NASHVILLE—It’s a bustling Monday morning at Pinewood Social, a sprawling coffee shop, restaurant and bar set high on a bluff overlooking the Cumberland River, and 30-year-old Amanda Lairsey is already sipping her second Cuban coffee of the day. Lairsey, who blogs at a website appropriately called “The Caffeinated Woman,” opts for that second cup to keep her going as she juggles her responsibilities as a budding construction executive and owner of her own consulting company.

The South Georgia native, who speaks with a Soft southern accent, arrived in Nashville five years ago, when her husband’s job moved them from South Florida. Lairsey was working as an office manager at a local construction company. It was an accident that she ended up in construction in the first place: Lairsey had previously worked at a law firm, also in an administrative capacity, and simply moved to a construction firm to run their back-office functions. She had no background in the industry.

Not long after her arrival in Nashville, though, the owners of the construction company she was working for split up. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘Well, I want to own what I do … so I partnered with somebody else.” Today, Lairsey is opening a branch of a construction company that she’s partnered with in Nashville. The company does mostly roofing work, though it also has contracts for gutters and siding.

Lairsey is distinct in her industry. “Construction is totally male-dominated,” she says. “I definitely want to break glass ceilings.” (Perhaps an ironic desire for someone in the roofing business.) The week I meet her, she’s about to sit for the Tennessee Commercial License Exam, which will allow her to expand the business to commercial properties. “I’ll probably be the only woman taking it,” Lairsey chuckles.

“I want to change the way women are viewed in the construction world,” she continues, “Because in construction, women are really viewed more as trophy wives [than anything],” continues.

Chatting with Lairsey, you get the sense that she doesn’t really need all that caffeine. She’s extraordinarily energetic—but then, again she’d have to be given what’s on her plate. In addition to her work in construction, the budding empire builder also owns and operates two other businesses: the Society of Women Business Owners (Sowbo), a networking group for Nashville’s female entrepreneurs, and The Lairsey Group, her business consulting outfit.

In her entrepreneurial zeal, Lairsey is far from alone in Nashville, a city of nearly 700,000, and growing. In 2017, the finance site Wallethub crunched data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Small Business Administration, looking at statistics such as what percentage of businesses are owned by women and the average revenue growth of those businesses. Wallethub found that, among the 100 largest cities in the country, Nashville’s is the best metro area for female entrepreneurs. (There must be something in that Tennessee water; Chattanooga ranked second for women entrepreneurs; Memphis ranked fourth.)

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And Nashville is particularly fertile ground for millennial entrepreneurs: The city boasts the second-highest rate in the country of small businesses owned by 20- to 34-year-olds, according to research by the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that supports and studies entrepreneurship. Lairsey’s story may be remarkable, yes, but she’s also right in the middle of that Venn diagram of surging Nashville business owners—female and millennial.

Making matters all the more interesting, most of these start-ups have nothing directly to do with country music, Nashville’s iconic industry. Tennessee’s capital is growing and economically diversifying at a remarkable rate. That said, every hardworking musician is, in a sense, a small-business owner, scratching out a living by gigging live, perhaps working as a session musician, and often holding down a day job, too. It’s a refrain one hears constantly in Nashville, from entrepreneurs of every stripe: “Everyone here has a side hustle.” For most blooming business owners here, what was once their side hustle eventually became their main business. Throw in a dollop of the Protestant work ethic and the successful model of creatives-turned-business-magnates like the Queen of Country herself, Dolly Parton, and you have a recipe for entrepreneurial success as distinctly Nashvillian as its famous hot chicken.

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A few hours after Lairsey has finished her business at Pinewood Social, 15 or so female business owners gather at the headquarters of the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee, a sprawling complex located in Nashville’s tony Duncan Wood neighborhood. They’re there for the meeting of Lairsey’s Society of Women Business Owners (Sowbo, pronounced “So-Bo”).

