Career Development Tips with Kevin Barth

Thank you. Thank you, Dean, and thank you guys for all showing up. I'm sure now this has to do with you needing any credits, right? I understand this is the last big opportunity to get 15 credits. I'll try to make it worth your time and not be just about the credits. I'm here for three, maybe four reasons today. First of all, I'm very proud of the company I work for and I love what I do. To find somebody my age who has been doing what they do as long as I have and still love it, still passionate about it, is a little bit unusual, but I do. I love what I do. Every day I'm doing something different and that keeps me energized. I'm also one of the reasons I agreed to do this, and I don't do this very often. It was several years ago, in a class like this or a session like this, I actually engaged a banker at the end of a session like this and started talking to him. At that point in my college career, I was thinking about either going into the Secret Service, the FBI, being an entrepreneur starting a business of my own, or maybe joining the Marines. That's where I was in college, right? And I met with this retired banker, listened to him talk, and after the session he said, 'Tell me about yourself.' He listened to me for a while. He said, 'You like business, right?' I said yes. He said, 'You like people, right?' I said yes. He said, 'You're very curious.' I said yes, I am. And he said, 'Well, if you like business, you know what you want to go into? You've got to go into banking.' And he said, 'Let me tell you why. Because in banking, your learning curve is going to go like this from the day you graduate from college until the day you retire.' And he said, 'Along with that, and this got my attention, the more knowledge you have, the more you climb that learning curve, the more valuable you're going to be to whoever it is you're working for.' And he said, 'You're going to have friends that are going to go into sales, and their learning curve is going to be like this, and about the time they reach 40 or so, their learning curve is going to level off like that, and their value is going to level off. They're going to be other people coming along, and they're going to be a lot more valuable to whatever organization they're with than you are.' And I thought, okay, he related it to the money, so I sort of got it then. The third reason that I'm here is that again, I'm all about adding talent to our company. If just one of you at the end of this or the next couple years decides to join our company and ends up making a difference and helping us take our company to the next level, then it's been a really good day for me. So I'm also about recruiting. So to start out, I actually had a little focus group a couple weeks ago. I was trying to figure out what I should talk about, and I sat down with a group of our trainees. I'm very, very close to our training program, spend a lot of time with our trainees because that's how I started with our training program. And I asked them, 'What do college students want to hear about now? Do they want to hear about Fed policy? Do they want to hear about the economy?' And they told me, this group which included three MU grads, 'Well, they don't want to see a PowerPoint presentation. They don't want to hear about Fed policy because they've been talking about that all year. They really like to hear about maybe what a banker is, what commercial banking is, a little bit about our company, and then they said they'd really most people like to hear some tips on how can they be successful, and to the extent I've had any success, how did I generate that success.' So that's sort of my plan. I'm going to talk a little bit about Commerce Bank, a little bit about what commercial banking is, talk a little bit about my story, and then I'm going to talk about something I like to talk about. I'm going to relate career enhancers. So I'm going to hopefully walk away with seven or eight career enhancers that you can use in your journey. And then finally, I'm going to talk a little bit about why banking, why banking is a good place to be right now. And then at the end, Brad and I, Brad King, he is responsible for our training program in Kansas City, and he and I will stay here all night long if you guys want to talk about banking training programs, if you want any pointers on how to do anything, you want to look at a resume, you may bring a resume. I'll get a resume. So that's how we'll end, if that's all right with you. And how much time do I have? 23 minutes? So the dean actually, I met the dean probably a year ago, and she asked me if I would speak. I gave her some idea what I wanted to speak about, and a few weeks later I got this thing back from her. It was a title. It said 'An Unlikely Success Story.' And holy cow, I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted. But anyway, so I changed the title to 'Why Banking, Why Now.' But I am going to give you a little bit of my story as soon as I first tell you a little bit more about Commerce Bank. So Commerce Bank is the 36th largest bank in the United States. We're a commercial bank, primarily focused in the Midwest. We have dual co-headquarters in St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. We're actually founded in Kansas City. We're not quite as old as MU, but we've been around for a while. That says 105 years? We're actually next year we'll be 150 years old. The average company in the United States is probably less than 25 years old. So for us to be around 150 years old, that