Industry Insiders: Meet Becky Harris, Co-Founder of Huskins-Harris Business Management

Actor Paul Giamatti stars in a Volkswagen commercial as a beleaguered celebrity accountant who has to navigate such shenanigans as a client who purchases a tiger then texts to see if he can claim it on his taxes. When Chris Young saw the spot, he immediately thought of his mom. As business manager for some of country music’s top artists, Becky Yates Young Harris can relate.

“I had a client one time that called me at 8 o’clock in the morning and had just bought a bucking bull which had long horns,” Harris, a founding partner in the firm Huskins-Harris Business Management, tells Sounds Like Nashville. “I don’t know why or exactly how that happened, but it’s that’s not what you want to hear that somebody already purchased something that has horns like that. My first reaction was not why, but ‘Oh Lord, where do I get insurance for that?’ because you are responsible for liability. So when they tell you they’ve bought a giraffe, where do you get insurance for a giraffe? I do love what I do. It’s different. In all of the years I’ve done this, I’ve never ever done the same thing two days in a row, not one single time.”

Harris is extremely discreet and protects the identity of the bull-purchasing artist. Obviously, it’s the fact that she can be trusted with both their money and their questionable choices that makes Harris one of the most sought after business managers in the industry. She and her partner, Donna Huskins, work with a roster of between 20-25 artists, and currently rep Young, Kane Brown, Drew Baldridge, Keith Anderson, Frankie Ballard, CeCe Winans and Don Murry Grubbs of Absolute Publicity, among others.

“The easiest way to explain it is if it touches their money, it’s our job,” Harris says, explaining a business manager’s role in an artist’s career. “A lot of people will tell you it’s a bookkeeper. It’s an accountant, a tax preparer, an investor advisor, this or that. If it touches their money, it’s my job. I pay their bills. I do their banking. We take care of personnel issues, payroll, pay out their commissions, collect their money on occasion, if we can’t get it to come in in the right way. We’re just all things money.”

This wasn’t the career Harris had planned as a young girl. A Nashville native, she got a full ride scholarship to attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, but opted to attend Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro because she didn’t want to move too far from home. “My first degree is in English,” she says. “I was going to teach college English Literature. I got married my senior year of college and they offered me an assistantship to work on my Masters and I was pregnant with my first child. I asked them to delay it a year because I didn’t think I could go through being pregnant and go to college. Looking back I should have.”

Life began moving along swiftly for Harris. She had a second child, her daughter Dot, and later found herself getting divorced. “My ex-husband came home and didn’t want to be married anymore,” she says. “We got a divorce. Then I was a single parent and I wasn’t making a whole lot of money.”

Working as an administrative assistant and raising her two children as a single mom was challenging, but she made her to keep her kids busy with activities. “I got [Chris] involved in children’s theater. He started singing and I didn’t know he could sing. It just kind of blossomed from there. He has like a genius IQ so I thought he’d be a doctor or a lawyer or something that genius level IQ people do. When he was 17, he looked at me and said this is what I’m going to do for a living.”

Though initially concerned that he was choosing music over a more stable profession, Harris supported her son’s career and booked TV shows, concerts and anything to help him get exposure. She also went back to school and landed an internship with the late Gary Smith, a business manager/accountant who worked in the music industry. The internship led to a full-time position with Smith, Wiles & Co., PC, which, provided Harris an open door into the music industry. She quickly set about learning all she could to help her son field prospective offers and understand the biz. “I realized that I really needed to take that job,” she says, even though it was a cut in pay from her job as an administrative assistant. “I wasn’t out beating the bushes looking for a job in the music industry, but Chris was getting more and more serious. He had met somebody and started recording an independent CD and I just felt like I needed to be somewhere where I could get some advice.”

Little did Harris realize that in looking to help her talented son navigate the music industry, she would end up finding her true calling. After working for Smith, Wiles & Co. for nearly eight years, Harris and Huskins (who worked at the same firm) launched their own company at the beginning of 2008. “I was ready to do something different,” Harris says of exiting Smith, Wiles & Co. “I didn’t go after any of the clients that I had over there. They all stayed there.”

Harris says their company soon began to grow, mostly by word of mouth. “Our first little office was down the hall from Country Weekly [magazine] over the Off Broadway Shoe building,” she recalls. “We had 300 sq. feet. It had offices, a reception area which barely let us fit a student desk in it and a conference room. It had a couch that we bought from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. It was blue velvet and we paid $20 for it… We did 145 tax returns that year from people who just walked through the door, just random people. A lot of them were musicians that played on Broadway that hadn’t done their taxes in years. They told other people and then they told other people and everybody in the building was telling each other. So we just kind of got started grassroots.”

Their first client was Jerrod Niemann and soon the roster began growing. “Managers are all different and I consider myself the over involved soccer mom,” she says with a laugh. “I’m up in all of their business. There’s some people that don’t want that and that’s fine and I refer people to [other business managers]. There’s plenty of business to go around.”

Though some people mistakenly think her son set her up in business, that’s not the case. “I still get people calling me up and they’ll be like, ‘So Chris put you in business?’ And I’m like, ‘Um, no he didn’t.’ Chris didn’t actually come to me and Donna until like two months after we opened the doors and he decided he wanted to go with us, but my first two clients were Jerrod and Cowboy Crush, which was an all girl group on Curb.”

These days her business is flourishing, and it’s not because she’s out beating the bushes for clients. “You can’t find me unless you know me. That’s intentional,” she says.  “If I want clients, I’ll go out and start looking for them, but I don’t want everybody under the sun calling me because we’re a small company and I’m going to stay a small company. We’re picky about who we take on. I’ve been very, very lucky. Kane Brown found me, not the other way around.”

