In February 2016, Brentwood lost a longtime public servant when finance director Carson Swinford passed away after 15 years at the job. For the next 11 months, City Treasurer Karen Harper acted as interim director of finance while the city looked for someone to replace Swinford in the position.
On Monday, Jan. 9 the person the city found started his new job.
It was a homecoming of sorts for Richard Parker, a Tennessee native, who had grown up out by the airport and attended Antioch High School.
He’d been living in Georgia for the past year or so after his wife’s job in the healthcare industry led her to pursue a job there. The only other time he’d ever lived away from the Volunteer State is when he served in the Air Force in Texas for four years after getting his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
“I flew a desk,” Parker joked about his time as a database analyst in the service.
After the Air Force it was on to the Jack C. Massey Graudate School of Business at Belmont University, where Parker graduated in 1990.
“We were one of the very first classes to get through that program,” Parker said. “That’s how long it’s been around.”
The private sector was Parker’s home from that point forward.
He went to work for Primus Automotive Financial Services when the company relocated to Middle Tennessee, focusing on “all manner of finance, from forecasting analytics to pricing analytics.” He rose through the ranks there, eventually becoming director of finance.
When Nissan relocated to the area, he moved to that company “and effectively did the same thing,” Parker said. He worked at Nissan for eight years before he and his wife, Nancy, moved to Georgia, where Parker took a job with a private investment firm.
Tennessee kept calling, though.
“We knew we wanted to move back to Middle Tennessee. That’s where all our family was,” Parker said. Nancy got a job offer in the area, and Richard started looking around for his own opportunity. That’s when he saw the finance director opening in Brentwood.
“I thought it would be an interesting thing to consider,” he said. “It’s a finance job, but it’s the public sector which I hadn’t done before. And I just wanted to try and do something different and was fortunate enough to get it.”
Not that Parker foresees too many differences between working in finance in the public versus private sectors. Actually, Parker has already found that the two are more similar than he first thought.
“In the finance word it’s really revenue and expenses,” he said. “It’s just the sources of the revenue are different in a public capacity versus a private capacity. And the expenditures are a little bit different.”
When he’s not managing the city’s finances, Parker expects that he’ll be indulging his love of the outdoors. His preferred outdoor activities are hunting, fishing and golfing. He called his golf game “consistently inconsistent” and said “it needs work.” But then again, he said, so does everybody’s.
For now, though, Parker is mainly focused on acclimating to his new job. City employees, he said, have been “absolutely gracious” toward him, which has helped. A week and a half ago he and his wife were throwing clothes into suitcases to get in town for his first day. Now, he’s feeling good about how things are going.
“It’s been as easy as I could have wanted,” he said.
Look here for more information about what the City of Brentwood’s finance department does.
