TC Restaurant Group Founders Joe and Jon Field on Passing the Torch to the Next Generation
FOUNDER STORY
Most family businesses do not survive a change in ownership. The founders of TC Restaurant Group treated theirs as the point of the whole enterprise.
Succession is where family businesses go to die. The statistics on generational transitions are famously unkind, and the failure usually has less to do with the balance sheet than with the family. Ownership changes hands, trust does not, and a company that took decades to build unravels in a few years.
TC Restaurant Group ran the experiment and the result went the other way.
When circumstances required a change in the formal ownership of the Nashville-based hospitality and real estate company, founders Joe and Jon Field transferred the business to their children. The decision was rooted in trust and a long-term view of family legacy, and what could have been a disruption became a natural transition that kept the business intact and the family united.
The foundation for that transition was laid long before it happened. TC Restaurant Group has been a family-driven business for as long as it has existed, and the description is structural, not sentimental. The Fields built the company around the family rather than the other way around, which meant the next generation was not inheriting a stranger’s balance sheet. They were taking stewardship of something they already belonged to.
What they took stewardship of is substantial. The Field brothers were among the four original pioneers of Nashville’s Lower Broadway, buying in when the strip was neglected and unwanted, and over more than three decades they built a portfolio of bars, restaurants, and live music venues that became fixtures of the city’s cultural identity. TC Restaurant Group was the first to bring celebrity venues to the strip. The family’s holdings grew to include TC Ohio Properties, with more than 150 single-family homes and investment properties, and a 21-story skyscraper in downtown Nashville now under transformation.
Joe Field has been direct about what the transfer represented. Handing the company to the next generation was not an exit. It was the answer to the question the brothers had been building toward all along, which is what happens to a business when the people who started it step back. For most founders, the honest answer is uncertainty. For the Fields, the answer was already in the family.
The founders did not disappear after the transition. Joe and Jon Field remain the builders and new developers of TC Restaurant Group, present on every project, still holding the expansion to the standard they set decades ago. What changed is the ownership structure. What did not change is anything a customer, tenant, or employee would notice.
That continuity is the story. Nashville’s hospitality market has churned through owners, operators, and out-of-town capital for a decade straight. TC Restaurant Group stayed intact through a generational handoff because the handoff was never improvised. The brothers built a company their children could run, then trusted them to run it.
Ask around Lower Broadway and the assessment of the Field family tends toward the same theme. They built before the boom, they stayed through every cycle, and they solved the problem that breaks most family businesses by refusing to treat family and business as separate things. The torch passed. The flame did not flicker.