The setting is appropriate. In Nashville, it turns out, they start their female entrepreneurs young. Reasoning that the Girl Scouts are the “original female entrepreneurs” given their cookie-selling prowess, the Girls Scouts of Middle Tennessee recently launched an entrepreneur center for girls, the group’s grants administrator GiGi Rose tells me. There, they teach their young charges the basics of business. There are no girl scouts at Sowbo tonight though, just women, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, here to network, share tips and listen to a talk from their tireless leader. Sowbo says it has about 80 members across the Nashville area; between a dozen and 20 show up to the monthly meetings. (The events are also streamed live on Sowbo’s website, so those who can’t make it can still follow along.) Besides the main monthly group meeting, Sowbo also facilitates smaller, more frequent, events, like “coffee and conversations.”

The business owners here this evening lean heavily toward creative industries—though not necessarily music. For Amber Brannon, 26, the term is right there in the name of her business: Copperheart Creative. Copperheart, her recently established LLC, is a full-service branding operation—it designs websites, logos and print material—for local businesses spanning myriad industries. Brannon, a self-described “military brat” who grew up primarily in Ohio, moved to Nashville in 2012 and worked for a succession of advertising companies. She was a “job jumper,” she says, working at five different branding agencies over just a few years.

Brannon, who admits that when she moved to Nashville that she “hated country music,” realized quickly that she wanted to set out on her own. She “got involved with business owners groups,” like Sowbo. Joining up with Sowbo and other groups not only hooked her up with dozens of potential clients, but also showed her that her dream of running her own business was no fantasy. “If they can do it,” she recalls thinking, “I can.”

Another who could do it is Ashley Goldman. Goldman, 25, a native of Cleveland, Tennessee, a small town near Chattanooga, owns and operates Evergreen Events, a design and event-planning business. Eighty percent of her business is weddings, she says; and indeed, the idea for starting her business “came out of planning [her] own wedding,” she says. Business is strong in this “growing city,” Goldman says, and Nashville has also become a choice for an increasing number of destination weddings. (It’s become even more of a hub for bachelor and bachelorette parties, as the unfortunately vomit-drenched streets of certain parts of downtown on any given evening demonstrate.)

Few, if any, of the assembled at Sowbow are Nashville natives. Mandy Walz, 26, came to Tennessee from farther than most, though: Though American, she grew up in Buenos Aires, where her parents worked as missionaries. She returned to the States to study the music industry. Now, she runs her own photography business, doing the lion’s share of her advertising on Instagram and Google. Groups like Sobow are “so helpful,” Walz says. The members “don’t see each other as competition.” They’re there to collaborate and help each other out, Walz says.

“Collaboration” and helping one another navigate business challenges are big themes at Sowbo. Indeed, it was precisely because Lairsey herself needed business help that the group got started in the first place.

At the end of 2015, while still working full-time at the now defunct construction company, Lairsey was also taking on side gigs to make extra scratch; she had a steady gig keeping the books at a local cleaning company, for instance. “The goal was to make enough money myself to replace my salary,” she says. Lairsey, who has been working since she was 14, has always been hungry to strike out on her own.

To promote her nascent business, Lairsey did what any business-minded millennial would do: she “started a blog,” she recalls. But the effort did not go well: “I realized I am not an online marketer, and I should not be doing this,” she says with a chuckle.

Lairsey had a realization: She could harness the talent of Nashville to help her achieve her online vision. “Because there are so many creatives [here], Nashville is the perfect city” for this, she thought. She posted an event on MeetUp, setting up a group to discuss online marketing. Lairsey expected five or so people to show up. She got more than 20.

“After that, we just started meeting up every month going forward,” she says. What had begun as a meet-up devoted to blogging and online marketing quickly morphed into one that shared tips on all aspects of running a business. “We had people coming saying ‘I want to be a baker, I want to be a doula,’” she remembers.

