Estal Fain had already rejected eight candidates for a job as a records analyst at a Chattanooga insurance company when a midlevel manager walked into his office.
“I think I’ve found the one you’re looking for,” she told him. “He’ll probably be my boss within a year.”
Fain hired 21-year-old Thom Tillis back in 1981, bypassing college graduates in favor of the kid who’d left home at 17 and was working as a records clerk in Nashville, Tenn.
“He had the can-do attitude and intelligence and records experience I was looking for,” recalls Fain. “He readily embraced new ways of doing things. He got things done.”
Tillis did become his manager’s boss within a year, a rapid rise that would become his pattern in business and politics.
On Wednesday, Republican Tillis, now 50, will become speaker of the N.C. House – and one of North Carolina’s three most powerful politicians – after just two terms in the General Assembly. No one has risen faster.
Five years ago, he was voting on fire stations and baseball fields as a Cornelius town commissioner. Before that he served on the parks and recreation board.
Not that long ago N.C. legislators had to pay their dues. Committee chairmanships could take years to earn. Even the seating chart reflected a hierarchy of power.
Tillis never chaired a committee. Never moved off the back row.
His ascension came amid the seismic shift that put 68 Republicans in the 120-member House. Now only 27 have more seniority than Tillis. Some say it signals a more fundamental change as legislative power shifts to urban areas and driven, well-funded candidates.
“The old legislative politics of biding your time and climbing the ladder just doesn’t hold as much anymore,” says Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill.
In April 2009, Tillis walked away from a job as an IBM management consultant and a $500,000-plus annual salary. Over a year and a half, he put 45,000 miles on his blue pickup traveling the state with his PowerPoints to recruit candidates, hone issues and raise money.
“I was willing to bet a couple years’ salary on it,” he said of the campaign, “and I’m glad I did.”
Few who know Tillis are surprised by his success.
“He’s an intelligent guy and a quick study,” says Rick Ramsden, a former boss. “He knows how to put together a team and how to get results.”
‘Persistent as heck’
Tillis and his five siblings led a nomadic life.
They followed their father, a boat draftsman, to jobs in Jacksonville and New Orleans. Tillis never went to the same elementary school two years in a row.
His father finally took a job in Nashville and Tillis settled in for junior high and high school. He was elected student body president and graduated near the top of his class. But then, at 17, he decided to leave home and get a job.
“We weren’t wired to go to college,” he says.
At Provident Insurance, Tillis joined Estal Fain in trying to solve a problem: how to automate and index thousands of records at a time personal computers were still in their infancy and mainframes were limited.
They partnered with computer company Wang Laboratories. With the help of community college classes, Tillis versed himself in systems analysis as they helped develop a new imaging technology. Two years later he went to work for the computer maker as manager of a research and development team.
Wang took Tillis to Boston – where he briefly left to join a high-tech start-up – and then to Atlanta. It was there he came to the attention of Rick Ramsden, a managing partner at what was then Price Waterhouse, one of the nation’s biggest accounting and consulting firms.
At a company where executives usually waited up to eight years to become a partner, Tillis made it in six.
“He was one of the best people I had so I would deploy him wherever necessary to get things done,” says Ramsden. “People liked to be on his projects and the clients liked him, and that’s not always easy. He is persistent as heck.”
A year after making partner, Tillis would finally get his bachelor’s degree through a co-op program at the University of Maryland.
When the new PricewaterhouseCoopers sold its management consulting arm to IBM in 2003, Tillis went with it.
From bike path to politics
A bike trail put Tillis on a path to politics. A voter named Jesse McCall helped set him on a path to Raleigh.
A transfer had brought Tillis, his wife, Susan, a real estate broker, and their two children to Cornelius in 1998. An avid mountain biker, his push for a local trail led him to a seat on the park board. In 2003, he ran for commissioner in the fast-growing lakeside town.
He tied incumbent Jim Bensman for second place. McCall, one of the town’s oldest voters, broke the tie by pulling Bensman’s name from a hat. As one of the two top vote-getters, Bensman got a four-year term; Tillis, in third place, settled for two. He impressed colleagues in his first elected job.
“He’s not an ideologue,” says Bensman. “Thom is very good at figuring out what it takes to make something work, and he’s not afraid to tell people if he doesn’t like what they’re doing.”
Town Manager Anthony Roberts says Tillis “doesn’t say ‘My way or the highway’ and run over you.”
“He tries to explain his position and work with you and compromise.”
The two-year term freed Tillis in 2006 to challenge incumbent state Rep. John Rhodes, a maverick Republican.
For now, Tillis plans to devote his attention to Raleigh, but says he intends eventually to return to consulting.
Just four years after he was first elected, House Republicans chose him as speaker.
He likens his new job to his others. As a consultant, he says, “you’re generally in a situation where you’ve got a problem you’ve got to solve.
“You’re always going in and finding how you can better deploy capital and cash. And that’s what we’re going to have to do.”
By Jim Morrill
jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Sunday, Jan. 23, 2011
