About Crest Capital.
Our Story.

The entrepreneurial spirit is definitely in my DNA, as my dad and both grandfathers created very successful businesses from the ground up. Growing up, I had a strong desire to understand how money, banking, and finance work. As a young kid I even bought one share of stock in a few public companies (my dad had to be listed as custodian for a minor) and I would actually read the annual reports that came in the mail. With the combination of heredity and passion, it’s no wonder I ended up founding a finance company.

Yep, when I initially hit the Auburn campus my career goal was to play strong safety in the NFL, but after a dose of reality I realized I needed to focus on getting a degree. I was good in math, and an advisor had originally recommended I major in engineering, but after a couple semesters I recognized that wasn’t what I wanted to be doing the rest of my life. Although deep down I wanted to major in finance, I changed my major to accounting because I knew “all the old guys” in the business world would give me a little respect if I passed the CPA exam. And looking back, that was a really good decision. To me, accounting was way easier (and more fun) than engineering. Life was good.

Upon graduation, the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to be an accountant (or an engineer), but my college advisor convinced me to take a job in the audit department of a public accounting firm. This time the advisor’s recommendation paid off. As an auditor, I got an all-access pass to see the financial inner workings of companies in a variety of industries, and despite being fresh out of school, I got plenty of opportunities to speak with presidents and vice-presidents of those companies. It was there that I discovered equipment finance. And it had all the allure that prompted my fascination with finance as a kid.

My original vision was creating an investment entity to fund true leases and shelter the interest income with the depreciation. That’s the boring version. In other words, it started out strictly as an investment technique. At the time, I was also a partner in a security guard firm that I started with a couple of other guys. We built that guard firm into one of the largest in Atlanta, and sold it to a national competitor prior to the Olympics. Using the proceeds of that sale, together with some bank lines, Crest Capital was catapulted into position to become a leader in small business equipment financing.

You’d be surprised how often I’m asked that question. And it’s an all too simple answer. I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to head over to the attorney’s office to file the incorporation papers when he called and asked me what I wanted to name the company… and that’s it. No meetings, no focus groups, no anything… if he called ten minutes later, it might have been named “Coffee Capital” or something like that.

We did start out doing most of our business in the southeast because we initially concentrated on fostering relationships with local equipment dealers. Plain and simple, any place I traveled was an opportunity to grab the yellow pages (the internet wasn’t invented yet) and call local equipment vendors offering to come by and present our customer financing programs at their sales meetings. Once, I narrowly escaped being late to a good friend’s wedding rehearsal while making vendor calls from my hotel room, and I was the best man. However, our geographic footprint quickly expanded nationally as many of our vendor relationships sell into other areas of the country or they’re part of national dealer networks and refer us to other regions. As a result, we now have substantial business in all 50 states and some in Canada too.

One thing we’ve always done is make certain we are very open to new technology, and if it can help us, we embrace it. Long before the internet, the first major technological advancement for us was moving away from tracking everything in spreadsheets and towards database-driven software. Customer relationship management, credit files, documentation, collections data: anything and everything that can benefit from automation and quick retrieval became profoundly more efficient. Those efficiencies took a quantum leap with the advent of the internet. Many of the manual tasks, like checking trade data and public records, not only became faster and easier, the age of “big data” bureaus consolidated incredibly insightful information. That consolidated data made automated credit decisions possible, and today artificial intelligence can read a file faster and more consistently than any person could. We put those tools to work, but we do not hand them the final decision. In our business, the best calls still come from pairing strong data with seasoned human judgment. So we lead with speed, and we keep the personal relationships that earn the initial and repeat business of small business owners.

Hands down, it’s our people. We actually care about delivering exceptional results and exceeding the expectations of our business partners and customers. We’ll anticipate, do the extras, and work hard so you don’t have to. And we’ll work late so it all gets done without delay. One of our corporate mantras is “No One Waits for Crest”.

Hands down it’s our people… One of our corporate mantras is: ‘No One Waits for Crest.’

The majority of our end user customers are small businesses with a staff between five and seventy-five employees. We also tend to partner with smaller dealers and manufacturers when providing point-of-purchase financing programs. Number one, I believe banks and institutional lenders may talk about efforts to increase small business lending, but they define “small business” as fifty to five-hundred employees. A five-hundred employee business is a lot of things, but “small” is really not one of them. Banks overlook most “true” small businesses, so many of our clients seek us out after the big banks turn them away.

Second, most small business owners don’t have the time and resources to go through lengthy financial disclosure reviews simply to finance a new piece of equipment or a couple of trucks. Take a listen to our customers, in their own voices, constantly expressing appreciation after experiencing our simple process and quick turnaround, and it’s readily apparent why they choose us.