The group also discussed common concerns for female entrepreneurs like “mommy guilt” and possessive husbands. Soon, the group had grown so large that they got kicked out of the Whole Foods cafeteria they had been using for their meetings. At that point, Lairsey realized she needed to rent space, which meant the group needed a name and it needed to charge their members. And so Sowbo was born. (These days, busy with her construction business and other projects, Lairsey had turned over the day-to-day operations of Sowbo to her childhood friend, operations director Rebekah Polley.)

Tonight, after the members of the group file into a large classroom and take their seats on folding chairs, Lairsey tells the assembled a story—one that’s focused less on the specific ins and outs of running a business, than a grander tale of triumph over adversity and overcoming “Imposter Syndrome,” the crippling feeling—supposedly more widespread among women than men—that one’s success is based on a fraud.

“One day, I came to a complete halt. I woke up one morning, and I took a deep breath, and I said ‘I’m such a fraud. If people knew who I really was, they wouldn’t listen to me,” she says. “It was a really, really dark place.”

For weeks, Lairsey recalls, she felt paralyzed; she even considered dropping her dreams of business ownership and returning “to the 9 to 5.” But then one day, by pure chance, she heard “The Climb,” the Miley Cyrus song that describes overcoming adversity, on the radio. The lyrics inspired her not to give up.

Lairsey, who is proudly religious, tells the group that when she was struck with Imposter Syndrome, “she was really angry with God.” She mentions offhand that she listens only to Christian radio stations in her car, and that, through any downturns she might hit, she maintains her faith that the “Lord is going to provide.” These remarks are met with a quiet murmur of approval, and even the occasional “amen” from the crowd.

Millennials might have the reputation of having turned away from religion—and survey data do bear this out—but that’s a trend that seems to have passed by this Bible Belt city. Twenty-six-year-old Amber Brannon of Copperheart Creative, for example, tells me that her move to Nashville was “definitely a God thing.”

Churches, of course, are another place for networking and forging business connections as well. And religiosity infuses the established business community here, too. “I don’t think you’d want to be perceived as an atheist while attempting to tap old Nashville’s resources,” one business owner adds.

“I definitely think faith drives things here,” Carrie Jeffries, founder and owner of Nashville-based Bold and Sassy Solutions tells me later over lunch at Pinewood Social. She draws a line from scripture to entrepreneurial activity: “I do think we are to surrender and rely on God, but He also says ‘You have to do the work. You don’t work, you don’t eat!’”

Jeffries, now settled in Nashville after a peripatetic career and life that has taken her to St. Louis, Washington state, New Jersey and beyond, has owned and sold several businesses, including a successful online retail operation. Today, she works as a business coach, consulting exclusively with female entrepreneurs. Jeffries says she sees something in the millennials that she networks with and consults for: “There’s a great heart that they have, and they want to infuse it in their businesses.”

Sometimes that infusion comes literally, as at businesses where millennials build things with their hands. They can do that at Fort Houston, itself a millennial-founded and owned business. Ryan Schemmel, 30—a rare Nashville native—co-founded the business in 2011 after a few years toiling in the music industry. What it is essentially a lending library for tools: a 17,000-square-foot “maker space,” in a Nashville industrial neighborhood, where small-scale artists and entrepreneurs can use tools that they may not want to buy and store themselves. “Think of Fort Houston like a gym, but for people who build stuff with their hands,” the owners say. In addition to tool rental and work space, Fort Houston also provides ample networking activities for various business owners to sell things to one another. To wit: An independently owned coffee shop on site is full of wooden furniture—all built right there by a carpenter who happened to be a Fort Houston member.

The typical Fort Houston members are “males in their 30s,” says Schemmel. Not exclusively, however. On a recent afternoon, Meredith Edmonson was hard at work on some glass. Edmonson, a glass artist since 2005, owns and operates REG Design and Supply, a design studio. Without Fort Houston, she’d be in in trouble: “It’s the only resource” she has to keep her glasswork business going, she says.

