Carolyn Hardy

Carolyn Hardy is answering a roundabout question about equity by sharing a memory about essence. Grape essence, to be precise.

The seventh of 16 children, Hardy grew up in poverty, in Orange Mound, South Memphis — all over town, really. The family moved frequently. She learned early on the value of cultivating ingenuity.

While plant manager at the J.M. Smucker Company in Memphis, Hardy decided to turn around the facility’s bottom-of-the-pot results. She didn’t hesitate to, well, stir things up.

She asked a mentor how his plant’s grape jelly managed to win quality tests so consistently. “I said, I looked at every report, and you’ve won every time. Nobody wins every time. I said, you’re doing something that everybody else is not doing. He told me. Mmm hmm. He was using extra essence.

“He got the fruit plant to send him all the extra grape essence. And legally he could use it, without changing the standard of identity of the jelly. So what did I do when I got back? I called them and said, I need my share of the grape essence” — a concentrated product that intensified the jelly’s flavor profile.

Hardy would go on to find other ways to ensure she and her team received their fair share. She had begun at the plant as a 20-year-old accountant, fresh out of college at the University of Memphis, where she also earned her MBA. To become plant manager, as she made it her mission to do, a mentor told her she would need experience in quality control and in human resources. So in quality control, she helped modernize the facility’s cook room, adding automation and creating a recipe management system. And to HR, she brought a new style of people management.

“I told them that automatically, I’m going to assume that everybody’s telling the truth.” Hardy recalls. “But if I ever catch you lying, I’ll never trust you again. So they had a lot to lose.”

Also during her years with Smucker, she took a two-shift plant to a 24-hour operation. As jams and jellies filled waiting jars, Hardy watched workers, performing a broader range of duties for the first time, fill with confidence. “Ladies who had never held a wrench before,” she says, “had to now start holding a wrench.”

With the jump to 24-hour production, “We demonstrated to the whole company — and the entire Smucker company runs that way today. It was a little woman who wondered if she could be a plant manager, right?”

By the time she departed Smucker to plant-manage the Coors brewery in Memphis, Hardy was a sought-after problem-solver hired to deal with issues of labor relations and cost. When Coors announced intentions to close the brewery, Hardy responded by turning in record results — and then buying the facility to launch Hardy Bottling, which she sold in 2009.

She’s now president of Chism Hardy Investments, a real-estate firm with an interest in supporting the railroads, and of Henderson Transloading Services, which is responsible for transferring shipments from one mode of transport to another. As we talk, she’s interrupted by a call about a shipment gone awry: A steamship line “sent the wrong box,” she says. Which doesn’t sound like such a big problem, until she mentions that the shipment contains some 40,000 pounds of oil that her team now must move safely.

Hardy has thrived as an entrepreneur, by any measure. And she’s thrived as a Black woman in a business world dominated by white men. She’s a former chairwoman of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, and now chairwoman of the Chamber’s Chairman’s Circle.

Change doesn’t happen spontaneously, in Hardy’s experience. “The reason the goals for women and minorities are so important still, to this day,” she says, “is because equity is not happening on its own.” In order for true progress to be made, she goes on, “You’ve got to have people who are willing to give other people a chance.”

Hardy sees the opportunity to foster greater equity in the business world. “To grow in the way we need to grow,” she says, “it can’t be whether a woman grows, minority grows, or a locally owned small business grows. In an ideal situation, all businesses grow. The challenge that we have in Memphis is that we are not in an ideal situation.

“I feel like women and minorities, when we go after something, we have to run up that hill 10 times to ring the bell. And the ones who run up that hill all the time, they run up it one time and ring the bell, and then they get to go on to something else.”

Hardy thinks in terms of what she calls “the what-if.” What if the jelly plant ran 24 hours a day? What if she owned a brewery? The big what-ifs she asks: What if Memphis were home to one hundred $100 million companies? What if our education system prepared students for the jobs that will be created? She cites a finding that, despite accounting for 68 percent of the population, minority [business revenues] in the Memphis community makes up only 0.83 percent of the Memphis economy.

Hardy believes the answers lie in developing more equitable business-to-business relationships. “All of a sudden,” she says, “the whole world starts looking very different. “The pie becomes bigger for everybody — so big we can’t eat it all.”

“We have to stop going for small goals,” she concludes. “Go for large goals. Take a risk. Answer the ‘what if.’”