesy. However, the way we do that is really through providing executive leadership.
So, we might do a consulting project to help somebody through a growth challenge they might have, or we might actually provide ongoing executive leadership. The buzzword is fractional executive, and that can mean a lot of different things to several people. But essentially, it’s part-time interim leadership where a company might not necessarily need a full-time executive. They need somebody in leading a team or running a project for a certain amount of time.
We typically see our executives in that role for about nine months on average. It could be as little as six months; it could be as long as a couple of years. It just depends on how big the organization is and how long the project needs leadership.
But CEOs and founders and leaders of businesses can pretty much do a lot of things. The issue is time. And where we see us really plugging in is being able to have that access to some expertise in leadership so they know that the project or the team is taken care of and there’s leadership there, but they’re not necessarily having to do everything like they did perhaps at the very beginning.
We’ve worked with small businesses, startups, as well as Fortune 500 companies to really give some expertise where they might not necessarily have it on staff and they don’t necessarily need to have it full-time at that point.
And so, like I said, project work as well as ongoing fractional executive work. I also do some executive coaching for some clients, a handful of clients as well. So, those three service lines are where we focus. We focus really on growth of the company—sales and marketing leadership, operations, strategy roles like CEO or chief strategy officers, some CFOs for big-picture financial work, and then technology, like chief information officers and chief technology officers.
Does that help?
Emily Bose: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that’s great. It’s—you know, there are so many interesting ways to do business now that are just coming out. And I love hearing about the different options.
Emily Bose: Real quick, would love just maybe your elevator pitch for someone who may be considering moving to Nashville on a personal level. What’s kept you there for so long?
Jonathan Barnes: Well, to my point about people love to help, my experience has been people are very open-handed to helping others. And I think the culture is just that. I mean, people are willing to help, especially if you are coming and thinking, “You kind of want to set up in mind.”
You know, the economy here over the past twenty-five years or so, it has just absolutely exploded. I remember when I was in college, I had a summer job downtown on Broadway, and we would close up shop about five o’clock, and all the employees would leave by 5:30 because downtown was not a very safe place, nor was it a very open place. And now, you know, it’s riddled with tourists, and business is booming. You go down there at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, and it’s just packed.
So that—I mean, obviously, the economy, economic opportunity is insane. It’s a lot of growth. But like I said earlier, the people are so willing to help. And so it’s so nice. And I think it’s a great place to raise a family.
As a person with a large family, it’s been awesome. The community is incredible. At some point, I think I read—and I’m not sure if this has changed—but we had more nonprofits per capita than any other place in the United States. So people have a heart to serve and help other people.
You can get involved with nonprofits. There are great churches around. There are wonderful neighborhoods to be a part of. And so I think it is a great place to be and to raise a family. It’s a wonderful place to build a business and to build a career.
So, all that to say, it’s a great place. It’s funny that some people don’t like all the influx of new people coming to Nashville. I think of it as a wonderful opportunity to grow. And as long as we can handle the infrastructure traffic-wise, I think we’ll be okay.
Emily Bose: Yeah, that’s usually the challenge.
Jonathan Barnes: Right. If they could fix the potholes on I-440, I would be really happy.
Emily Bose: Right.
Jonathan Barnes: But, you know, I think we’re seeing a huge influx of people coming in from all across the country because of more of a freedom-focused economy and more opportunity in the state. I think the governor has done a good job. And, you know, in the legislature, I think everybody has made it very business-friendly.
And what that means for us is small business growth into medium business into more enterprise. And then you see huge headquarters being moved to Nashville as well.
Emily Bose: Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Barnes: And that’s not just with healthcare, even though one of the bigger announcements has been Oracle moving their headquarters here. Oracle has a large healthcare technology presence.
But yeah, I think—Is that a good enough pitch for Nashville?
Emily Bose: That’s great. You touched on a lot of awesome things. I think one of the best illustrations I’ve heard so far—someone said they coach a lot of youth sports. In other cities I lived in, it was very competitive; the other coaches would never talk to you. And in Nashville, the other coaches in the same league would sit down together and talk about their training plans and compare notes.
And they were like, “This is wild. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” So when you were talking about people being willing to help, that came to mind. So I think that’s a common theme that I’ve heard, which is great.
We do need to wrap up, but I so appreciate all of your time and the insight you shared. I think, you know, for both transitioning military members or other folks in the military community who may be interested in Nashville, or just looking for their next opportunity, I think you shared a lot of great insights.
And anyone else out there that’s a job seeker, I think, could get a lot of good, just food for thought, if nothing else, to help them in that path. So thank you so much, Jonathan, really appreciate your time being on here with us today.
Jonathan Barnes: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Emily Bose: Of course.
