Two Microphones and a Room Full of Dresses

Why we started the podcast

Mindy and I kept running into the same kind of person around here. Someone who had built something that mattered, who served people nobody else was serving, and who had no interest at all in being noticed for it. You'd only find out by accident, usually from somebody else.

That bothered us in a good way. So we bought a couple of microphones and started asking them about it.

That's how You Matter Nashville started. It's a podcast about the neighbors, founders, and volunteers holding Middle Tennessee together, and every episode lets them tell it in their own words. We're not journalists and we're not fundraisers.

How the conversations go

Most interviews start with the organization. We start with the person.

The first real question in every episode is some version of "before we talk about the organization, take us back to the beginning, what first stirred your heart toward this?" It gets asked differently every time, and it's usually the moment somebody stops reciting a mission statement and tells you something true.

Every episode also has the You Matter Five, five quick questions about a habit that keeps them grounded, a book that shaped them, a lesson learned the hard way, and someone who made them feel seen in a hard season. Then we close with a Community Quick Hit, one small thing a neighbor could actually do this week. Not a donate button. One real next step that fits the story.

Some of the people we've met

Each name links to that guest's episode, so anyone who wants the whole story can go hear it in their own words.

Not every guest runs a nonprofit. Milton Bartley built giving into the way ImageQuest runs day to day, instead of treating it as a separate program off to the side.

What this has to do with real estate

Honestly, nothing. Nobody has ever hired us because of the podcast, and that isn't why we do it.

But people ask, so here's the straight answer. Doing this has made us better at the actual job. You can't sit with this many people about the hardest seasons of their lives and stay casual about somebody's move. A house sale is rarely just a house sale. There's usually a job change, a parent getting older, a marriage starting or ending, a kid changing schools. This keeps that in front of us.

It's also made us know this place better than we would have otherwise. Our guests come from Franklin, Brentwood, Nolensville, Spring Hill, and most of the towns in between, and that adds up to a picture of Middle Tennessee you don't get from a market report.