says that we've learned a little bit. Our major pre-tax profits, our profitability really comes from eight major markets, and then we've developed commercial expertise and developed other offices in some other geographic locations, faster growing markets like Nashville and Dallas. We believe that the primary reason we exist as a bank is to help our customers, commercial and retail customers, access the payment system. We love to make loans, it's a lot of fun to make loans, we like helping people grow, but the main reason we exist is to help people access the payment system. The markets, and I'll talk a little bit about what I do, but in addition to being head of a commercial bank for a company, I've really been responsible for focusing our efforts growing into Colorado, into Denver and Oklahoma, down to Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and in the last couple years have been really aggressive in terms of growing our offices in Dallas to take advantage of those growth markets. Super community bank, as we refer to ourselves as a super community bank. I'm not going to read all that to you, but what it means is our goal is to have all the products and services of a major money center bank or even an international bank, all the products and services that a company would need or that an individual would need to conduct their banking and to access the payment system, but we want to deliver it locally. Examples of that are one of our best customers is MU, right? Little Commerce Bank in the Midwest, huge organization. You think they might have to bank with a bank in New York or Chicago or whatever. We do a lot of business with MU because we are a super community bank. We have the products and services that may be housed in an area in Kansas City or St. Louis, but we have unbelievably sophisticated and experienced bankers here that deliver the services to the college that are actually competing with people coming out of New York, Chicago, but we deliver it locally. This is some of our results in terms of one of the reasons why we achieve superior results. The CBI, that's us, that's Commerce Bank, the blue bar is the largest 100 banks, and this just shows charge-off results. That really is just going back to September 2012 compared to our industry. If you go back to 2008, 2009, 2010 when the banking industry and economy was really in the dumps, the differences in those bars are far greater. So a lot of banking is managing risk, right? And this just shows that when compared to the industry, we do a very good job of managing risk and not losing our depositors' money, because at the end of the day every loan we make, it's not our money, it's our depositors' money. This shows what I was talking about earlier in terms of where we make our money. Our peer banks make 67% of their income from net interest income, which is loans and deposits. We make 59% because over there, that light blue and those other colors, that's the payment system, and it's a huge differentiator for us. So when the economy hits rough times and when loan quality is low, loan demand is low, or loan quality is poor, we have all these other sources of income that really help differentiate us from our competitors. And then this just shows going back to 2004 our performance in terms of ROA and ROE compared to our peer banks. The gray bars and the blue bars are large banks, so that's banks with over $50 billion in assets. We're about $30 billion in assets right now, and you can see what I was talking about in 2008, 2009, how we compared. We were still really quite profitable, and you saw the large banks, many of them didn't make money. A lot of the money they did make in 2010 and 2011 was actually regaining on some of the charge-offs that they had. Most of those banks actually had to have the government help bail them out with TARP money. There are a few that didn't, but you can see actually in 2011 and 2012, when the industry was still somewhat depressed, those were record earning years for our company, highest earnings we'd ever had in the history of our company. 2011, 2012, which has really served our shareholders and those of us that worked there very, very well. And then at the end of the day, the true test in terms of how we're doing is we are a publicly traded bank. We have one family, the Kemper family, that owns a fairly significant percentage of our stock, but way, way, way less than half of it. But you can see our shareholders, both inside shareholders and outside, how they compared to the KBW Bank Index and NASDAQ banks in general. Our shareholders have fared very, very, very well. So that's Commerce Bank. Again, I'm a commercial banker. I still have some retail overall responsibility, but as a commercial banker, our primary responsibility is to provide products and services and credit to businesses of all sizes, small businesses up to the very largest companies in the United States, Fortune 500 companies. We do a lot of business with companies on the East Coast, West Coast, and we're doing it right out of here, out of the Midwest, out of Kansas City and St. Louis, primarily because of this payment system that I was talking about, where we help people speed up the collection of their money and help them pay their vendors. We do that both domestically and internationally. And so my passion is working on products and services, and I work on incentive plans that we use to pay our commercial bankers, marketing that we use to market within the different markets to service commercial businesses. A lot of times I'll