Over the past four decades since graduating from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Robert Stahl has worked at 10 different banks in Chattanooga through a series of moves, mergers and management promotions.
After working with banks big and small, Stahl says he has a developed an affinity for community banks, where decision making is more local and knowing your customers is more critical, he says.
“I think community banks tend to be more personal and deal with more people on a one-to-one level, more like how banking tended to be in the past,” Stahl says. “We’re small enough to give that extra personal attention but we’re also large enough to take care of most transactions any small business would want to make.”
Three years ago when he was working at BB&T in Chattanooga, Stahl jumped at the chance to join Southern Community Bank when the Tullahoma, Tennessee, bank expanded into Chattanooga. Bill Yoder, one of the founders and now CEO of the Southern Community Bank in Tullahoma, previously worked with Stahl at First American Bank in Chattanooga in the 1990s and says Stahl has been ideal to first build a loan production office and then for the past year a full-service bank in downtown Chattanooga.
“I couldn’t be more pleased with what we’ve seen in Chattanooga with our deposit and loan growth and I think we’ve got a great team there led by Robert Stahl,” Yoder says.