2026 Dianne Elizabeth Osis Lifetime Achievement In Business: Todd Parnell

Todd Parnell says he’s been blessed beyond anything he ever dreamed of.

His early childhood shows evidence of this. Parnell grew up next to a creek – “and I loved it,” he says.

That creek was Roark Creek in Branson, a stream that feeds Lake Taneycomo. Parnell says he spent much of his youth there and elsewhere around the Ozarks, “floating, swimming, fishing.”

Many years later, as founding CEO of a Springfield startup bank, Parnell took up the cause of cleaning up the James River. Some of his directors asked, “Why are you spending so much time on this?”

His answer, he says, was all about business. More on that in a moment.

Parnell, who turns 80 next summer, is the recipient of Springfield Business Journal’s 2026 Dianne Elizabeth Osis Lifetime Achievement in Business Award. He will be recognized Nov. 12 at SBJ’s Business Impact Awards.

Asked what business impact means to him, Parnell answers in just three words. “Tell the truth,” he says.

It’s what gets people behind a leader when times are hard, he says: “If you tell the truth, people are going to understand, and they will help rally around you, even if a situation is difficult.”

Parnell comes from a banking family. His father, Ben Parnell Jr., helped establish People’s Bank of Branson after World War II and was instrumental in financing Silver Dollar City, according to past SBJ reporting.

“A bank is only as strong as its community,” Parnell says his father hammered into him. “Your job is to help make the community strong.”

Parnell graduated from Drury University in 1969 and earned an MBA from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. He then worked for a government agency in Washington that financed projects in Africa, for a St. Louis bank’s operation in Los Angeles and at several St. Louis banks, he told SBJ in 2007.

“I was fired several times along the way because of mergers, because of disagreements with senior management,” he says. The last time was in 1996.

Afterward, while hiking near Vail, Colorado, Parnell says he ran into a Clayton bank CEO who suggested he open a Springfield branch for that bank. Back home, Parnell took the idea to a mentor, Eugene Everett, a longtime Springfield banker.

“He took a deep breath and he said, ‘You know, it’s a great time to start a bank in Springfield. We don’t need a St. Louis bank to do it,’” Parnell says.

The Bank opened in 1997 with Parnell as founding CEO. Everett was a co-founder, and the board included Jack Stack, now chairman and CEO of SRC Holdings Corp., according to past SBJ reporting. The bank adopted SRC’s open-book management system, the Great Game of Business. Parnell believes The Bank was one of the first banks in the country to do so.

Starting The Bank “was when banking became fun,” Parnell told SBJ in 2007.

“If I had never been open to really looking hard at the Great Game of Business and what open-book management meant, I never would have been successful,” he says now.

“Curiosity is a gift,” he adds. “If you are set in your ways and you aren’t open to other ideas … you’re going to shortchange yourself and the people you work with.”

Curiosity also helps business leaders try new things that allow their companies to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, Parnell says.

In 2004, The Bank merged with Signature Bank to form The Signature Bank, where Parnell was president and chief operating officer until he retired from banking in May 2005, according to past SBJ reporting.

When President John Sellars resigned, Drury named Parnell interim president effective June 1, 2007. The board made the job permanent in January 2008.

“Drury’s search committee unanimously chose Todd,” Rick Lester, chair of the presidential search committee, said at the time, according to past SBJ reporting, citing Parnell’s integrity and “collaborative management style.”

Then the Great Recession hit Drury’s endowment. Parnell says he told everyone how much it had lost and how difficult the situation was.

“The campus came together like no organization I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Not only did we survive the Great Recession, we emerged better.”

Parnell retired as president in May 2013.

Parnell traces his views on honesty to a teenage job as a teller at a Branson bank. One day, he says, he gave a customer who ran an auto repair shop too much cash when he was asked to break a pair of $20 bills. His drawer came up $160 short. The man, who Parnell says “was not well off at all,” returned the next morning with the extra money.

“He could have used that money so well, but he didn’t,” Parnell says. “That taught me what it means to tell the truth.”

Since moving to Springfield in 1997, Parnell has chaired the boards of the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce and Community Foundation of the Ozarks Inc., led United Way Ozarks Region’s 2012 annual campaign and chaired the Missouri Clean Water Commission from 2013 to 2015, according to his website. After he left Drury, he and his wife, Betty, co-chaired the Every Child Promise early childhood initiative, he says.

Parnell is an author, too, inducted into the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame in 2012. His books include “Postcards from Branson,” “The Buffalo, Ben, and Me” and the novel “Skunk Creek.”

Parnell and Betty marked 50 years of marriage earlier this month. They have four children and five grandchildren.

“I know that you are known throughout this state and probably the Midwest for your concern and your care about clean water,” Taney County businessman and author James Leon Combs told Parnell in a StoryCorps audio interview recorded at the Library Center in 2022.

The boy from Roark Creek had a ready answer for the bank directors who questioned his time advocating for the James River while they were also working to start a new financial institution.

“Water quality is an economic development issue for the Ozarks,” recalls telling them. “There’s nothing more important to the Ozarks and its future than maintaining the water quality we have.”