Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed TN-5 candidate and newcomer to politics, entrepreneur Geni Batchelor, in-studio to discuss her life experience and why she’s running for Congress.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by one of the nine qualified candidates for the Republican nomination for congress in the 5th Congressional District, Geni Batchelor. Good morning, Geni.
Batchelor: Good morning.
Leahy: So, Geni, you are new to politics.
Batchelor: I am.
Leahy: And tell us a little bit about yourself.
Batchelor: Well, I’m a retired businesswoman, mostly small business, owned my own businesses, as well as working in other small businesses throughout my career.
Had a little bit of exposure to the legal field, working as a legal assistant early on in my career. But basically, I got in touch with my entrepreneurial nature and started my own businesses and was able to grow them and sell three of them – four of them, actually.
Leahy: So tell us what these businesses were.
Batchelor: They were service-oriented businesses. I was a graphic design artist, and I provided that service to other small businesses to get their startups going and their business cards and just a general branding design. That was one of them. One of them was a bakery.
Leahy: A bakery? How long did you run a bakery? Where was it?
Batchelor: Four years, in Florida.
Leahy: In Florida?
Batchelor: On the panhandle?
Leahy: On the panhandle – Destin?
Batchelor: [State Road] 30A.
Leahy: You lived on 30A?
Batchelor: Four years.
Leahy: And why did you leave 3oA? Because of course, we call it, lovingly, the Redneck Riviera. But it’s a beautiful place. The beaches are great, and great restaurants right next to the gulf, the beaches.
Batchelor: It’s a wonderful place. It’s an absolutely wonderful place. But as you can well imagine, if you’re running a bakery and you’re there at 4:00 in the morning to build the cinnamon rolls, and you’re there until 6:00 at night when you’re shutting down and closing everything up, you don’t have much time for the beach. (Laughs)
Leahy: Unfortunately, because all of us, I mean, we go down there and just hang out at the beach and have fun.
Batchelor: Right. So I go there now for that, and it’s wonderful.
Leahy: And so is the bakery still around?
Batchelor: I actually sold it to a gentleman who’s a caterer, and he’s expanded the services to take in his catering.
Leahy: So he’s got the bakery.
Batchelor: There is still a bakery there, yeah.
Leahy: Wow, that’s good. Okay, so then what did you do?
Batchelor: I’m not really giving this to you in chronological order, but I also did start – my first business was a singing telegram service in California, and that was back in the ’70s.
Leahy: Where in California?
Batchelor: Sacramento is where I started the first one.
Leahy: How many of those do you have?
Batchelor: Well, I had 13 by the time I sold it all.
Leahy: Singing telegrams?
Batchelor: Yes.
Leahy: In San Francisco?
Batchelor: San Francisco Bay area, but they were in different parts, so the first branch was in Fresno. This was really generated by people coming to me and saying, I’d like to do this, what you are doing here.
Leahy: Singing telegrams, bakeries. What was the most recent business you did?
Batchelor: The most recent business that I retired from actually was a global event planning company. (Chuckles)
Leahy: Okay, so what on earth is a global event planning company?
Batchelor: Well, it’s a third-party service that is provided to large corporations that need to have meetings planned, but that doesn’t necessarily have an in-house department to do that.
Leahy: So how long did you do that?
Batchelor: 13 years.
Leahy: From here in Nashville?
Batchelor: Yes, from Lebanon, actually.
Leahy: Some large corporations would have you do this.
Batchelor: Primarily, our niche was in the area of pharmaceutical clinical drug trial meetings. So the physicians that were signing on to perform clinical drug trials.
Leahy: So when you sell these businesses, and a lot of small businesses get sold, usually not for cash, usually like for a note, a long-term note. Were you able to make cash on all these deals?
Batchelor: The first one was a long-term note, and it took her 10 years to pay off. But the others were cash.
Leahy: Cash? So you got money in the account, you don’t have to work.
Batchelor: Well, no, I’m retired.
Leahy: So you are just living off all the money you succeeded in your small business.
Batchelor: I don’t want to overblow that, because I made good money, but I did not make millions and millions. These were small businesses.
Leahy: You made enough to retire.
Batchelor: I did, yes.
Leahy: And now you’ve decided to run for Congress.
Batchelor: Yes. Divine inspiration.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Geni Batchelor” by Geni Batchelor.
