About Lipscomb
Turney Stevens
Dean, College of Business, Professor of Management
615-966-1989
Office: Swang 200
Education:
MBA, Vanderbilt University (1981)
BA, Lipscomb University (1972)
Courses Taught:
Strategic Management
Background:
C. Turney Stevens, Jr., 60, is the third dean since its founding to lead the College of Business at Lipscomb University. He is a Nashville native and an alumnus of Lipscomb (BA 1972) as well as Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management (MBA 1981).
For more than 35 years, he was an investment banker and business executive. While still a student at David Lipscomb College. Stevens began his career at Tennessee Securities, Inc. in 1971, where he learned the equity and debt capital formation businesses and became the youngest securities licensee in the history of the state of Tennessee.
In 1973 he founded PlusMedia, Inc., a magazine publishing company which he served as president. This business was sold to a public company ten years later with a total of five publications in its portfolio. During his tenure, he joined with other city magazine publishers from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and more than 20 other markets to found the American City and Regional Magazine Association, which he led as its second president in 1979-80.
Returning to the investment banking business, he founded Stevens and Associates, Inc. through which he raised equity and debt for a variety of ventures including real estate syndications of hotels, restaurants, apartments and other properties. He also founded American Host Corporation, which became the exclusive franchisee of Mrs. Winner’s Chicken and Biscuit Restaurants in central Florida.
In 1985, he began an association with Ambassador Joe M. Rodgers, United States Ambassador to France during the second Reagan Administration. This business relationship later resulted in him being appointed as president of Rodgers Capital Corporation through which he and Ambassador Rodgers’ companies raised equity and debt capital for a wide variety of ventures both in the United States and Europe. The firm maintained offices in both Nashville and Budapest, Hungary.
In 1994, he acquired Williams Printing Company, a leading southeastern lithographer that had fallen on difficult times. Leading the company as CEO, Stevens and his team turned the business around in little more than one year and changed its name to American Corporate Literature, Inc. The Company was sold to Kohlberg & Company in 1997 and served as the foundation for a four company merger that became Printing Arts America, Inc.
Stevens served as the new company’s chairman and led the acquisition of nine more companies over the following four years, leading the company to more than $230 million in revenues when he left in 2001 to found Harpeth Capital, LLC.
Until his retirement as an investment banker in 2007, he led Harpeth as its Chairman and CEO, eventually merging it into a new parent company, Harpeth Companies, which consisted of investment banking, consulting and real estate divisions. The firm focused largely on health care transactions and assignments, serving many of the more than 300 health care services companies based in the Nashville area.
Stevens has served on a variety of boards through his career, including his current service on the public board of Kohlberg Capital Corporation. It was through this role that he developed his continuing academic interest in good board governance practices and issues of integrity in the cultures of companies, both large and small. He graduated from the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management Director’s College in 2007 and founded the Hilton and Sallie Dean Institute for Corporate Governance and Integrity upon his arrival at Lipscomb University in 2008. He is certified as a public company director by Institutional Shareholder Services and is a member of the National Association Corporate Directors.
As dean, he is leading the College of Business through a new era of growth and achievement through the realization of the goals of its “Five Years To Five Stars” strategic plan. This blueprint will result in the College doubling its enrollment, doubling its faculty, and doubling its budgets in the five years of the plan.
Stevens and the former Ann Parrish have been married for 29 years and have two sons, C.T., 27, an accountant with Ernst & Young, and Mark, 23, a civil engineer. They are members of the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Nashville, where he has served as committee chair, teacher, deacon and elder over the years. He is a former chairman of AGAPE, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Inner City Ministry and is an alumnus of Leadership Nashville, a member of the Nashville Rotary Club, a member of the board of the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee, and is active in many other organizations both in Nashville and nationally.