Think Big, Not Small – Andy Max
Presented By:
Andy Max-Director of Pricing Strategy and Performance at First National Bank of Omaha
Description
It’s easy to get caught up in a process and lose sight of the big picture. What story are you telling and why does it matter? More importantly, are your employees buying in? Andy Max talks about the process of building a culture of storytelling and relationships. He emphasizes, above all else, not to let the pursuit of perfection overshadow progression.
Transcription
Dallas Wells: Welcome back. Everybody seems a little quieter after lunch, so it looks like we got you fed. Thanks again to the folks at nCino for lunch. First things first, a little housekeeping. As Lisa got off earlier, she said, “I got all emotional and I forgot to tell them something important,” so a message from Lisa. If you hand Lisa your business card, she has something for you. I know you guys are all suckers for this. I’ve been in a lot of your bank branches. You still have that open a checking account and get a free gift, so I know you guys are into this. Hand Lisa your card, she’ll have something for you, something useful for you.
This afternoon, as Carl said, starting at the top of the mountain, starting real broad and then working our way down. I think you saw that from Roy’s inspirational talk and then Lisa getting into some tactical things that you can actually take back and put in place with that inspiration at your back. What we’re going to talk about this afternoon, and I think you guys will get a lot out of this, we’re going to talk to some bankers, so it’s one thing for us as a vendor to preach it to you. It’s another thing for speakers to come up and motivate you. I think what’s really powerful, though, is to hear it from your peers, folks who have done this, and so, first up will be Think Small, Not Big from Andy Max.
Andy is the Director of Pricing and Performance at First National Bank of Omaha. Andy’s one of the stars in this industry. We’re thrilled to have him as a client, and really count him as a friend now. We’ve worked closely with Andy for a long time. These guys have really pushed us to make our product better, to make our whole approach better. The things we build for Andy get passed out to the rest of you, so you should all be thankful for Andy as well. Andy did a version of this talk at our advisory board meeting last year, and I think everybody kind of universally agreed that was the star of the show. It wasn’t anything we talked about. It wasn’t even any of the kind of side conversations. It was seeing what Andy and his team have done and taking that back as kind of a …
That’s the point on the horizon that we’re aiming for. Their story, kind of how they got to that point, is a really good one. Andy does a good job of telling it. The other thing to take note of here as I walk off and Andy walks on, you’ll notice we’ve had entrance music for everybody coming up here. We told Andy this. Andy got really excited, so he said, “You know, I’ve probably got one chance in my life to have a walk up song for something, so I’m going to put some thought into this.” I think Andy put more thought into the entrance music than he did the rest of the pitch, because this is just kind of his story. Anyway, as I walk off and Andy comes on, I think you’ll agree he nailed the song, so we’ll be off to a good start. Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Max.
Andy Max: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m happy to be here and get the chance to talk with everyone today, so I try to keep this light. It looks like we’ll have a little Q & A at the end of all this. Kind of two tough acts to follow. I told Carl that at lunch today, that he really set me up for failure, but just listening to Roy and listening to Lisa both, I took a lot away from that and I’m sure everyone else did in this room, too. I’m thinking to myself here, “What’s my purpose?” I got a lot of soul searching to do, but so I was asked to talk a little bit about the First National story, and a little bit about my career, so we’re just going to kind of jump right into that and … First National bank, a little background on where I work is that we were founded in 1857, and we’re a six generation, family-owned, privately held bank, so we’re actually America’s largest privately held bank holding company.
We operate in six states right now. We’re in Nebraska predominantly, and Colorado and Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and South Dakota. When Roy did talk about what’s your purpose, find your purpose, why do you do what do, where do you find your inspiration, I’m sitting out there and I’m thinking, “You know what? I want to go find that real quick before I get up here,” because I think it’s cool. I’m very passionate about being a nerd, as Dallas kind of said. I’m very passionate about learning new things, and you know what? I look back and look what our bank did last year. Our bank gave $19 million back to the community. If I’m able to support our lenders to be able to make profit, to be able to give back to those communities, to be able to reinvest and understand what you’re working towards and what you’re for, I think that’s very important.
One other thing was that we volunteered over 25,000 work hours, and we were all very active in that too, so doing all these things and being able to support these things through loan pricing, in a very roundabout way, is where I’m starting my course to realize that. Oops, wrong button.
