The Tennessee Business Roundtable was founded in 1983 at the recommendation of then-Governor Lamar Alexander to fill the need for a unified voice for the business community. Today, our Roundtable serves our state and our nearly five dozen member companies and organizations across all three of its Grand Divisions under the motto Non Solum Pro Nobis, Sed Pro Omnibus Tennessee (Not for Ourselves Alone, But for All Tennessee). We convene and empower Tennessee’s business thought leaders to drive economic success and resiliency across our state.

Management Solutions is a national award-winning performance management and consulting services firm that specializes in improving organizational performance through proven sustainable solutions, customized to meet its clients and partners’ needs. Known for our engineering processes which are driven by advanced technological knowledge, enhanced professional standards and innovative solutions, we consistently deliver significant cost reductions, improved efficiencies, expedited project completion and increased business value to our clients. Our Gold Standard performance management and consulting services ensure our clients the best, most reliable and innovative business solutions. We delivers customized and sustainable management and consultation services to a wide variety of government agencies and commercial businesses. Utilizing advanced technologies and practices, our performance management and consulting services provide value far beyond a stated scope of work. Management Solutions maintains a culture of innovation that fosters creative thinking, and advances efforts to create enhanced economic and business value for every client. Each member of the Management Solutions team works hard and puts forth our best professional effort to achieve every project for every client on time, on budget, every time. But we also realize that our work is only part of our identities, we take time to have fun, recognize personal achievements and give back to the community as well. We promote a work environment that recognizes we are part of something larger. We believe in being good stewards in our local community and offer opportunities to our employees to participate in charitable work with a larger cause. This ability to engage and give back strengthens our own sense of family and community, improves our teamwork skills as an organization, and adds strength to our individual and collective ability to achieve optimal results. We are a certified EDWOSB and also an 8(a) firm.

Analysis and Measurement Services Corporation (AMS) is a recognized market leader in providing the worldwide nuclear power industry with equipment, training, and services to verify the performance of process instrumentation and control (I&C) systems.

Merrick & Company is an employee-owned engineering, architecture, surveying, and geospatial firm, headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado. Sears Merrick, a former engineering professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, founded our company in 1955 in Denver. Our initial focus on structural engineering quickly expanded into power engineering, surveying and other types of engineering across Colorado.

Though Merrick has grown to serve customers outside of Colorado, we haven’t outgrown our founder’s belief in the value of employee ownership: “If a man works for himself, he is much more committed.”

See our Strategic Direction here.

Shift Thermal was founded in 2017 by two engineering PhDs from Cornell University to help solve for the missing link in our sustainable energy future: energy storage. The company moved to Tennessee to join the inaugural cohort of Innovation Crossroads, a DOE-funded entrepreneurship program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Over the next two years, the team invented IHEX technology and built a deep scientific understanding of its capabilities. Since graduation from the ORNL program, with support from NSF and DOE, our team has expanded with talented scientists and engineers, brought IHEX to commercial scale, and partnered with multinational HVAC firms to realize our founding vision.

WastAway, based in Morrison, Tenn., is a leading green technology company boasting a multi-patented equipment design and processing system that converts municipal solid waste (MSW) to fuel, achieving 85% landfill diversion. WastAway’s technology removes metals (ferrous and non-ferrous), plastics, glass and ceramics for recycling and converts the remaining waste into sterile carbon rich sustainable engineered fuel for a variety of uses. Its renewable – negative carbon footprint – products include a soil enrichment additive; a proven, high-BTU coal replacement fuel for cement kilns, power plants, steel mills, pulp mills and other solid fuel users; biofuels through gasification and pyrolysis; renewable natural gas (RNG) through anaerobic digestion and building materials through extrusion processes. WastAway was founded in 2002 as a subsidiary of Bouldin Corporation, which began in 1959 as Bouldin & Lawson, a manufacturer of agricultural and horticultural machinery for the greenhouse and nursery industries. For more information, visit www.wastaway.com.

Harvey Abouelata, founder of AREA51.SOLAR, boasts a rich history in business management, strategy, sales, marketing, and public relations, with a special focus on renewable energy. Graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1984, he began his career by developing cost accounting and estimating software for manufacturing. His proficiency in accounting and metric data collection paved the way for his involvement in business launches, reorganizations, and market introductions of new technologies.

Harvey is renowned for his expertise in creating successful sales and marketing strategies, business plans, and economic development strategies. His approach is marked by key phrases like “fast cycle time”, “In God we trust and all others must provide data,” and “Build the win in for all stakeholders.” His tenure in the solar industry is particularly noteworthy, where he successfully secured millions in grants for local companies and the state of Tennessee.

Catbird Consulting brings new and emerging technologies to market. We support academic, government, industrial, and R&D organizations, matching emerging technologies to markets, partnerships, and novel uses.

We focus on advanced technology adaptation, technology/R&D scouting, and new venture development. Using customer and market discovery best practices, we find product-market fit and develop it into efficient business models . Model and market evaluations inform development of sustainable funding plans and partnering strategies for a range of technologies, government/university R&D, and private-sector industries.

We are strategically located in Tennessee’s Technology Corridor near Oak Ridge National Lab, and other major research institutions.