FAIRHOPE — Hatch Fairhope, the entrepreneurship organization that has spent the past several years cultivating startups and small businesses along the Eastern Shore, has hired its first-ever community manager. Sydney Davis, a recent University of South Alabama graduate, steps into the newly created role just months before Hatch opens a much larger home base in downtown Fairhope.
The hire comes at a pivotal moment for the organization. Hatch began in 2020 as a shared workspace designed to give local entrepreneurs and early-stage startups room to build their businesses, offering desks, mentorship and a sense of community for founders who might otherwise be working alone out of a spare bedroom or coffee shop. This October, that mission is set to expand significantly when Hatch opens a 36,000-square-foot innovation hub inside Fairhope’s historic K-1 Center, a former school building that has become a focal point for the city’s efforts to blend its past with its economic future.
What began as a handful of desks has become part of a Baldwin County institution in the making. The K-1 Center, one of the historic school buildings that anchor Fairhope’s downtown streetscape, had served the city for generations of students before its later civic life, and its reuse as an innovation hub ties the Eastern Shore’s newest economy to its oldest architecture. Fairhope, a city of roughly 22,000 residents on the bluffs above Mobile Bay, has long been known as a haven for artists, writers and independent businesses — a culture that makes an entrepreneurship center a natural fit for the town’s identity even as Baldwin County’s growth transforms the region around it.
From hand-lettered signs to a full-time role in entrepreneurship
Davis’s own path to Hatch runs through her experience as a small business owner. While still a student, and during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched Sydney Letters, a business producing custom signage and hand-lettered design work. Running that venture on her own gave her firsthand exposure to the kinds of decisions every entrepreneur eventually faces, including, as she put it, “pricing your time, pricing your skill and understanding what customers respond to.”
Those lessons followed her to the University of South Alabama, where she earned a business management degree with a concentration in entrepreneurship. Davis stayed active outside the classroom as well, serving as a senator in the university’s Student Government and later as president of the Mitchell College of Business CEO Club, a student organization geared toward aspiring business owners and executives. By her own account, she took on those leadership roles deliberately, pushing herself outside her comfort zone to build the networking skills that would later help her land a job.
Her resume reads like a case study in building an entrepreneurial career from scratch. A pandemic-era side business run from a bedroom desk taught pricing and customer psychology; campus leadership taught organizing, budgeting and public speaking; and a degree concentration in entrepreneurship connected both to the academic frameworks business schools now offer students who want to build something of their own. That blend of operator, organizer and student of the craft is what a small entrepreneurship organization looks for in a hire.
An unsolicited resume that paid off
Davis’s connection to Hatch did not come through a formal recruiting pipeline. Instead, she secured an internship with the organization by submitting her resume without being asked, a move that caught the attention of Hatch Executive Director Keith Glines. That initiative ultimately translated into her new, expanded role as community manager, a sign of how seriously small organizations like Hatch weigh hustle and self-starting when they are hiring for jobs centered on supporting other entrepreneurs.
The path — unsolicited resume, internship, full-time role — has become a recognizable route into Alabama’s small but growing entrepreneurship sector, where organizations rarely run formal hiring searches and instead promote the people who show up with work already in hand. Hatch’s own growth story followed the same logic: an organization built by founders and volunteers expanding into an institution, and staffing itself with the kind of self-starters it exists to serve. For students watching the outcome from the Mitchell College of Business down the road, the lesson was hard to miss — the cost of sending a resume no one asked for was a job no one else got.
As community manager, Davis now oversees a broad slate of responsibilities: marketing and communications for the organization, coordination of Hatch’s events, membership management for the entrepreneurs and small businesses who use the space, and day-to-day contact for members with questions or needs. She also supervises Hatch’s interns and helps run the programming meant to build a sense of community among the founders working out of the space.
Community management, as a discipline, sits at the center of every coworking and innovation-space operation. The physical product — desks, meeting rooms, fast internet — can be replicated by any landlord; the community product cannot. Members renew because someone knows their name, remembers their pitch, makes the introduction they needed and schedules the workshop that solved their problem. In a building the size of the K-1 Center, that connective work becomes a full-time proposition, which is why the role Hatch created did not exist in its earlier, smaller form.
Why the hire matters for Fairhope
The timing of Davis’s hire is no accident. With Hatch preparing to roughly triple its footprint when the K-1 Center hub opens this fall, the organization needs staff in place who can manage a larger membership base, more frequent events and a growing roster of entrepreneurs relying on the space. A dedicated community manager gives Hatch a single point of contact for members and helps ensure the transition into the new facility runs smoothly.
A 36,000-square-foot building changes an organization’s character. The shared-desk operation Hatch ran in its early years could function on relationships and hallway conversations; a building that size needs programming, orientation, communications and systems — the unglamorous infrastructure that turns square footage into a working community. Members arriving with questions, speakers arriving for events, interns arriving with projects, and founders looking for their first introduction to the network all now route through one desk, and that desk belongs to Davis.
The renovated schoolhouse also gives Hatch room for things a shared office never could. Larger classrooms can host pitch nights and workshop series; assembly space can hold the region’s startup events; dedicated rooms can serve member businesses that have outgrown a single desk. Cities across the country that converted historic schools into innovation hubs have found that the buildings themselves become part of the pitch — a tangible statement, in brick and mortar, that a town intends to keep its next generation. Fairhope’s version adds its own signature: a city that has always attracted people building something different now offers them a building built by their grandparents.
The expansion also dovetails with plans at the University of South Alabama, which is developing a new internship program tied to the opening of Hatch’s larger facility. That partnership could give more USA students the kind of hands-on experience Davis herself once had, working directly with entrepreneurs and startups rather than only studying business theory in a classroom.
The university partnership reflects a broader shift in how South Alabama’s institutions of higher education approach entrepreneurship. The Mitchell College of Business has built its entrepreneurship concentration into a visible program, and links to real ventures along the Eastern Shore give Mobile-area students an option that once required a move to a bigger city: work in a startup ecosystem without leaving home. For Baldwin County, the same pipeline runs in reverse — graduates who intern in Fairhope often stay to build businesses there.
For Fairhope and greater Baldwin County, the growth of Hatch represents another piece of a broader push to support local small business creation and give young, homegrown talent a reason to build their careers in the region rather than leaving it.
The stakes are familiar to any growing region. Baldwin County’s population has climbed for two decades as new residents arrive along the I-10 corridor and the beaches, and the county’s economy has diversified from agriculture and tourism into professional services, light manufacturing and technology-adjacent work. An innovation hub in a restored schoolhouse sends a specific signal in that environment: that the county’s next economy can be built by the people already here, in a building that already belongs to them.
Still an entrepreneur herself
Even as she settles into her new full-time role, Davis has not set aside her own entrepreneurial ambitions. She continues to develop an online clothing boutique, with hopes of eventually expanding into a physical storefront.
In the meantime, colleagues describe her as someone still building confidence in her own expanded capabilities, a fitting parallel for an organization whose entire purpose is helping founders grow into bigger versions of themselves. For the founders who will fill the K-1 Center’s desks this fall, the example is concrete: the person at the front desk building the community is running her own venture on the side, pricing her own time, and proving that the Eastern Shore’s entrepreneurial pipeline begins with people who never stopped building things.