A little bit about me, just take yourselves back 10 years. What were you doing? I was graduating from Iowa State. Haven’t changed much. Still look the exact same, I know, but had a great college career at Iowa State, and when I got done the last thing I thought was in 10 years I’d be standing on this stage. I’ll tell you that much right now. I didn’t care about work. I didn’t care about a job. All I wanted to do was move to Colorado, so I figured I’d turn down the couple of job offers I had in Des Moines, Iowa, and was like, “Heck with you guys. I’m going to Colorado.”
I moved out there and I graduated with a finance degree and the only job I could find was as a bank teller, so I happily accepted and that’s where my career at First National Bank began, so I think when I look back though, it’s important for me to reflect on my teller days, because I did a lot of things that normally some of us may not get the opportunity to do, cleaning your cash, making sure your drawer balances, which by the way I about got fired twice because I am not good at that. Just being able to do this and kind of learn the systems that you’re working in from a transactional standpoint is very helpful down the line when you’re trying to look at greater integrations, things along those sort. While I was on the line, every now and then you have a little down time, so I always tell the story that I’m a big Sudoku fan. I take anyone on head to head and I think you’d probably still beat me, but I still like figuring those things out.
I like putting together puzzles. I like figuring out how things go with each other. I like understanding at the very end of the day what is my passion? What is my benefit? Through these puzzles I found Microsoft Excel, which I completely ignored in college, by the way. I don’t really know how I got through without it, but at the very end of the day I was like, “Man, this Excel thing’s so cool. Have you guys ever done a sum formula? I mean, seriously, how cool is that?” I’m sitting here and I get my first kind of job in finance and my boss tasks me, and he just says, “Hey, we need a loan pricing model.” I was like, “What’s loan pricing?” He’s just like, “Well, you’ve done some cool things in Excel with all your sum formulas and all that other good stuff. Here’s a Visual Basic book. Why don’t you go figure out something pretty cool?”
My story starts with learning a lot about our FTP methodologies and kind of how we loan price today, and then being able to build a model in Excel. When we first rolled out our model in Excel to a lot of our lenders at our company, Excel based, what we ran into was they were like, “You know what? We’ve got a rate sheet. We don’t need to put this stuff in here.” I learned then there was not enough benefit in my model for them to actually see what they were going to get out of it at the end of the day. I went back and I asked them, I was like, “Hey, guys. Well, what would make you use this?” They’re just like, “Well, we want to know what the relationship is.” I went back, found a way to get our relationship into the model itself, and I was like, “Hey guys, look at this. We got it. Did it for you guys. You asked for it. Let’s start to use this thing.” They’re like, “I’m too busy.” Just like, “Oh, okay. Well, if you’re so busy, what can I do to hopefully automate something so we can get in there and start to get value out of this?”
After about six to nine months of automating some more processes, some building, for all you Excel fans out there, putting in new macros in, building new functionality, all that fun stuff, and you get to this model at the end of the day and you’re just like, “This thing is so badass. This is so cool.” I finally roll it out, and it took six to nine months of training and getting everyone up to speed, and helping them understand what the benefit was. I think that’s when I learned I can build whatever I want. I can make this the coolest thing ever, but if I can’t explain to everyone who’s going to use this what it is and what the benefit is. They’re never going to use it. They need a reason to stop their busy days to get into a tool that gives them advice. Then at the end of the day, what do you do with it? I have my number. Great. You told me how profitable this deal is. I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. That’s all you need to know.”
They’re like, “What’s it mean to me?” It’s like, “Well, your manager said you need to be this over this index, and that’s good.” They’re like, “That doesn’t really help me that much.” I was just like, you know what? I spent all of my time developing this really cool thing. I didn’t really think about how people were going to use the information at the end of the day. I was spending all of my time in the model itself and doing some very high level code. I’m not quite as good as these guys over here, but I stepped back to myself, and when I moved to Omaha I had the opportunity to meet Precision Lender, and what they really helped me do is step back from what I was doing. It was a great exercise for me to learn what building a model is, what it takes to do. Now that we’re partnering with these guys and they built a kickass model that I really love and agree with, and we were able to roll it out very quickly and very seamlessly, is I can help explain what the benefit of the numbers are.
We have meetings with our lenders once a month at least. We try to get out in front of them at least once a month, and what we notice is the more we start to get in front of them and … 15 minutes. Not an hour meeting, nothing big. What’s the benefit that I should learn this month? What’s something I should take away from this meeting? Why are you wasting my time? It needs to be worth it, so what we did was when we got on Precision Lender, I was like, “We’re all on this model. We all were in Excel. Now we’re into this really cool one. It’s going to be fantastic.” We got everyone on, got everyone trained, and we took off and we were running. Then I looked at our usage stats after awhile, and I realized that you know what? Again, it’s a fantastic model. We have a lot of people in there. A lot of our Colorado folks were in there a lot more because they’re used to some of these Excel models that we built, but at the end of the day, it was not part of their normal process.