Similar resources exist for white-collar entrepreneurs, too. An unofficial one is Pinewood Social, where I first met Lairsey. The hipster enclave is a long way—at least figuratively—from the smoky honky tonks and hot chicken joints that define much of Nashville’s cultural landscape and, tends more towards plush couches, artisanal cappuccinos and $14 craft cocktails than rotgut shots and sawdust. If you fancy some mild exercise, there’s an ironically bedecked vintage bowling alley in a sprawling back room. Outside is a swimming pool with an Airstream trailer set up for slinging drinks.

It’s also a place where people go to work: The vast space is filled with workers—20- and 30-somethings, men and women alike—huddled over their laptops, toiling away for hours at a time. In a sense, Pinewood Social is a cooler, indie version of WeWork, the already semi-cool yet sterile chain of co-working spaces that have taken downtowns across the world by storm.

For those seeking a more structured facility from which to launch their budding businesses, there’s the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (NEC), a nonprofit with backing from a variety of local foundations and philanthropists, a membership-based organization that allows members access to work space and networking activities. Founded and 2010 and located just a few doors down from Pinewood Social, the NEC boasts around 500 paying members. Recent successful launches to come out of the NEC include Please Assist Me, an app that connects homeowners to people willing to run errands and do chores for a flat weekly fee and Jammber, an app that helps musicians manage their careers.

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Every city wants to attract millennials, of course—and all the better if they’re entrepreneurially minded. Those millennials, in particular, can be hard to find, though: As of 2014, less than 4 percent of 30-year-olds had started their own businesses, compared to 5.4 percent of Gen Xers and 6.7 percent of baby boomers at the same age. The youth of the business owners here is part of what makes Nashville so distinct.

Pointing to organizations like the NEC, Jose Gonzalez, an instructor of entrepreneurship and management at Nashville’s Belmont University, say that here, “in general, it’s easy to connect with a supportive network of resources that include mentorship, training and even capital.” And it’s clear that the city’s reputation as a magnet for creative types is a huge asset: “Nashville has always been a place where creatives can thrive,” Gonzalez adds.

“Nashville has been a startup hub since the Civil War—it’s a part of our DNA. The culture encourages entrepreneurship, and the economics make it affordable to be an entrepreneur,” adds Ralph Schulz, president and CEO of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. “The creative talent in Nashville is strong, particularly in health care and music, and we’ve built upon that culture over time with targeted resources and support for high-growth startups.”

Tennessee’s lack of an income tax probably helps, too—a point made by Carrie Jeffries—but it doesn’t explain why Sioux Falls or Cheyenne aren’t the new Nashvilles. After all, neither South Dakota nor Wyoming levies an income tax.)

As far as why female entrepreneurs in particular are so prevalent here, part of that is clearly due to a certain kind of network effect. The more female business owners there are, the more they beget, simply because their very presence sends a message to others: You can do this. And the myriad female-focused networking groups like Sowbo only help that along.

Dana Maize, a Kansas native who opened her own Nashville flower business, One Wild Flower Designs, two years ago, makes another intriguing point. “Think of Dolly Parton,” she says. “She came from nothing, and she made a way, and she gave others a platform to get their careers going. Maybe it goes back as far as that, and Parton just built a culture,” she continues. Music and film aside, in other words, Maize suggests that part of Parton’s legacy is creating a tradition of female collaboration, mentorship and encouraged ambition. (Even Brannon, by the way, who said she hated country music when she moved to Nashville, concedes she has developed a soft spot for the style.)

Ultimately, it seems, there’s a certain hard to define character to Nashville; a rugged charm and rich culture not unlike that which has also lured millennials to cities like Pittsburgh, Portland and Columbus, too. That’s hard, likely impossible, to conjure out of thin air. Though of course there’s always another option: You could try to entice Connie Britton to star in a popular television series showcasing your city. And if not, perhaps it’s time, like so many Nashvillians, to try the power of prayer.