Pathway providing resources for entrepreneurs | Finance

“When he was mentoring us, he talked about the importance of financial partners,” Fleming said. “You have business coaches, but you need financial partners to give you the capital resources you need to bring your entrepreneur dream idea to life.”

Fleming said he originally approached Pathway when he was growing his insurance agency. He started his first company, Fleming & Associates (an Allstate insurance and financial agency), in 1997. Since then, he has established CleanTek of Nashville, expanded Fleming & Associates to MetroCenter, launched Metro 1 EMS for private non-emergency ambulance service and most recently created real estate development company AmeriCare Properties, specializing in multifamily housing.

For each new idea, Fleming continued to return to Pathway when he was ready for the financing stage.

“From the beginning, Pathway has always focused on reaching into communities that have historically been underserved, and helping entrepreneurs access that critical piece of future of success, which is capital,” Pathway President and CEO Clint Gwin told the Post.

For 25 years, Pathway has lent more than $526 million in the state, most of which has gone to more than 1,500 small businesses. Capital totaling $180 million went to women-owned businesses, while $40 million went to African American entrepreneurs, and another $8 million was directed to veteran business owners.

Some financial institutions still view these emerging markets as high-risk, Gwin said.

“When you look at those targeted populations that we’re trying to work with that have historically been underserved, from our perspective they have a lot of common attributes to them,” Gwin said. “They’ve historically had a lack of ability to obtain and own personal residences, which is one of the places where folks typically generate the capital to start a business or to grow a business.”

Gwin said because veterans move so frequently, they have less opportunity to own or create equity in their homes. Women in the recent past have struggled to buy property without a spouse, and the African American community for years met with challenges of landing a traditional mortgage because of racially divisive housing policies such as redlining.

“If you look at women, veterans and African American entrepreneurs, the preponderance of the folks that they hire are those same women, veterans and African Americans in their businesses,” Gwin said. “So you’re creating more economic vitality in those communities when businesses that are part of those communities and represent those communities and look like those communities have the opportunity to grow in those same communities.”

Fleming lives in North Nashville, and he and his wife decided with their next company that they wanted to buy properties to renovate and allow the people who live there to stay there by keeping those properties affordable.

“I was able to go to Pathway with that relationship that we built over the years to again get another round of funding to expand and grow the business and grow the agency,” Fleming said. “I was telling them about my idea of AmeriCare Properties, and what we wanted to do is find multifamily housing, affordable housing in Nashville. Because I hear from my clients, even within my Allstate agency, that people are coming from the outside and they’re gentrifying our communities, and they’re pushing us out. So I’m always of the mindset, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Fleming adds that his relationship with Pathway also opened options for traditional financing later because the companies built a history of being bankable.

“We make deposits at Regions, so now we’ve developed a relationship with Regions Bank. That’s another financial institution or lender that we can use to do some deals and maybe have a larger capacity, in addition to what we’re doing with Pathway,” Fleming said. “As a real estate developer, I need to be able to pull and have access to capital for multiple sources versus just one.”

Fleming said sometimes entrepreneurs are just looking for someone to bet on their idea with them.

“I think a lot of times you just need that one break,” he said. “I think by coming to Pathway and getting the education first, then you can say, ‘OK, now I know what I’m doing. Now I need to secure some financing for my first project, for my first deal.’ Then once you do the first deal, and it works, and everything goes well now, you are ready for your second one.”

Around the time that Fleming was starting AmeriCare, Pathway started an emerging developers cohort that he joined.

“We spend a lot of time in the markets that we try to serve. Our lending staff, our capacity building team, our outreach team, are regularly in those markets, trying to understand what those markets need,” Gwin said. “We’ve now had over 120 emerging developers go through that program over the last 36 months, and it’s an intensive program where they really get to understand what it really takes to become a developer.”

Fleming said, “I think the capacity building and things that Pathway is doing, as far as the educational piece of it with the emerging developers, allowed me to kind of learn as I was doing one project after another.”

Gwin said the education component is a core belief for Pathway.

“Our vision statement that we really try to take to market day in and day out — which is no missed opportunities — means we don’t want an entrepreneur to miss an opportunity because they don’t have either the capacity to execute on it or the capital to execute on it,” Gwin said.