meet somebody I don't know and they'll say, 'What branch do you work at?' because everybody thinks a bank is really a series of retail branches, and that's not what I do. Our bank does both, but that's really not what our training program is about or what I'm here to talk about. So I am actually, and here's the unlikely success story. So if you look at the top five people in our company as a public company, some of you probably did that, you'll see that there's one graduated from Harvard, one from Yale, one from Stanford, one from SLU, and one from Graceland College. So, and no, that isn't where Elvis went. But so I grew up in a small town in southern Iowa with about 2,500 people. Grew up with a family where neither one of my parents went to college, either one really cared if I went to college or not. They raised me and my brothers and sisters to earn, that there was no free lunch. So early on, from the time I was like eight years old, they never gave me money, never ever ever gave me money. Had to buy my first bicycle, to buy my first basketball, had to do everything. But they would always help facilitate us earning money, right? So early on when I was eight years old, my father plowed up a big part of my yard and I got to plant 50 tomato plants. I'd go sell tomatoes to the local grocer, local stores, fruit stands, stuff like that, and created over the course of several years several businesses. Anyway, got ready to go to college and didn't really know what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in business, and I didn't get a lot of direction from my family, but I was always asking people I'd see, successful people. I always had these jobs, I'd stop and ask them, 'Tell me what you do, how you do it, how you did it.' And that's when I started to learn about this thing called banking and attended this seminar where the banker started talking about this learning curve, right? The learning curve and relating the learning curve to profitability and making money. So that's when I decided I'd start looking for a banking job. I went to this small college, Graceland College. I found a guy there, one of my professors, who taught an investment class. He actually introduced me to a banker in Kansas City that had a small bank that sounded like it was doing very well, it's growing. Anyway, he sent a note down to them, which I later saw the note, and introduced me to the bank. So I went down. My first job right out of college was as a repo guy in the inner city of Kansas City. I see some old friends here, they didn't know that about me. But so my first job was actually primarily going out and cleaning up collateral from contractors, repo-ing backhoes and dump trucks and stuff like that, all in the inner city of Kansas City. Showed up the first day I worked from college and there's a lady sitting on the step, and this is sort of sad, eating cat food, right? And I realized this is not Iowa anymore. But I didn't know any better, I thought okay, I could do this. I grew up in a small town, I could do just about anything. And so that's how I started my career, was cleaning up bad loans. And then eventually started doing some small business lending and started making some SBA loans. And someone said, 'Hey, you know, you need to get out of here because things aren't going really well at this bank.' And he introduced me to Commerce Bank, and I learned about this thing called a training program. So I got out of that bank and I went to the Commerce Bank training program and realized that there was this whole other level of sophistication in banks other than collecting bad loans. I got in the training program, walked in the first day, almost still fresh right off the farm in my 110 polyester suit, right? And walking into this big line of guys in there, and I recognize all the names on the desks because all these names I recognize last names of people that I've seen in the Kansas City Business Journal, families that own businesses in Kansas City, right? I also noticed, wow, their suits are a lot nicer than mine too. And anyway, I just thought this is a different world. But quickly, as soon as they figured out the difference between me and some of those folks, and literally where I went to school, I sort of got in with an introduction from a friend that introduced me to the management there. They had a problem. They had a bank out in Grandview, Missouri that had a bank robbery, had a shootout in the parking lot. Nobody wanted to go out there and work, right? And so they took me out of the training program early and they said, 'Well, you're from Iowa, you'll do anything.' So they sent me out to be the assistant branch manager of this bank that the guy before me, his name was Doug, he actually crawled to the door and locked the door after the robbers got outside, robbers started to come back in, and there was a shootout in the parking lot. But I quickly thought, you know, I don't want to be here. I remember crying when they told me I was going. I literally cried. I don't want to do this. I want to be a commercial banker. I want to be in the city. This is out in the suburbs. I want to be in the city. I want to be making big loans. So I realized though, the quickest way out of here is to do a good job, and to create ways to make this branch go like I've never known before. So I just found out this thing called residential construction loans, and I started making residential construction loans. Before you knew it, like the next eight months in a row, this branch was the fastest growing branch in our city at the