It was not easy still for them. They had to go out to Precision Lender and log in. Although I see all the value in the world in Precision Lender, you have to make sure that your lenders understand what that same value is, that same benefit that they get out of it. Talking with the Precision Lender group over there we were just like, “You know, I think we need to integrate with Salesforce. I think we need to be a seamless part of that process. We need to remove another login that someone has to remember,” and so we did, and they did it quickly, which was fantastic. What we saw was adoption rates go through the roof. I mean, it was just amazing. It was part of their sales process now, and now that they were in there, they were starting to ask more questions. Before it was more we were kind of saying, “Hey, if you’re not in there, you’re going to get a slap on the wrist.”
That’s probably not the best way to pitch this product to your internal sales staff. If you’re not in there you’re going to get a hand slap. What that means is you’re making me do this. I don’t even know if I get any value out of this at the end of the day. What we did see with the integration was not only was it powerful for them, but it was powerful for us, and so we actually got all of the data that Precision Lender collects and it feeds right over into Salesforce today. Although they put together some nice visual for us pages that really helps, it’s really important to, when we communicate it out to all of our lenders to say, “Guess what? How long does it take you to price an opportunity?” By the time they go into Precision Lender, they price it, it comes back over, it takes them three to five minutes based on what they’re doing in there.
Guess what? You bring back over 70 points of data in the Salesforce with that, and with being an Excel geek and being a data geek, and all this other stuff, I’m like, “Oh my gosh. How much cool stuff are we going to do with this now? I mean, this is just amazing.” We have all of this information. Now we have great pipeline reports. We have standard lending reports that everyone’s on the same page with. Everyone understands what that synergy is and how the tools are supposed to be used. I guess as I reflect back on all that stuff there’s whole process to get from 10 years ago to today, and what I’m passionate about and why I get up here, and why I want to just share my story is because at the very end of the day I’m just a pricing geek that wants to help our lenders tell a good story. You know what? I’ve never talked to … I’ve never been in a client-facing role before in my life.
The only lending opportunity I had is I gave my brother a dollar quite a long time ago, and I never collected on it. He went into default on that. I had to give him the old noogie, but outside of that I’m a pricing guy, and how does a pricing guy influence front line managers at the end of the day? They can do it by helping them tell a story. My passion is trying to develop those stories for those clients out there that aren’t just, “Well, this is what the loan priced out at.” We don’t loan price anymore. We opportunity price, and greater than that, we relationship price now. When you do that you can’t just look at what the outputs are and not be able to tell a story. You really have to dig deep and say, “Okay. What is this information telling me today?” In all of our meetings that we get together once a month or once a quarter, or whatever it is, as much as we can get in front of our lenders a day, we help tell that you should do this loan for these reasons.
We should understand why we did that loan. We should learn from it, and we should make sure that we’re consistent in doing that throughout the rest of our company as well. I think the power of story is very, very … I mean, I was very moved today by a lot of the stories that were told. It’s very emotional. You can connect on a different level. There’s better ways to share the information instead of, “This is what the numbers are.” One thing and one issue that we had with that was that our managers, as we kind of heard from Lisa today, were not ready to hear the stories that our RMs were telling. Although they were doing a great job of saying, “Hey, the relationship’s this, and I know it’s this, but we improved this, and we do this, and this is why we do this deal,” they were like, “Yeah, great, but what’s the ROE?” I don’t know. I don’t like that.
We had a little bit of a disconnect there, but over time we were able to get everyone onboard and be able to start telling those stories together because it is a culture. You have to all be on board with accepting what these qualitative stories are. Without them, if they don’t meet a criteria, they’re out. It’s really a way for those lenders to go to bat for their clients. A couple of things I learned, that integration’s where the key to adoption … I don’t think I’m going to blow anyone’s minds here with the things I learned, but what we saw was when Precision Lender and Salesforce worked with each other, not only was I ecstatic about it, about all the new information that we could trust and we could build on, and we could build dashboards and all this cool stuff with it, but to get the RMs to use the tool, and we price every single deal that we do in Precision Lender today, and I think if we took it out right now, they might be a little bit lost.
