In 2008, David Nast and four partners organized the opening of Progress Bank. It was at the time, the only bank headquartered in Huntsville, and they opened offices on Williams Street in downtown Huntsville and in Decatur.

In the past 13 years, Progress Bank has expanded to offices in Madison County, Florence, Birmingham, Daphne and the Florida Panhandle.

Today, Progress is the sixth-largest bank headquartered in Alabama with more than $1.6 billion in assets.

You started Progress Bank during the midst of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. How did that happen?

It’s an important part of our story. We opened the bank in February 2008. The financial crisis was just beginning to show but it got worse the latter part of 2008, 2009 and 2010, but there’s good news in that.

David Nast: “My advice for starting any company is to believe in yourself and make sure you have a good solid plan.” (Photo/Steve Babin)

We started organizing the bank and raising money to get the bank started in 2007. I think there were 40 or 50 of us who had federal bank charters in 2008 but it slowly dropped off in 2009 to just a handful, and then literally, for a decade from 2010 to 2020, there were hardly any new banks being chartered.

Thankfully, by starting early, we got our money raised and got open in 2008 or we probably would not have been able to do it.

Business start-ups and entrepreneurs are known for taking risks, but …

At that time, there were no banks headquartered in Huntsville. That is the original reason for starting Progress Bank. We saw an opportunity there.

If you think back at that time, there was a lot of disruption in the banking industry in Alabama. The two largest banks in Alabama, AmSouth and Regions were merging, and it caused a lot of disruption in the state. Also, Colonial Bank, another of the largest banks in the state, was just beginning to show problems and it eventually failed.

The combination of disruption and opportunity kind of led to say, “Hey, let’s do this.”

Also, if you remember that crisis was created by the housing industry and there were a lot of mortgage issues and a lot of construction and development centered around housing.

In 2008, 2009 and 2010, you could see where the problems were, so we were able to avoid some of those problems and focus on what we needed to do to be successful. We didn’t have a loan portfolio full of loans that were past due and had to be reworked.

Was it hard?

Oh, raising $31 million in capital was unquestionably the most time-consuming and the hardest part! Think about it this way. You’re sitting at $20 million, and you’ve committed to the FDIC and the state banking department that you’re going to raise $30 million.

So, you wake up in the middle of night and think, where am I going to get $10 million?

There were many sleepless nights but the next day, everybody just keeps going down their list and calling people and asking if they are interested in investing in our start-up.

There are other difficulties too – you have to get permission to begin organizing a bank. You have to get state banking department FDIC. You must get a lot of people’s permission to go down this path, and then at some point, once you’ve done everything you told them you were going to do, they can approve you.

We had to have the right people, we had to have all our systems in place, and we had to be ready to open the company.

All our shareholders and initial investors were Huntsville and Decatur people. We raised right at $31 million to capitalize the bank and basically started at Ground Zero.

All new businesses must assess competition and it seems the banking industry has a lot of options – was it hard getting customers?

Sure, it is, and we hired this great team of bankers to do that, but that part comes after you’ve been approved. You can’t start taking deposits and doing loans until you’ve got your charter and you have permission to open the bank.

After you’ve gotten all that taken care of and get the company open, you start hiring additional bankers that that can help you grow. They bring business and they’re good at what they do. It certainly is not easy, but it really helps when you have a great team like we did. We were able to bring on board members and most of the original organizers have been in the banking community here for a really long time. My hope was that we earned their business.

Did you foresee Huntsville’s commercial growth back then?

Certainly, we wanted to take advantage of what we saw happening in Madison County. That was our business model, but we also had a strategic plan that called for us to eventually, as we could, expand into these other markets.

How many people did you have onboard in the beginning?

There were five of us along with our board of directors. We basically just went out and asked people, ‘Can we can we talk to you about investing in our bank?’

We told them our story and what we intended to do.

We have certainly had additional investment opportunities that have happened along the way and it brought on new investors and I’ll always be grateful for them, but I’m especially grateful for that first group of investors that gave us $31 million to start the bank.

Would you start a bank right now?

Right now, no I wouldn’t do it again. It’s an enormous amount of work and I’m too old, but if today was 13 years ago, then sure, I probably would.

It’s a lot of work and it’s hard work. There’s a whole set of steps that you have to go through, and you have to prove to them that you’re capable of doing it.

It’s a little bit different for banks because we do have to have FDIC Deposit Insurance and they have to trust us so that if get examined, we want to make sure we’re running the business the right way.

What advice would you have for somebody starting a business?

My advice for starting any company is to believe in yourself and make sure you have a good solid plan.

It’s not a complicated formula. It’s pretty simple. You have to work hard, you have to do things the right way, and people have to trust you. We have been here for a long time and the hope is, if you’ve treated people right, and you’ve built a reputation for doing things the right way, that helps any business grow and attract new clients.

Make sure you have great people because there’s no way one person can do it all. No one can know everything, so hire people that are better at certain things than you are.

If you do that and have the right amount of capital and good advisors, then chase your dreams and work as hard as you can.

Huntsville sets a good example for start-ups. Huntsville is such a strong market, the growth is good here, the entrepreneurial spirit is as strong as anywhere I’ve ever seen.

Most people starting a company or in senior management know you’re never going to be “off”. You’re always working, and there’s a lot of hardworking, smart people here for you to use as mentors and advisors. They get up every day with a strong sense of purpose.

For someone who might be thinking about starting a bank today – is $30 million a reasonable capital investment?

It depends on the size you want to be and the size market you are opening the bank in. It ranges anywhere from $20 million to $40 million probably, but $31 million was enough for us.

What advice would you have for somebody starting a bank?

If you have a good plan and great people, a good reputation and good work ethic – all those things – there’s no reason why you can’t be successful in banking, no matter what the competition is.

It seems you have steadily if not quickly expanded. How do you know when it is a good time to do so?

You go where you think your business model is going to be successful – number one.

Then, number two, you don’t go anywhere unless you can hire the right people. That is just a rule we don’t break.

We were able to attract people in our expanded markets that are really good at what they do. They believe in us. When we decide it’s time to go into a certain market, we don’t go there unless we have the right person leading the market, to hire other good people. If not, we don’t go until we get that in place.

We’ve just been able to do that in every market we’ve gone into. We’ve gotten really, really good people and we give them the resources they need, and we try to lead them on and let them do what they’re good at.

You are primarily a commercial bank, but do you offer consumer banking services?

We work primarily with business clients, but we also have traditional consumer and retail products. We have a very traditional branch up front, and we have all the consumer products anyone would need.

We also have a significant wealth management group, a private banking team that really works specifically with professionals and doctors and high net worth clients.

We also have a financial services group. We have a little over $1.6 billion in assets on the bank side, but in Progress Financial Services, we have over $1 billion in assets under management and that piece of our business is growing right alongside the bank.

We have a significant mortgage banking division as well.