time. We probably had 35 branches, because I was trying to get myself the heck out of this town, out of this community. And it wasn't long after that, about 12 months later, I got a call and they said, 'Hey, you know, our bank can't have banks on the Kansas side of the state line, the state line cuts Missouri and Kansas City apart, but we want to go into Kansas and develop business customers. We'd like you to come and be at that location at 89th and State Line and start developing business in Kansas.' And I said, 'Well, I really like it here. We're doing well.' And they said, 'No, no, we want you to go do this, right?' So went and did that. After a couple of months of doing that, probably like nine months, we started generating a lot of business in Kansas even though we didn't have banks there. A couple months after that process, then our chairman came to meet me and said, 'Hey, we've had some people leave downtown, which is where I originally wanted to be, but we want you to come downtown and be in the agribusiness department. You're from Iowa, you ought to know what corn and soybeans are.' And I said, 'Well, no, you know, I really like what I'm doing here at 89th and State Line. I have some success.' I didn't tell him this, but my house is about five minutes away. I could go home and have lunch with my wife once in a while. Life was good. But he said, 'No, we're going to come downtown.' So anyway, brought me downtown to the agribusiness department, and I started dealing with the grain traders and grain companies. Our bank had a lot of history of that, not with farmers but with commercial ag businesses. And I quickly realized it was pretty sleepy, right? Everybody was having a good time. There were three people there. We had about $35 million in loans and had had for a long time. But I got impatient with that. So we need to be doing more. So I started doing more outbound calling. Pretty soon we started with me and a lot of other people help me start growing that. And then after a couple years of doing that, sort of got restless and said, 'Geez, I'm calling these grain companies in Iowa too, and around the region. Can we also start calling on corporate customers, corporate prospects, because our bank didn't have any customers in some of the states then, in northwest Arkansas or Iowa?' They said, 'Sure, sure, sure, go ahead, do that. You can't hurt anything.' So with a lot of help from some other folks that I worked with, we started developing business with commercial customers in Iowa and northwest Arkansas and started generating a spring of growth there. Before long, then our chairman tapped on my door one day and said, 'We want you to take on more. We want you to take on this regional banking role and do more than just ag.' So I started doing the regional calling. We developed a real systematic calling program and really a systematic sales process, really value-added approach, that before long, a few years after that, with the help of some very good people, we actually had more commercial loans in this regional group than we had in Kansas City, and we've been in Kansas City for at that time 120 years. And again, it wasn't all about me, it was about the group of people I was working with. They said, 'Hey, we'd like you to come and manage commercial banking now for all Kansas City, and we want you to employ some of these systematic calling processes in Kansas City.' So we did that and started working with the metro group. Actually, the person that I was reporting to at the time, they said he's going to start reporting to you. That actually happened twice in my career because things were changing in banking and some of the people had been there for a while weren't really changing with it. But as I started adding again more of a proactive sales approach, that created more opportunities. And then before long, a few years after that, we had a lot of success there again because of the team we had more than anything. I was asked to become head of the commercial line of business for our company and start trying to do some of these things, and really not tell everybody what to do but influence some of the other markets to try to take the systematic calling approach into the company. And we've since done that to the point where we're not just having a systematic calling approach in the markets we have, but now we're opening up offices in Nashville and again in Dallas and these other states, Colorado, Oklahoma, to really take our super community bank strategy into those markets. And so that's sort of where how I ended up where I am. And when I think about that, I have, I keep this list I've been doing for 20 years of career enhancers. I have four things: career enhancers, career derailers, what good leaders do, and then just overall good leadership traits. And I'm just going to talk about career enhancers right now. And the first one is the willingness to take on a tough job. So again, coming from Graceland College, small town Iowa, I didn't have an MU MBA or an MU degree with me. I had to be willing to take on tough jobs. And looking back, had I not taken that job of being a repo guy and working out bad loans, I never would have ended up with the opportunity I have now. I had to agree that I was going to sort of step down maybe below where I thought I should start, but I was going to work my way out quickly to try to do better. It also happened when I went to Grandview, right? I didn't really want to do that. Like heck, I cried because I was going to have to go to Grandview. But I thought, okay, I'm