We use it that well. Company culture is everything, as I kind of talked about. If your senior managers are not on the same page with your RMs, “Well, I’m all onboard for this, but …” “Well, I’m doing this but,” well, you know what? We got to put our buts aside and we got to be able to say, “Hey, we’re going to be okay with this story. This is a story we like to tell. This is a story that makes sense for our community and a deal that we should do.” If we’re not all on the same page and culture doesn’t change, then we’re no better for it. Find vendors that you can trust and partner with, and this is one I’ve learned in the last four years obviously with Precision Lender. Being that geek Excel guy myself, when I would talk to Carl when we were having our initial talks and just sitting there like, “Oh my gosh. That’s so cool. Oh, you can move this and it does that? Wow. That’s amazing,” you’re just sitting there and the fact that they wanted to hear feedback from me I thought was so cool.
The fact that we were on the same page from the beginning and I constantly learn from the Precision Lender group, I constantly learn from other people in the audience here, a lot of the CAB members as well, we stay in touch quite a bit, and it’s a lot of fun to connect and learn with those guys. If you go out and buy a canned product from a vendor you don’t have a good relationship with, you’re stuck with it. You kind of try to make a little bit of lemonade out of lemons there, but at the very end of the day, I feel like we’re getting better because of all the clients of Precision Lender and Precision Lender and their expertise. That makes me sleep easy at night because it makes my job a lot easier to be able to leverage all of the good output that you guys have given to them.
As far as Salesforce goes, we have a good relationship with them as well.
They’re obviously an industry leader in CRM, and we have a lot of good team members on our team that can do a lot with Salesforce today. One of the coolest things that we were actually able to do, when I talk about some of our dashboarding and everything, is we’re getting to the point where we can budget our balance sheet in phone calls and leads. One cool thing about that is when you go out and tell an RM, “Hey man, I can actually say based on the growth you need and the amortization of your portfolio today, you need at least 300 new leads this year. You need to make at least 700 phone calls. You need to do these things in order to meet your goals according to the way you work today.” It’s very cool to be able to see those changes in the way we think about it. It’s not, “Hey you’ve got five million. Go figure it out. Go start calling and I’m sure you’ll get there.”
At the very end of the day, the lenders are seeing power in the ability to push back and say, “Hey, you want me to do that? Yeah, right. Look what I did last year with what we had. We’re going to need more staff. We’re going to need more leads. We’re going to need more resources.” They give them tools to be able to push back a little bit and say, “Sure I can give you that, but this is how we got to do it.” It’s been a lot of fun. We’ve had a couple of sessions with St. Meyer & Hubbard that have provided some really cool information when it comes to how we look at our pipeline now, so now we measure sales velocity, which is great, because lots of lenders work in different ways. We have some that do the big deals but they just do a handful of them. We have those community lenders that do a bunch of small ones and they ultimately kind of get to the same place sometimes at the end of the day.
What we started to learn, though, is that we can learn from the average time to close, and we can learn about time and stage and we can learn about giving advice. We can take all of this knowledge and kind of package it up and give it back to them and say, “Hey, you know what? The industry says that if it goes past this date in your stage and it does all these things, you shouldn’t waste your time on it anymore. You should free up your time for that and you should use it elsewhere. We still have a lot of golds. We have a whole bucket of leads for you now to work through,” because that’s what we’ve talked about and agreed to, but now we can actually take action on that and say, “Hey, once it gets to this point, yeah, we’re going to close, lose that for now, and we’ll come back to it when they’re ready to talk.” There’s lots of insights that we’re starting to uncover, and we’re in the very early stages of that, but I’m excited about what’s coming down the path there.
Very lastly, this is one thing that Carl actually shared with me about six, seven months ago, and it was a Harvard Business Review article that I thought was really interesting. Is there anyone in the crowd that’s heard of Sir David Brailsford? We’re all about marginal gains. We kind of understand what his message is, and the more I read about him and the more I understood what he was about, I felt that that’s really the way that our group works. Sir David Brailsford, and I’m going to refer to him as Sir Dave from here on out, became the head cycling coach of the British National team in 2002. His philosophy was all about marginal gains, so breaking things down, being able to understand what’s important and making small gains on each one of those opportunities. When he looked at his cycling team and he said, “Okay, we need to look at human performance. We need to look at strategy, and we need to look at the psychology of our cyclers.”
