Recently retired as CEO of Cornell Dubilier, his family-owned company based in South Carolina’s upstate foothills, Jim Kaplan recalls the exact moment he realized the value of having a close relationship with TD Bank. It was about seven o’clock on a warm, spring evening, and he was on the sidelines of his son’s soccer game when he got a call that stopped him in his tracks.
“We’d been working on an acquisition for months, ready to close the next day with a $5 million loan from one of the biggest U.S. banks,” he says. “They told me the loan fell through. I was stunned. Without it, we faced potentially losing the deal and hurting our reputation in the industry. So that’s when I called Nate at TD.”
“Nate” is Nate Barrett, who heads TD Bank’s middle market commercial banking business in the Atlanta region and after this incident, remains on Jim’s speed-dial whenever a banking need arises.
“To close the deal, Jim needed $5 million in about 12 hours,” Nate says. “Fortunately, I’d taken the time to learn his business inside and out, so I knew its assets and cash flows could support that size loan. Plus, I knew Jim was risk-adverse and not one to acquire a business he couldn’t make profitable. I worked my phone really hard that night, and he had the money the next day.”
Small-town headquarters with global operations and markets
Founded in 1909, Cornell Dubilier grew to become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high-quality film, electrolytic and mica capacitors used in demanding medical, military, aerospace, and diverse industrial applications. “Their most common uses are for energy storage, power conditioning, electronic noise filtering, remote sensing, and signaling,” Jim says. “Our products are used in everything from defibrillators to fighter jets, all over the world.”
Before its 2023 acquisition by the Knowles Corporation, the company’s annualized revenues had grown to more than $135 million with 40,000 customers worldwide. The Kaplan family’s ownership began in 1983. That’s when Jim’s father, who had worked his way up from field engineer to the company’s president, headed a leveraged buyout from then-owner Exxon.
Jim started working for the firm during summers while in college. After earning his MBA in 1992, he assumed a variety of positions with increasing responsibility, then succeeded his dad as president in 2000.
Today, with global headquarters and manufacturing in Liberty, South Carolina, a small town of 3,000 people, near where Jim and his wife live, the company has 1,000 employees, five other manufacturing plants in Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, and Mexico, and a sales office in China.
“Across our entire organization and company ownership, relationships have been and are everything,” Jim says. “Although our company always had and will continue to have global reach, we held onto our small-town values, which put people first — our employees, customers, suppliers, and the communities where we operate. We share those same values with TD Bank, which is one of the key reasons we stayed with them.”
Strategic advisory and financing support for steady growth with reduced risks
In the 15 years prior to its acquisition, Cornell Dubilier had tripled in size through 10 strategic acquisitions, with Nate providing due diligence support and arranging TD Bank financing. That’s in addition to diverse banking services Nate arranged, including payroll, merchant processing, fraud controls and treasury reporting, foreign exchange, and interest rate swaps.
“With the full resources and capabilities of TD behind us, we were able to support Jim and his company through several economic cycles, some quite serious downturns, tailoring foreign exchange and treasury solutions to enhance their efficiency, risk management, and cash flows,” Nate says. “And, as each of these acquisition opportunities arose, we provided customized financing solutions so they could grow steadily through all their industry’s ups and downs, including plant modernizations, expansions, and recapitalizations.”
For Jim, his close banking relationship with Nate and TD Bank was all about trust — in their expertise, in their granular understanding of the company’s industry and business, and in their willingness to find solutions to the many business challenges along the way.
“After our loan fiasco that Nate saved us from, we had built such levels of trust with Nate and TD that we never shopped our deals around,” Jim says. “Doing so would’ve required us to educate new people, which would take time, increase our deal risks, and with those increased risks, cost us more points on financing. We knew TD’s team members like Nate had been with the bank for a long time, which is always a good sign. They understood both their business and our business, so we could always count on them for strategic advice and banking solutions, plus we could move fast together.”
Turning the page to start a new life chapter with generational wealth
Now, with the company’s purchase behind him, Jim and his wife will continue their modest suburban lifestyle in a nearby town and trust TD Bank’s wealth management services to conservatively handle their now-substantial financial assets.
They’ll be sharing the proceeds of the company’s sale with family members, including his mother, siblings, and their children, as well as with local philanthropies. They’ll also be taking time for travel and hobbies that include gardening, fishing, hiking, and quail hunting — and doing so with the peace of mind that their wealth is safe.
“Our relationships with Nate and now with our two senior TD wealth advisors have been all about them learning what our goals are, which are to sit tight for now, and not try to push us into anything outside our comfort zones,” Jim says. “All along, TD Bank has provided us concierge services like what we might expect from a boutique bank but with all the resources of a big bank. And truly focusing on what is best for us, not TD. That’s always set TD apart from other banks, and we’ll always value that.”