going to make the best out of this. I could have quit. I could have gone down the street. I could have done something else. But I said no, we're going to work, I'm going to work my way out of it. And so I took on the tough job, and what I did in doing that is all of a sudden our chairman, who didn't know who I was, once he saw this little branch out there was making money that hadn't made money before. In fact, nobody wanted to go to work there. All of a sudden it was one of the top performing branches. It really increased my visibility. And all of a sudden our chairman, there was a Mr. Kemper, he said, 'I want to keep an eye on this guy.' Right? So took on a tough job, got more visibility, early exposure. Get early exposure and visibility. I think that's important. I talked, I had lunch today with some graduate students that met with a smaller group here earlier today, and we've talked a lot about different size companies and where to go and different markets where you should go look for a job. And I'll just give you my perspective. So having early exposure, early visibility. Had I gone to work for a large national international bank and maybe been at a branch that was five, six, seven, ten layers below where the decisions were made, I wouldn't have had that visibility. My resume wouldn't start out if anybody's looking at my bio ten layers up and said, 'Well, gosh, who should we promote to run this next office?' My bio from Graceland College, Rockhurst, would not have made me stand out. The only way I could stand out was get a chance where I got an organization where I was close enough to the center of power where decisions were made that they were going to see what I was doing. So that was very important to me. And then the other thing that was very important in terms of early exposure and visibility, I figured this out early on, is the best people to promote me within our company were our customers. And so the more I could do a good job for our customers and the more they talked about me to the people in senior management of our company, the more they saw me passionate about taking care of them and helping them, they became my biggest cheerleaders. And the next thing you know, our chairman's pulling me inside and saying, 'Well, so-and-so just says you're doing a great job or this or that or the other.' And that's because I was focused on taking care of them. Depth and function, product knowledge and industry experience builds credibility and confidence. So I didn't really want to go back down to the ag department because I was having fun at State Line. I was going home from lunch and seeing my wife more often and having some success. But going back and taking that ag job allowed me to focus on an industry. A lot of people don't like to do that. I don't like to focus too much, but I focused on an industry that all of a sudden within a year I was like the expert in the bank. Maybe two years I was the expert in the bank in this industry. And it's not because I grew up in Iowa, I didn't know that much about the industry, but I read like a sponge. I just started reading like crazy about that industry. And whenever I was calling companies in that industry, I was just asking all the questions I could. And again, before long, not only I built up this other credibility because of early exposure, but I was an expert on a subject which made me more valuable, maybe worth more financially, made me a little bit more indispensable because I was seen as that expert. And I think there's a lot of opportunities to do that in whatever industry you're in. But sometimes there's a hesitancy when you're first starting out to want to specialize because you want to be really general. But the other thing it did for me is it built my self-confidence because I was a subject matter expert earlier than if I'd been a generalist for a long period of time. Breadth of experience: grow it, fix it, start it up, operating through cycles. Don't be afraid to take some risk. And that's sort of where the regional expansion came. Someone was asking me earlier, 'How did you get permission to do that?' Well, I didn't totally ask permission to do that. I figured out the script in my job description. I had a little bit of leeway here where I could start calling up into Iowa a little bit, around northwest Arkansas, and start bringing in some names that our bank wasn't familiar with. And so by not being afraid to fail, by really asking for a little bit of forgiveness more than asking for permission, because it was sort of hard to change and turn a culture that's 120 years old, 150 years old, to go do that was not really the most accepted thing to do. But by doing it, by taking a little risk and maybe making a few mistakes, again it increased my visibility and my value to the company. Failure works through perceived failures and then rebound from failure. That's all part of taking risk. I've had a lot of huge failures, but certainly had my share of, for a bank that didn't have a lot of credit problems, working through some issues, maybe making some loans that didn't always go as I had hoped, and maybe even taken some large charge-offs. But the thing was, it's like a good receiver in the NFL, all right? I thought, okay, what could I do different? How could I change my past pattern? What could I have done different? But then you forget, you drop that ball and you go on. And so I didn't get too down on myself. A global view: learn about different cultures. Again, I don't care if it's a bank or if it's a hospital system or whatever you're