At the very end of the day, where this story ends up, that they were making small, 1% improvements in each one of these categories that was very important to their success. If we can continue, or if I can continue at First National Bank, to do that through our integrations, through our reporting, through our improved storytelling, through everything that we want to do and be, and make 1% gains every six weeks, every two months, whatever that is, and we aggregate that up, it ends up to be seven gold medals out of ten at the 2008 Olympic Games. That was what Sir David was able to pull off. My message is although we see all what some of these banks, and I’ve talked to some of the bankers in the room and I’m just like, “Wow, that is so cool what you guys are doing right now,” although it seems like it could be a long ways away, we don’t always have to jump to the end point and say, “This is what we want to be.”
You know what? What I believe in is making sure that we have good scope on what we’re trying to do, we understand why we’re doing it, because at the end of the day if we get to the end of it, and all of a sudden there’s no value that comes except, “Hey look. This is a cool thing,” we’ve kind of wasted our time and our money on that and just really forgetting about perfection and focusing on progression and just taking that next step, taking that next step, getting to that next iteration.
The very last thing, you guys all know, it’s all about who you work with, whether it’s a vendor, whether it’s an RM, whether it’s someone on your team, whether it’s management at the bank. I mean, it really comes down to being able to work with everyone, learn, listen, understand what others are trying to do, what they’re saying and helping you to work towards your progression, not necessarily your perfection at the end of the day. I don’t think I blew anyone’s minds there with a lot of my insights of things I’ve learned. I’ve really enjoyed our relationship with Precision Lender, and being able to learn from them. I think I’ll just kind of wrap it up right there, so thanks everyone for listening to me today, and I think we’re going to open it up for questions if anyone has any.
Speaker 3: How are you doing? I wanted to check back with the conversation you had about the Salesforce integration. What was the eureka moment for the bankers when they transitioned from the sales tool to then just dovetailing Precision Lender into that?
Andy Max: Yeah, and that’s a point that I kind of left out there was the fact that we had had pretty good use on the Precision Lender side and really not that great a use on the Salesforce side, on that monitoring side, what lenders felt like, “Hey, you’re starting to watch me. I don’t want to get in there. I don’t want to do these things.” But when we were able to tie those two with each other, that really was the aha moment, and I wasn’t really clear on that point, but on both sides, from a Salesforce adoption standpoint, and from a Precision Lender adoption standpoint, that was really the aha.
Speaker 4: Andy, are the incentives for the lenders, relationship managers, are they performance based, and does the Precision Lender tool facilitate some of that performance evaluation? If so, what did you learn if you applied that over time?
Andy Max: Yeah. A lot of our sales metrics today are not ROE based, and we do use a lot of the information from Precision Lender to look at overall relationships at the end of the day. When we look at metrics today, we really look at the metrics of the customer. We really look at … Precision Lender really will help us understand that Sprint family plan we always talk about. We always just say, “Hey, if he’s in here, and he’s in here, and he’s in here, we should be getting a deal for this or that or the other thing.” We really use that as a customer management pricing tool. We don’t currently use it for any incentives today. We do a lot of our incentives based off of some of the feedback from our core systems, but we hope one day to be able to get to that point.
Dallas Wells: Andy, can you talk about some of the results that you guys saw … You guys built this as a customer facing thing and improved those interactions. I think you guys have seen that. What about what Lisa talked about? Did that turn into dollars for you guys, and have you seen some performance changes with what you’ve done?
Andy Max: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, things that I kind of skip over sometimes. Yeah, just being able to tell that more effective story, being able to give the customer more options. Now, I kind of said we don’t loan price anymore, we opportunity price, but what we really do is we also do all your shopping for you. Now we make sure that all of our lenders come to all of their deals with at least three options, and so we make sure they’ve kind of gone out there and said, “Hey, you know what? We’ve thought about what your needs were. We understand them. What do you think works best for you? Would you like option A, B, or C?” Being able to make that choice instead of saying, “Here’s the deal,” has really helped change our conversation with a lot of our clients out there.
I was actually fortunate enough to go on a client call and see how that worked. It was really interesting. It was a client that actually wanted a different pricing model built in Excel, and since I knew how to do that I was happy to help them, but it was really interesting to see the conversation that the lender was having with the client at the end of the day. I don’t understand all the X’s and O’s of everything they said, but I know they had a lot of options right in front of them and explained them all really well, and at the very end of the day, I think we can all agree, when we go on Amazon and do a search and see all the things that they recommend to us, I feel better about the purchase I make at the end of the day. If I get that feeling from being provided those multiple options, I kind of get that more satisfactory feeling from a client standpoint.
Speaker 6: I have a question.