There is a third reason too. Beyond the financing itself, we put real effort into education. We publish free tools and plain-English resources that help owners understand their equipment financing options and the potential tax advantages that come with them, because an owner who understands the decision makes a better one, whether or not they end up working with us.

The biggest change will be how well we read risk. Artificial intelligence and richer business data are already helping lenders decide faster and more accurately, and used responsibly and within fair-lending rules, that is good news for small businesses. Better risk models mean lower losses, lower costs, and more owners who qualify for financing that a rigid bank scorecard would have turned down. The real work will be keeping that power in check: using data fairly, protecting privacy, and never giving up the human judgment a sound credit decision still requires. What will not change is demand. Capital is the lifeblood of business, so our job is to keep finding smarter, faster ways to get it into the hands of the owners who drive the economy.

Borrowers will expect more control and more transparency. For years, financing was a closed process: you sent in your information and waited for a generic status update. That is changing fast. The next generation of business owners expects to track a financing request in real time, from their phone, the same way they track a package. We are building toward exactly that: secure, self-service tools where a customer can upload documents, sign electronically, and see precisely where their approval stands, without having to call and ask. The goal is simple. Put the customer and our credit team in the same view, protect their information with bank-grade security, and take the mystery out of getting financed.

I’ve certainly had a bunch of highlights along the way, but like anyone who has ever founded a company and seen it through to success, the original decision to actually pull the plug on a good job and salary to venture off the beaten path… It’s a defining moment by definition, and the vision must be exhilarating enough to keep you going, because the going gets very tough from time to time.

You know there’s always going to be disappointments. Progress on important goals and objectives often slow to a crawl and take a backseat to day-to-day business demands; a great hire turns out to be a washout; a new referral partnership fails to produce… all kinds of stuff. Overall, I’ve managed to keep the lows to a minimum and ride the highs to a very successful run that started back in 1989.

Yeah, I think everyone in our industry, and everyone involved in lending in general, is annoyed when someone attempts to reduce the lending business to “rate”. This is because rate is often driven by risk. For example, if I asked you to loan me a sizeable sum of money, would your risk be greater if I pledged (a) my house as collateral, (b) my car as collateral, or (c) nothing as collateral? Obviously, your risk is lower with (a) (you have my house as a guarantee). So you’ll likely give me a lower rate because of that. You’ll also give me a lower rate if I have a history of credit worthiness (and the opposite if my credit history is spotty).

But despite the logic behind rate being driven by varying degrees of risk, many people wonder why credit card rates are higher than car loans and car loans are higher than home loans. In our business, we’re often secured only by the equipment we finance, yet we’re compared to a bank loan secured with a blanket lien on everything you own. In reality, rates are basically all the same, and adjusted appropriately for risk. An educated borrower evaluates lease and loan structures based on factors that are not equivalent from lender to lender. An educated borrower realizes “if I go with Crest, I don’t tie up everything I own”, and makes a decision accordingly.

Follow through. Always do what you say you’re going to do.

Follow through. Always do what you say you’re going to do.

My dad. His video production company helped many of the nation’s largest organizations handle management issues. He was recognized with numerous national and international awards including seven Telly Awards, Best of Show at the Aurora Awards, and a CINE Golden Eagle. He was easily the most effective communicator, educator, and motivator that I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around.

I’ll pass my own “best advice received” forward: Follow through. Always do what you say you’re going to do. That’s good advice for anyone at any stage of their career. Also, for young, aspiring entrepreneurs, I advise setting aside enough savings to cover your living expenses before launching a new venture. At least a year, but even more is better. Many great business concepts die a quick death because people mistakenly think they’ll make money right away. In reality, you’ll work twice as hard and earn half the income you expect, and invariably you’ll need to reinvest all the income to fuel growth. In the beginning, it’s about labor of love.

I learned to scuba dive in the Gulf of Thailand at the age of eight.

For one artist, I’d say Jimmy Buffett. But my playlists range from Jazz to Heavy Metal, and I grew up on Classic Rock, so that’s my go-to on long drives. As far as movies, Saving Private Ryan comes to mind. My dad joined the Navy during WWII at age 15 and drove a landing boat in the Pacific. The opening scene depicting the Omaha Beach assault serves as a graphic reminder of the price of freedom.

Right now it is a stack of notes on how we are putting artificial intelligence to work across the company, from sharpening our credit models to speeding up service for customers. The interesting part is not the technology itself. It is deciding where it genuinely helps and where a person still needs to make the call. In our business you have to weigh legal, economic, and practical factors right alongside the technology, so these moves get real thought before we make them.

A play-by-play sportscaster. My wife thinks I missed my calling. She’s always pointing out when the commentator on TV repeats what I said five seconds earlier. And it would be a great gig wouldn’t it? Most of us enjoy talking about sports all day anyway; why not make it a career?