doing. I became a student of our industry, and I found out whenever we're talking about what's going on, if we had problems, if we had issues, if we had things we're trying to do, I would quickly be the one that said, 'Well, you know, I've been studying this bank, that bank, or this bank, and here's their business model, here's how they do it.' And there aren't a lot of original ideas in most industries, but I wasn't afraid to copy good ideas and bring those back to our bank. And pretty soon our chairman's introduced me to people who said, 'He does a good job of keeping his nose on the competitor's tent.' And you do that whether you're just competing with banks here in Columbia or whether you're competing with companies all over the country. Keep being a student of the industry, be a sponge, bring good ideas to the table. So part of this entrepreneurial spirit I guess I was raised with as a kid because out of necessity, because if I wanted to have anything nice I had to go figure out a way to earn the money, was developing this entrepreneurial spirit and bringing good ideas to the table. And I was fortunate enough that I picked an organization that rewarded that and liked having new ideas. And I think that one of the good things right now about the economy, just about any industry that you guys are going to be looking at, is the rate of change in just about any industry in the country is greater than any time in history. And a lot of the things that allow companies to survive and deal with that change is bringing new ideas. And that's what I would do. I would always be bringing in new ideas, different ways that we could generate more income, different ways that we could leverage our core competencies to generate additional income. A couple other personal things, and I know you guys are thankfully, 'Yeah, this sounds good, but so what?' I always had a personal board of directors. And everybody in here should have a personal board of directors. There are always two or three people that I had, and they weren't people that worked in our company. You find your mentors. Every opportunity I've had in my career, there's always been someone there that helped me find the right direction. You have to make decisions, you go this way or go this way, but I always had this personal board. I still have a personal board of two or three people that I go to and I bounce ideas off of them, and I talk to them about political issues whatever within our company, or just to get their feedback. And everybody needs that personal board. And usually those people for me have also helped me find opportunities even within my own profession that I wouldn't have known about had they not also been looking out for me. And then managing your brand. I've been talking to my own son who's a senior in college at another school, and we've been talking a lot about managing the brand. And I think that starts early on. You guys probably get tired of this sermon, but I opened up my son's Facebook page the other day and there he was holding a beer at a party. It's called bad brand management. Bad, bad, bad brand management. And it starts right now while you're in school. And then it really starts as soon as you walk in the door of your first job. You sort of get a push restart right when you start your first job. You can create your own brand. And I would tell you the brand I had when I was a senior in college at Graceland was a lot different than the brand that I walked into and started projecting my first day on the job. But guys, be looking at how you manage that brand, how you're perceived. And always having enough empathy and reading people, having some perception of how you're received. I'm sure I didn't always get that right. There's some people in here that I've worked with, they can probably tell me where I was off on my brand. But you can't underestimate the importance of managing that brand. Now, why banking? Why banking for me then? Why banking now? The learning curve thing, that is so important. So one of my best friends, the guy that for two or three years after I got out of college, whenever we'd go on a Friday or Saturday night, he was always buying my beers because he was earning three or four times more than I was. I took that first job, got a lot of money? I took a job my first year out of college, now I'm sounding like a dinosaur, I was making a thousand dollars a month gross, right? I had to get an apartment close to my house because I couldn't afford to drive very far. But I kept thinking about that learning curve. And that's probably the best advice that I could ever give anybody. When you're coming right out of school, when you're looking at first opportunity, think about okay, what's the value now and what am I going to learn that's going to make me more valuable over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years? Am I going to get bored in five years? And you may get bored even if you go into an organization with a very steep learning curve. And I've always found myself guilty of that. I need to change a little bit every five to seven years. But focus on the learning curve. The thing that I've enjoyed the most and it keeps me passionate about banking is exposure to different industries, exposure to different business models, and not always dealing with the same thing every day. If I were going into healthcare, there's a guy here today I'm actually trying to recruit, he's focused on healthcare. But anyway, I'm just kidding, that's just a joke. But so I was telling the guys a little bit ago, different