Alexis Willis grew up in New Orleans in a neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain riding bikes, making mud pies and eating Snowballs, a shaved-ice delicacy the originated in the Big Easy.
“We had the quintessential childhood,” says Willis, 40, a Chattanooga commercial property broker.
But while N’awlins will always be her hometown, Chattanooga is now her home.
It’s a place where she has been educated — at Girls Preparatory School and later at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — learned to network, reared her children, nurtured entrepreneurs, and, most recently, turned to a real estate career to boost her earnings.