A Saturday afternoon in downtown Franklin. Strollers on the sidewalk. Coffee at a table outside. A toddler with a bow in her hair laughs at a dog walking past. Two couples chat about kindergarten. It's an ordinary scene and it's the reason AXG Advisors moved its headquarters here.
Adam was in Dallas with his wife, Czarina, and their six-month-old daughter when they found out they were expecting again. The business was thriving. Life was full. But something felt unfinished. "We looked at each other and asked... are we really going to raise two kids here without any family roots?"
They booked a trip to Franklin. Adam had never been. "The moment we arrived, it reminded me of where I grew up. The pace, the neighborhoods. The feeling that families actually live here." They walked downtown, drove through neighborhoods, imagined strollers on sidewalks instead of high-rises. Within days, the decision felt obvious. They didn't overanalyze it.
At the same time, on the opposite coast, Max and his wife Tori were seven months pregnant with their first child when wildfires broke out near their home in the Pacific Palisades. Adam called him from Tennessee. "I told him, you need to come see this place. I may have oversold it a little, but not by much." Max and Tori visited soon after. Like Adam and Czarina, they felt it immediately. Their daughter would be born in Williamson County.
One move became two. Two became four. Today, four AXG families live in Franklin. All of their children are under two. Three were born here.
From personal to strategic
What began as a family decision became a business one. AXG Advisors, a private-client risk management firm Adam founded after twenty-five years in the industry, relocated its headquarters with them. Not because the firm needed a new market, but because it needed the right home.
"Cost of living was part of it. Quality of life was bigger. But the ability to attract great people who actually want to raise families here? That was the whole thing." "What we found in Franklin wasn't a gap. It was acceleration."
The work AXG does is exactly the kind of capability that used to require a relationship in New York or Los Angeles. They design and manage bespoke insurance portfolios for entrepreneurs, family offices, and accomplished families structured, contract-grade coverage that performs precisely as written when something goes wrong.
"Franklin is filled with serious entrepreneurs and accomplished families," Adam says. "We've advised in major financial centers for years. There's no reason that level of strategic guidance shouldn't live here too."
Built for the long haul
It's intentionally relational. When your kids are in strollers together, when you run into clients at the park, when your reputation travels through school pickup lines instead of billboards, the work becomes personal. "We don't get to disappear after placing a policy," Adam says. "We live here."
The long-term plan is to build AXG's flagship presence in Franklin offering something durable, sophisticated, rooted. "We're thinking in decades. We want to build something strong enough that one day, if our kids want it, they can step into it."
For now, the kids are still focused on crawling.
Sidebar:
Why private-client coverage performs differently
When AXG had clients in the Pacific Palisades, the wildfires became a stress test for the contract language behind their policies. Where retail insurance depreciates values, caps settlements, and offers little or no temporary housing, true private-client policies pay full replacement cost, even when labor and materials triple after a disaster, and cover unlimited loss-of-use, relocating the family to a comparable home until reconstruction completes. The difference doesn't appear on a declarations page. It appears the day a claim is filed.