It was October 1999. AmSouth had just acquired First American National, the $20B Nashville-headquartered bank where Rob McCabe was Vice Chairman and Terry Turner ran the General Bank. McCabe and Turner had spent a combined three decades climbing inside Nashville’s biggest bank. They walked out together.
It would take ten months and eleven other Nashville businessmen, but on October 27, 2000, they opened Pinnacle Financial Partners with one rule that has not changed in twenty-five years: bankers must have at least ten years of experience to advise a client.
Twenty-six years later, Pinnacle is one of the largest regional banks in the country, with roughly $117 billion in assets and a track record on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For that now stretches ten consecutive years.
They are one-third of this year’s Hall of Fame class.
The 2026 NEXT Awards Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame honors three Nashville founding teams who, between them, built the bank, the buildings, and the restaurants that turned Nashville into a national city.
The Bank: Rob McCabe & Terry Turner, Pinnacle Financial Partners
The Pinnacle story is usually told in numbers — assets, market share, shareholder return. The harder achievement is the partnership.
McCabe and Turner have run the same company together for twenty-five years without a public crack. McCabe — Knoxville-born, UT-educated, four years in the Army, a civic resume that includes past chair of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Partnership, Cheekwood, the Nashville Symphony, and Ensworth — is the operator. Turner, eldest of ten from a family that lost their father when he was nineteen, ran the company day-to-day for the full quarter-century until he handed CEO duties to Kevin Blair on January 2, 2026, the day Pinnacle’s $8.6B merger with Synovus closed.
The induction lands months after that handoff. Turner is now Chairman. McCabe is Vice Chairman and Chief Banking Officer. They are still building.
The Restaurants: Max & Ben Goldberg, Strategic Hospitality
The Patterson House opened on Tax Day 2009 in a Nashville that did not have a craft-cocktail bar. Velvet curtain. Twice-filtered ice. House bitters. Ben Goldberg was thirty-three. Max had left a finance career in New York two years earlier to come home and bet on his brother.
Bon Appétit named The Catbird Seat one of the ten best new restaurants in America in 2012. Pinewood Social changed what a third place could look like. Henrietta Red, Bastion, Locust, Kisser, Babychan. Friends in Low Places bar on Broadway. The airport concepts. The Catbird Seat earned a Michelin star in the 2025 inaugural Guide American South. So did Bastion. So did Locust. Tennessee had three Michelin stars that year. The Goldbergs operate all three.
Six James Beard nominations for Outstanding Restaurateur. A model that makes the chef an equity partner rather than an employee — the reason a generation of Nashville’s most celebrated chefs are part-owners of the rooms they cook in. They aren’t running a kingdom. They’re running a venture studio for chefs.
“Brothers first, business partners second,” Ben has said. The rule that has kept it together for nearly twenty years.
The Buildings: Don & Tracy Hardin, Don Hardin Group
Don Hardin was living in New Mexico, working in contractor management for Fluor Corporation, raising a five-year-old son with his wife Tracy, when a fraternity brother called him about a project back in Nashville. Mt. Zion Baptist needed a builder.
He moved the family home. He ran that project. Then he walked into Tennessee State University’s Business Incubation Center — the school where he earned his architectural engineering degree — and started the Don Hardin Group.
That was 2000. Twenty-five years later, you have been inside their buildings without knowing it.
Music City Center, where Don’s team achieved thirty percent minority subcontractor participation on a project most firms couldn’t crack ten. First Horizon Park, where the Nashville Sounds play. The Interim International Arrivals Building at BNA. The National Museum of African American Music, a project he won in 2009 and intentionally staffed with African American and women-owned subcontractors before “supplier diversity” was a marketing line. Five-Oh-Five Church. Vanderbilt’s Master Athletics Plan. Meharry’s Cal Turner Family Student Center.
Tracy has been the firm’s Chief Financial Officer for sixteen of those years. The Nashville Business Journal recognized Don with its CRE Lifetime Achievement honor in 2020.
What These Three Have in Common
They are all founding teams. Not solo founders.
A married couple. Two brothers. Two best friends who walked out of the same bank on the same day. Six people, three partnerships, three decades.
Each of them started inside an existing institution — a bank, a finance desk in New York, a structural engineering job in New Mexico — and chose to build something Nashville did not yet have.
Each of them stayed.
That last part might be the most important. Nashville has spent twenty-five years becoming a national city. Some of that growth was capital that flew in and flew out. Some of it stayed because people like these three teams stayed — kept hiring here, kept building here, kept opening the next thing here.
The Induction
The 2026 NEXT Awards Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame induction takes place Monday, October 19, 2026, at the NEXT Awards. The Nashville Entrepreneur Center will honor McCabe and Turner, the Goldbergs, and the Hardins together — the bank, the buildings, and the restaurants.
If you have eaten at a restaurant they own, banked with the bank they built, or walked into a building they put up — and almost everyone in this city has done at least one of those — they are part of the reason Nashville is what it is.
About the NEXT Awards
The NEXT Awards & Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame, presented by Amazon, celebrates the visionaries and innovators driving Nashville’s economic growth. The 2026 ceremony will recognize outstanding entrepreneurs across eight industry categories.
The event serves as Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s signature fundraising event, supporting the organization’s mission to increase the likelihood of success for entrepreneurs in Middle Tennessee.
Event Details
What: 2026 NEXT Awards & Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame
When: Monday, October 19, 2026
Where: Schermerhorn Symphony Center
More Information: ec.co/next-awards
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