Fogelman College of Business and Economics

Whitney Hardy had her first taste of entrepreneurial energy sprawled on the floor of her parents’ front room, determined to use their better-than-fine vacuum to turn a skateboard into a hovercraft.

“I’d researched enough to know that the vacuum cleaner bottom produced enough air to lift up the little 7-year-old that I was,” she said, her eyes dancing not just with the notion of lift but the thrill of her own ideas taking shape in her hands.

The vacuum was so expensive and powerful that her parents had her map out every inch of her plan before she could take the thing apart. Those drawings, product blueprints, were pinned up everywhere in the Hardy house, linear line drawings of an idea taking shape.

Hardy, 37, who’s innovated in many spaces since then — including designing two of the four hydrogen drinks made at Hardy Beverages, the company she co-founded with her mother, Carolyn Hardy — fell in love with giving ideas muscle to get up and go.

She spent five years at Epicenter, first as director of entrepreneurial programs, then as chief capacity officer. She co-owned logistics company, Henderson Transloading. She was an original investor in The Liquor Store restaurant and founded 3rdspace, an arts nonprofit. She’s also advised startups in pet care, consumer tech, retail, hospitality and health.

And four months ago, the University of Memphis named her director of its Crews Center for Entrepreneurship.

It had been without a permanent leader for more than a year and before that, had fallen quiet during the pandemic.

Hardy applied some gumshoe entrepreneurship — in this case, preparing tailored presentations for nearly every dean on campus on what the coaching could look like in their department, art to engineering — and making appointments with each one to talk it over.

“Entrepreneurship is interdisciplinary. It is about seeing a problem and coming up with a solution. It’s about not only creating a new venture but creating value in the workforce when you do start your first job,” she said.

It can be about cupcakes

Yes, there are students who see entrepreneurship as shaping the rare genius idea that can make them rich. Hardy has at least eight of them in her new coaching realm, but others are interested in building side gigs, working to transform family businesses or innovating to use their degrees in new ways. And some, she said, still dream of owning a cupcake shop.

“I’m like, ‘OK, well, let’s talk about it. If you want to create that cupcake shop, let’s figure out what do you need to know and where are you trying to go in the community,’” she said.

To make Crews central to how college-age entrepreneurs build networks, strategy and eventually the tax bases in their communities, Hardy is promoting the features at Crews, the Tiger Tank Pitch — a “Shark Tank” type of competition with a $10,000 prize for the winner — and the 12-week summer entrepreneurship accelerator, ImagineU. It comes with a $3,000 stipend.

But she’s added lunch and learn events with local entrepreneurs, a new pitch challenge funded by the Patton Foundation (with three prizes totaling $8,500) and a $40,000 accelerator, sponsored by the Greater Memphis Chamber, to guide multicultural Memphians through entrepreneurship in a 10-week session.

“Just seeing how clearly she defined the process from Week One to Week 10, and what they will be learning, the business fundamentals, the strategic plan,” said Jessica Mosley, director of community development at the chamber.

“Throughout the week, the members can schedule check-ins with Whitney, her team and the faculty and staff for ongoing support.”

Hardy teaches some of the segments, but she also brings in university faculty, leveraging the power of the campus for people who may have never been there before.

And because she’s big on access to capital for entrepreneurs — her words — she specifically carved out funding in the grant so that each finisher receives $1,500.

“If they want to put it toward accounting, if they want to put it toward marketing, if they want to put it toward a new website or getting inventory, they’ll have some cash to do it,” Hardy said.

Bigger than business

The Crews Center runs under the direction of the Fogelman College of Business & Economics. It’s traditional on campuses that entrepreneurial thinking is based in the business school, said the college’s dean, Bobby Garrett.

“Within entrepreneurship, we often use the word bricolage, which is French and basically means piecing together whatever you have and figuring out how to arrange the pieces into something new.

“I really feel like Whitney is an expert at bricolage, of taking the pieces we have and rearranging them to suit her vision. She’s done a lot without needing a lot of additional resources.

“And, she’s been super proactive about getting out on our campus and meeting with all the deans and the department chairs and saying, ‘This is not a Fogelman College study. This is a university center. And we’d love to get your advisers, we’d love to get your students, over here to understand more about what we can do for them.’”

For that reason, Hardy loves that Crews, 3618 Walker Ave., is a standalone building, separate from any of the colleges, where ideas can bake and students can intermingle and build on their concepts.

The building’s second floor, an open space at least the size of a gym floor, is a maker space with 3-D printers, de rigueur for creatives in this age. But it also has countertops that can morph into production spaces, plus encampments around the perimeter, personalized spaces students have created to fine-tune their venture development ideas.

In the middle is the flux space, which Hardy loves because it has the power to be anything.

“I always say the best thing about entrepreneurs is these are people who had the audacity to think that they could change the world, and I believe they can,” Hardy said. “So, I’m here to give them the tools, the resources, the mentorship, the partners on campus, because the campus has a ton of resources. But it can be hard to navigate.”

One Friday in early February, the space was a mini-lecture room, chairs arranged in a tidy semi-circle for a Crews-sponsored Lunch and Learn featuring Brandon Seavers, the Memphis State grad who met his business partner on campus. Together, they founded and run Memphis Record Pressing, the largest vinyl disc manufacturer on the continent.

The audience was as varied — in age, color and ethnicity — as any coffee shop in the city.

Besides the targeted questions Hardy threw at Seavers — How do you stay on top of your customer needs? Tell me about your dedication to Memphis? — she built in time for the audience to relate, an easygoing back and forth with students and guests from the city at large who came for the lecture and free pizza.

Connor Lorino, a music major, sat close to the front. He’s starting his own record label and management company and knew nothing about the Crews Center, but came because a professor recommended it in class.

“Learning about how an entrepreneur really works, even in a different facet of the industry, is important,” he said.

He also left with the knowledge that Crews has a specific pitch competition for music-related businesses. He plans to apply.

That connection to Crews for him happened in the space of 10 or 15 minutes, which doesn’t surprise Hardy.

“If a student comes to one of our events, I remember them because I saw them perk up when we started talking about the opportunities here.”

Years of experience, for Hardy and Crews

Entrepreneurship programs are not new on college campuses. The Crews Center itself started in 2013. In conjunction with it, the university offers a minor and a concentration in entrepreneurship, but not a major.

Hardy sees no need for a major, saying a minor allows students in every department to incorporate what Crews offers into their own study disciplines.

“This needs to weave into their day. If I say I want to take the whole day,” Hardy said, “then students are not learning the technical side of their work.”

Maybe nine or 10 years ago, Leslie Lynn Smith, Epicenter’s founding director, met Hardy, who was then in her late 20s.

She had a CPA license and a raft of entrepreneurial experience, even then.

“I just knew immediately that I needed more Whitney in my life,” Smith said with a chuckle.

“She’s built a food accelerator. She’d built an operations accelerator that was responsive to the needs of entrepreneurs trying to grow and scale their business by understanding finance and ops.”

Smith, who wrote a recommendation for Hardy at the Crews Center, said the important thing about her being there now is that students can’t be what they don’t see.

“Whitney is such a complex expression of identities. She’s a Memphian, a Black woman, a lesbian, an artist, an intellectual, a young person. There are so many students on campus who see themselves in her and believe, as a result of the magic she’s made in the world, that they, too, have that capacity.

“And I think that’s really important for young people.”