2015 Distinguished Entrepreneur Award recipient Claire Tucker with TWC President Harley Knowles
CapStar Bank President and Chief Executive Officer Claire Whitfield Tucker was named the recipient of Tennessee Wesleyan College’s 2015 Distinguished Entrepreneur Award. Ms. Tucker is the second recipient of this award, presented annually by the TWC business administration department. TWC Board of Trustees Chairman Allen Carter introduced Ms. Tucker and spoke briefly about the Distinguished Entrepreneur Award.
“The accomplishments of the honoree should include innovation and growth of the region from an economic standpoint,” Mr. Carter said. “Our goal is to honor the Distinguished Entrepreneur Award recipient and allow students to understand and experience the business and personal rewards of starting and operating a business.”
The Distinguished Entrepreneur Award committee selected Ms. Tucker to be this year’s award recipient based on her successful founding of CapStar bank as well as her 35-plus years in the banking industry.
“Thank you very much for this wonderful, wonderful honor,” Ms. Tucker said. “It’s very humbling. Not only to receive the honor but to see so many of you here who took time out of your day. It’s very humbling.”
Prior to joining the banking industry, Ms. Tucker graduated from Tennessee Wesleyan in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science in accounting and earned an MBA from the University of Tennessee/Tennessee State University. She is also a graduate of the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University.
Upon completion of her education, Ms. Tucker worked at First American Corporation in Nashville as a management trainee and advanced to become President of Corporate Banking in 1997. In 1999, the company merged with AmSouth, where Ms. Tucker served as a senior executive vice president. In 2001, Ms. Tucker joined FirstBank, a $1.7 billion community bank headquarted in Lexington, Tn., as senior vice president/metro markets and city president (Nashville).
In 2007, one of Ms. Tucker’s mentors and customers approached her about starting a new bank in Nashville.
“The vision behind all this was to create a bank that would focus on small- to medium-sized businesses in middle Tennessee and their owners and employees,” Ms. Tucker said. “[The goal was] to focus on creating returns for shareholders who were going to invest in the bank, and the critical elements were really around hiring the best bankers.”
Ms. Tucker, with three colleagues from FirstBank, resigned and began the process of opening their new bank.
“You might think why didn’t you just Google how to start a bank?” Ms. Tucker said. “I’m here to tell you, there’s never been a book written, nor will there ever be a book written, on how to start a bank because nobody’s crazy enough to do it twice.”
In September and October of 2007, Ms. Tucker and her colleagues were able to raise the capital needed to open the bank, raising $88 million, which remains the largest capital raise for a financial institution in the state of Tennessee. Throughout the process of building and opening CapStar, Ms. Tucker learned several lessons, which she shared with event attendees.
“You have to stay agile and stay flexible because you never know when the next great recession is going to occur,” Ms. Tucker said. “That makes for a very different framework in which to start a bank, and we had to be very resilient and change our whole business plan to react to that.”
Ms. Tucker and her mentor designed the original business plan for the bank on a flight, using the only paper they could find. This experience became another lesson Ms. Tucker shared.
“Invest in a legal pad, rather than doing what my mentor and I did, which was use air sickness bags on an airplane,” she said. “I still have those. That’s where we developed our first business plan because neither of us had a pad with us when we were on a particular flight.”
Throughout the development of the bank, they were forced to redesign the business plan in response to the recession, hire the best bankers possible and raise capital to open the bank. Despite the obstacles that come with starting any new business, Ms. Tucker recalls naming the bank as one of the biggest challenges.
“I never thought that the most difficult part would be selecting a name,” she said. “We finally landed on CapStar. The derivation of CapStar is very very simple: the capital is in Nashville and the flag of Tennessee has three stars, so CapStar. I was so excited. I called our regulator…and said I’m so excited, I have finally named the bank. She said what is it. I said it’s called CapStar. She says, you do know that’s the name of a flea and tick killer don’t you? Be careful when you’re thinking about what your name is.”
In addition to discussing the formation of CapStar Bank and the lessons she learned from that process, Ms. Tucker shared her insights into being an entrepreneur and the impact that has on her life.
“The challenges of being an entrepreneur are widespread. It’s lonely at the top,” Ms. Tucker said. “Your personal life gets shortchanged. I won’t call [being an entrepreneur] a 24/7 job, but it’s pretty close. Another mentor of mine said you have to think of life as a seesaw. Sometimes your personal life is going to be down here and your professional life is going to require the time, and sometimes it’s going to be the other way because you have personal needs, but it’s never going to be in perfect balance.”
Through Ms. Tucker’s work, along with the dedication and expertise of her employees, CapStar has grown into a $1.2 billion commercial bank with plans to continue expansion.
“Being an entrepreneur has great rewards. There’s personal satisfaction that comes with building a business,” Ms. Tucker said. “There’s tangible evidence that a difference has been made in people’s lives. We have an annual employee picnic. Year one we might have had one or two little babies. Now we’re up to year eight and we’ve got a whole posse of children who are the CapStar children, which is a great thing. It’s a great reward to see the team build and to see all of them really growing. It’s worth those 24/7 days that you have to be able to see that you’ve made a difference.”