banks in georgia

While pleased with the progress we were making assembling the team of people necessary make our process work, I can't shake the feeling that actually getting business is going to be my responsibility and I can't afford to spend too much time on activities, however important that aren't business generating. So, bright and early Monday morning, I start a communications stream with people I know at 2 different Banks. Linda Pressley and I worked particularly well together 10 years ago. She is 6 or 7 years older than me, has never married but managed to avoid the all too familiar trap of letting her work become her life. I always admired how responsibly she treated her relationship with the Presbyterian Church and she had an elegant demeanor about her that always appealed to me. She and I always seemed to connect personally so I felt sure that she would help me if she could. She is now a senior credit officer with a bank whose business model it has been to buy small community banks and allow them to run, virtually autonomously, rather than fold them into a single brand. I guessed that meant that they would have member banks that had done plenty of real estate lending and would be suffering now, as a result. Linda happily took my call and we had a productive cup of coffee a day later. She told me indeed that her bank had $500 million dollars worth of bad real estate loans and gave me the names of several of those responsible for the management of that portfolio. I started e-mailing and calling her contacts immediately, using Linda's name hoping to get past the inevitable defenses erected to defend against sales people.

Concurrently, I put a call into Penn Ackerman. I never knew Penn especially well but he had been a journeyman executive at several banks and recruited me for a job some years ago while he was at Bank of America. I'd seen him around socially, knew that he was a regional executive with a bank based out in Gwinnett County and felt sure that he'd remember me. He did remember me and while we didn't speak over the phone initially, we did communicate irregularly by e-mail for several weeks.

In the case of both banks, I learned that problem real estate loans were devastating their performance, monopolizing their executives time and that neither seemed to have the first intelligent human resource necessary to re imagine solutions for these issues. Both banks assigned personnel to these broken deals that had made the bad loans in the first place and seemed astonishingly clueless about how to fix them. Each had as their core strategy, the belief that one of these days, somebody was going to come along and simply buy their problems from them. Nobody impressed me with their willingness to entertain an innovative solution. Consequently, I had to be tirelessly persistent in my follow up, I had to force myself not to take their rebuffs personally and I had to reorganize my approach to each bank as I ran of momentum with a particular name I'd been given as a contact person. Oddly, this just seemed like a game to me and I never got too frustrated. I believed in what we were doing (or more accurately, planning to do), I had the strength of my convictions and I believed that if I persevered, somebody at one of these stupid organizations would, sooner or later listen. That didn't mean that they would hire us but I was relying on an old business maxim that stressed that if you make your calls responsibly, sooner or later you'll make your goals.