Harris loves what she does and works hard for her clients. “I love all of the clients that I have and I’ll answer my phone 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” she says. “In the past couple of years, I do have one week that I take off a year and I tell them way in advance, ‘You’re not going to be able to get me this week. You’ll have to call this person or this person.’ . . . You have to have the right fit for this because you truly know everything about their personal business. You see every charge. You see all about their insurance, everything. You know everything about them.”

Serving her clients well has put Harris in a lot of crazy situations. When producer James Stroud was going to Canada to go hunting, Harris had to figure out how to get his gun and ammo into Canada. “I called the airline and I’m like, ‘Hey, I need to ship a gun and ammo to Canada,’” she says with a laugh. “Think about this for a second. It’s right after 9/11. I was on the watch list for a while after this.”

Harris managed to get the details and ship the guns and ammo to Canada. “Then a few weeks after that, I opened up a box that came for James and it was the head of a bear,” she recalls. “He hunted all the time back then and one time a tractor trailer pulled up making a delivery for James. I said, ‘Just put it right here,’ and [the driver] goes, ‘Honey, it’s the whole truck and it’s refrigerated.’ I called James and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, it’s elk meat I forgot to tell you about that. We’re going to need to buy a couple of freezers.’”

Harris prides herself on having a solid relationship with her clients and says most of them know each other and are friendly. “When the [Route 91 Harvest festival] shooting happened in Las Vegas, Kane is the one that called and told me that Chris was there and there had been a shooting and he couldn’t get him on the phone,” she recalls. “My clients are pretty much friends with each other too. James [Stroud] produced Chris for a while and he’s still family. He calls me Little Sister. All the rest of my clients— with the exception of Chris who calls me Becky and James Stroud who calls me Little Sister—call me Mama Beck. Jamey Johnson nicknamed me that. Sometimes Riley Green will call me Miss Becky, but I cuss too much to be considered a Sunday School teacher.”

Clients can sometimes test Harris’ sweet, maternal demeanor and if it goes to far, she admits she fires them. “I hate having to let somebody go. That is never fun and is always emotional,” she says.

So what would prompt her to drop a client? “They don’t listen,” she says matter-of-factly. “If you’re not going to listen to me about my advice—because that’s what you are paying me for—then you need to go somewhere where you agree with the person who is handling your money. It’s not my money. It’s your money and you need to care about your money as much as I care about your money because your money keeps me up at night. I can’t sleep if I think somebody is doing something that’s going to end up costing a lot of money or is not the right thing for them or they’re not preparing for their retirement. It literally is personal to me. When they retire, I want them to have plenty of money in the bank and think, ‘Becky Harris was a good steward of my money while she was with me.’”

 Like most everyone Harris’ business has been affected by COVID. “Typically I have 10 staff members. Right now we don’t have that many because obviously we’re not doing what we normally do,” she says. “Right now I only have seven staff members. I’m trying to get them to take some time off because I feel like if everything goes back to normal we’re going to be working six or seven days a week.”

Because Harris is so good at her job, her clients haven’t suffered as much financially during the pandemic as many others. “All of my clients were prepared,” says Harris, who had set them up to weather unexpected circumstances. “They weren’t prepared for COVID, but they were prepared for some type of situation where they wouldn’t be able to work for months and my clients all have big hearts. They are taking care of their crew and their staff and at least through the end of the year, we’re all covered. We’ll see what next year brings. I’m not planning to layoff anybody and I don’t know of any of my clients that are laying off staff. That’s subject to change. We don’t know. I would have never thought this would have gone on this long.”

Harris also doesn’t see things going back to the way they were before. “It’s going to affect everybody for the next several years,” she says. “We’re not going to recover from this in six months time. I don’t think anybody can. It’s not possible and I don’t think you’ll see the kinds of shows you saw in the past when people go back out. People are going to have to cut back on production. There’s no way that somebody could take a million dollar set out there and make it work going forward. It’s sad and I hope I have to eat my words. I hope I’m wrong and things get back to the way they were, but I just don’t foresee it happening.”

In the midst of working to help her clients weather the pandemic financially, COVID-19 hit on a personal level when both Harris and her husband contracted the virus. “We really were not that sick,” says Harris, noting the worst of it was the persistent cough.  “We think we caught it somewhere in Nashville. Chris did not have it and has gotten tested several times. He hasn’t had it, didn’t catch it from us… I ran a fever of 103 for three days and then I was fine, but continued to test positive for the next three weeks.  The CDC is telling people now that after 72 hours of no symptoms, you can go back amongst the general population, but I wanted a negative test before I went back to the office and went around clients and my employees. I just felt like that was important, so I waited, but I lived three weeks of zero symptoms with a positive test result.”

Harris is back at work and is keeping busy. When not doing business, she loves doting on her granddaughter. (The child’s mother is Harris’ daughter, Dot, a former Marine, now works for Huskins-Harris.) In her spare time, Harris is also working on a cookbook and gardening. “We had a garden this summer which I haven’t had in years—squash, tomatoes, bell peppers and jalapeno peppers, cilantro and spices. I’ve got fresh dill. I’m doing things that I hadn’t done in years like a flower garden. Do I think I want to do that every summer from now on? Probably not,” she laughs.

Outside of cooking and crafting, Harris doesn’t consider herself a very creative person, but relishes her role in helping other creative types flourish. “I love watching people come into their own and I love watching them blossom,” she says. “I love all kinds of music. CeCe Winans is a good person inside and out, but when she opens her mouth to sing, it’s just magic. It’s the same thing with Kane. He is just this laid-back guy but when he walks on that stage, he lights up from the inside out. I love watching that and I love watching people be entertained by them. It’s something different to stand in that crowd and know that that is your boss on that stage and all of those people in that audience paid to see them.”