Together With:
RenderATL is August 12 and 13 at AmericasMart, 230 John Portman Blvd NW in Downtown. Engineers and technical founders get five summits covering AI, go-to-market, open source, observability, and legal technology. Killer Mike delivers the keynote. Read more here.
Advancing Health & Life Sciences in Georgia is August 13 from 8 to 10 a.m. at City Springs, 1 Galambos Way in Sandy Springs. Atlanta Business Chronicle and Wellstar are bringing together healthcare executives, life sciences founders, real estate investors, and capital providers. Read more here.
Morning Money Mix is August 17 from 10 to 11 a.m. at Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee, 1140 Spring St NW. THE PIT gives an active investor 20 minutes to explain a thesis, founders 20 minutes for questions, and the room 20 minutes to connect. Read more here.
I.Swift Workforce AI
Swift Workforce AI is working on the part of healthcare AI that matters after the demo: getting an actual hospital workforce to use it.
Nurse scheduling is a good example. Open shifts and schedule changes can still move through Excel sheets, GroupMe messages, phone calls, and managers manually updating the system afterward.
Swift sits on top of the hospital’s existing scheduling software and handles open shifts, swaps, approvals, and updates through SMS and chat.
The important product decision came during a pilot with Wellstar.
Nurses did not want another app. They did not want another password. They wanted the scheduling problem handled through something they already used every day.
Wellstar has since expanded Swift across 11 hospitals for more than 8,000 nurses and additional staff. During the six-month pilot, the companies reported an 86% reduction in change-management time for nurses and support staff and a 96% reduction for nurse managers. More than 98% of users interacted with the product through text or chat.
The company launched as vflok and is led by CEO John Sheehan and CTO David Sommers. Sheehan previously ran Pri-Med International, which was acquired by Bain Capital, and HealthHonors, later acquired by Healthways.
There is a broader Atlanta story underneath it.
The city has major health systems, universities, technical talent, and enough healthcare infrastructure for companies to test products against real operational problems. That matters in AI because the hardest part usually comes after the model works.
Read more here.
Banshee
The Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant sits at 1271 Glenwood Ave SE and comes from Peter Chvala, Nolan Wynn, Katie McDonald, and Faielle Bolzan Stocco, with Wynn leading the kitchen.
The menu changes constantly, which is part of the point. Banshee takes the neighborhood restaurant format seriously enough for a client dinner but keeps the room loose enough that nobody feels like they booked the wrong place for a Tuesday night.
Friday and Saturday dinner rolls into a late-night cocktail bar and music.
Read more here.
How to Start Your Own Pink Zebra Moving Business
Atlanta households move all year long, and most of them need a mover. Most of that work still goes to companies nobody recommends twice, which is exactly the gap Pink Zebra Moving was built to fill, with hot-pink zebra-striped trucks and a customer experience people actually rave about.
It comes from Ron Holt, who grew a single cleaning store into a $40 million, 90-location brand before selling it and pointing the same playbook at moving. Owners get comprehensive training, a recession-resistant service, and no moving experience is required because the model runs semi-absentee alongside what you already do.
The numbers show what is possible: franchisee Drue Chrisman’s location generated $2.5 million in revenue and $707,000 in net operating income in its first full calendar year, even after franchise expenses and new-truck purchases.* Across the network, franchise owners average $135,904 in net operating income.*
Atlanta gets only one owner, and whoever raises their hand first gets the territory.
If you have been quietly wanting something of your own with no ceiling on the upside, tap below to explore the model and request more information directly from the Pink Zebra team.
II.What Happens to an Office Building Nobody Needs?
Buckhead’s office market is starting to answer an uncomfortable question: when is an office building worth more without the offices?
JLB Partners is proposing 314 apartments at 470 E. Paces Ferry Road, replacing the seven-story office building currently sitting between East Paces Ferry and Peachtree Road. The location helps explain the math.
This is the walkable part of Buckhead, close to Buckhead Village, restaurants, retail, and Peachtree Road. More residents there create customers after office workers leave and give developers another use for land that no longer needs to live or die based on corporate leasing.
Three days before the JLB proposal surfaced, Cousins Properties and Town Lane completed a $20 million renovation of Proscenium in Midtown.
One office building gets another $20 million because ownership thinks it can still compete for tenants. Another gets replaced with 314 homes.
Atlanta has plenty of office space. What Buckhead increasingly needs is enough people living nearby to keep the district operating after 5 p.m.
Read more here.
4 other headlines to snack on:
MARTA narrowed its CEO search to three finalists, all with experience running major U.S. transit authorities. Read more here.
Shake Shack is opening at Centennial Yards, adding another national tenant around the massive Downtown redevelopment. Read more here.
Smith + Howard is switching private-equity partners, with TPG replacing Broad Sky Partners after roughly 3.5 years of expansion into an approximately 800-person national accounting and advisory business. Read more here.
Group 1 Automotive agreed to buy 10 Hennessy dealerships for approximately $1.3 billion. The stores are expected to add roughly $1.7 billion in annualized revenue and make Atlanta Group 1’s second-largest market. Read more here.
That’s it.
What’d you think? Reply and share some thoughts.
See you next week.
Andrew