Indispensable: How to Become the Company That Your Customers Can't Live Without

Chapter 13. Case Study: Pinnacle Financial Partners

If You Could Make It Up

I've always maintained that the coolest thing about business is that it is a wildly creative endeavor, or can be, if you do it right. Every day we get to go back out there into the marketplace and just make it up. We can do what we do in any way we choose, and the market will tell us whether or not it worked.

So if you could make up any business you wanted, from scratch, and build it from the ground up in any way you want, what would it look like? Terry Turner did just that. This is the story of what it looked like.

Beyond a Pound of Nails

I do a lot of work in the financial services industry, and it's pretty much a commodity business the way most of the players do it. They have products that look the same, have offices that look the same, have ads that look the same ("We're part of your community!"), and have people who act the same. The biggest challenge for banks is to get beyond commodity and find meaningful, sustainable, and hard-to-replicate ways to differentiate from the competition. In lieu of differentiating, they end up being driven almost totally by price. To most bank customers, it's like buying a pound of nails. A pound of nails is a pound of nails no matter where you buy it, and the only difference is price. Terry Turner decided to start a bank, and to transcend the "pound of nails" commodity label in everything that the bank would do.

There's Another Way to Play This Game

Terry Turner had been with ...