Speaker 7: On the pricing, I think our team loves the product, but they’re cross-selling at times, which actually drives the rate down on that. It’s a nice problem to have, because it’s empowering them, or getting a return on the ROE. I just wanted to see if you’ve gone through that, because I’m balancing between getting a return on the ROE and getting the rate up on the loans overall.
Andy Max: Yeah, I think as bankers, at least at some point in time we’ve all had the siloed approach in our banks. We all have different departments that are focused on their P&L’s and not necessarily focused on the bank’s P&L as a whole sometimes. To your point, we do opportunity price now, so we highly encourage all of our lenders to work with our treasury officers, our corporate card officers, and we incent that with our global trade officers. Although our targets are set a bit high, they’re set that way for a reason at the end of the day, and it didn’t happen overnight.
I mean, we’re still working on that, but at the end of the day we are excited that we’re actually working across business lines now. We’ve set up programs that incent referrals to other business lines, and that’s really turned into more effective, fee-based business growth that we were previously just focused on the loan. Now if we can get the loan, the deposit, some treasury services, whatever it may be, and that opportunity works out, we have kind of gotten there, but it came with a lot of training. It came with a lot of meetings. It came with a lot of explanations, and at the end of the day you have to incent what you get sometimes to get started.
Speaker 8: Lisa earlier talked about how the CEO can impact so many things with the types of things they talk about. What has your senior leadership done in terms of putting emphasis on this process? You talked a lot about getting your communication with your users. How much communication do you have going upward in senior management, and what’s the response that you’ve gotten from them?
Andy Max: Yeah, great question, Neil. We meet with our senior managers at least once a month. We have a unique structure at First National Bank where we have nine big presidents in some of our smaller markets that we all get a phone call at least, and are able to talk about what’s coming and how are you using it? What are best practices, and how do we continue to grow this and get more out of it? We have a unique situation where we’ve onboarded our users, about 1/4 of them four years ago, about 50% of them another two years after that.
Then just most recently about nine months ago, we onboarded the last of our users right now. We have people in different stages of the game as well, and so when it comes to our senior managers, the ones that have been on there for the longest amount of time are really helping to steer the ship, but they’re taking a lot of input and a lot of those questions from some of the other bankers. There is a designated time and place that we try to get better when it comes to reporting and loan pricing.
Dallas Wells: I’ve got one more for you, Andy. We’ll make the developers over here a little nervous. What’s next for you guys? After you see the success of combining Salesforce and the pricing piece of it, are there other things that make sense to put together and kind of connect all those data points in the end?
Andy Max: Most definitely. My goal is to give the power back to our lenders. I want to get to an ideal state where we believe enough in what we’ve done and our model and our process that we can go out there, price a deal, and we can take it off the street because they have the power to do it. We don’t have to go through more of this white tape to move it to this manager to get this approval to do any of those things. But if we can get to that point where we’re able to believe in what we’re doing and making sure that those targets are appropriate, and that’s where I was going on this, is in Salesforce today, we’re actively building a target setting center. We’re really close on it, we’re really excited about it, but what that allows is for our managers and our senior managers to fully understand what they’re pipeline looks like, more accurately move your targets up and down.
It actively just gives you the information by clicking refresh based on your product line, based on your geography, and you can understand that, “Hey, we got way too much of this that’s in the pipeline right now. We need to boost that up a little bit. We need to actively manage what we’re bringing on the books today.” If we get to that point and that comfort level where our senior managers say, “You know what? I feel good about what we have here. I feel like I have control over what we’re trying to do. I can look at our portfolios and slice and dice them the way I want to, and now we can make good recommendations about what those targets should be.”
I mean, I think there’d be nothing cooler than being able to be a lender at First National and just say, “Yeah, I can do that deal,” met everything that we did and our senior managers feel real good about it. Of course, what you’ll hear from Greg here in a second, though, is where we ultimately like to go out and talk to a few of you there as well, as continuing to work down the progression of a seamless onboarding experience there through the Salesforce application and the start of your client relationship all the way through the credit process, through the documentation, to kind of all that stuff. I know Greg’s going to talk a lot about that here and they’ve done a lot of good things out there as well.
Dallas Wells: Anybody else with questions for Andy? You know where to find him. He’s been down this path and is one of the early tribe members. He’s been there, done that, so find him out in the hallway and ask him questions. Andy, thank you for doing this.
Andy Max: Yeah. Great. Thanks.
Watch the Video "What Does All of this Mean for YOUR Bank? (Panel)"
Topics include social media, community involvement, and shifting from a fear-based to an opportunity-based approach.
Watch Now