business models. We're dealing with a company, one of our customers, this guy created this industry. He sells more baseball bats than anybody else in the United States, right? How did he do it? You guys would all probably get this better than I did. He did it with search engine optimization, merchandising, marketing, and being a really, really good leader and a coach of people. One of the business models of the family we were talking about earlier, a husband and wife that I worked with started, he worked for the USDA, she was a teacher. Probably between them they never made more than $30,000 a year. They noticed their dog had bad breath, so they started messing around in their kitchen, right? Creating these concoctions to try to sweeten up their dog's breath, and realized that the issue was the plaque. So they made this thing really, really sticky so when the dog chewed on it, it pulled the plaque off their teeth, refreshing their breath. They also put some stuff in there. And that became a company called Greenies. They ended up selling it to Mars for a lot of money, like nine figures, a lot of money. We were driving over here today and Brad, my associate, was talking about companies. There's a Love's Travel Stop billboard there. I've worked with Bill Love. I've worked with his family. I've heard about his business model. I've heard his strategy of working down Interstate 35 and really taking advantage of the NAFTA corridor. And so working with all these different businesses is very exhilarating. And it's also part of the learning curve. And then the other thing I think that was important to me and why banking for me, and I think it still holds true today, is I like the idea of being sort of a respected advisor, right? I like the idea of being looked up to. Maybe growing up in a small town too, I always remember the three biggest houses in town were the attorney, the doctor, and for whatever reason the pharmacist. And they were all really looked up to. Oh, the banker, I forgot about the banker. He was really looked up to. But we didn't bank with a local banker because my dad didn't want anybody to tell me how much money he had, so we drove 25 miles to a different bank. But there's a lesson there too. But I like that idea of being respected. And even now, I get calls from people that are, believe it or not, 15 years older than me, that have created major companies that are well known nationally, and they call and they want to talk to me for advice, believe it or not. And I like that. I like being a part of that. But why now? Why is banking a good place to be now? There's this big talent gap in banking, in fact in other industries too. The baby boomers are working their way through the system, right? And even within our own company, about 60% of our senior management team is going to retire in the next five to ten years. A big chunk is going to retire in the next three years. And there's going to be a lot of turnover. And you can say the same thing probably for healthcare or other industries. But you guys that are going to be graduating in the next year or five years, it's a very, very, very good time to be getting out of college if you focus on the right industry, if you focus well. And make sure banking is one. It's always going to be a local industry. You're not going to have some bankers in China banking the local businesses in Columbia or the businesses in St. Louis or Kansas City. It's always going to be regional or local depending on the size of the company, maybe national if the companies are big enough. So it's a good place to be for that reason. And then the other thing is that there's this void in banking right now because of consolidation. A lot of banks consolidating their credit decisioning, they've eliminated their training programs over the last 15 years. So a lot of the nation's biggest banks, a lot of the regional banks, don't have training programs anymore. And it's a very, very specialized thing that we do, learning how to assess risk and the critical thinking skills that you learn. And because of that, I go to some national conferences. I sit with, I was just at one with 30 of the top 40 banks in the United States. You go around the room and these are the heads of all these banks. They're all saying the same thing: we wish we hadn't eliminated our training programs, but we thought we were cutting expenses over the last 20 years. So there's a void there because of the lack of people trained. And then I guess the other thing in terms of why banking, why now, and especially for a bank like ours, is this whole thing again about not being able to outsource overseas banking. Regional banks in particular, there's a young man in here who's actually an analyst working part-time for a shelter, and he got this. Regional banks are really, really in favor because of people realizing that the national banks maybe have gotten a little bit too big and can't stay as close to the customer. So with the growth in regional banks, banks like ours that are growing regionally, you're still able to stay close to the center of power, the center of decision-making, and grow as those banks grow regionally. There's going to be a lot more pressure if you're already a big, great big bank. It's going to be much more difficult to grow those organizations. So anyway, that's my story. That's why I think banking is a good place to be. The other thing I would say is because of that talent void and because of the pressure for banks to generate earnings, they pay a lot better than they did when I started. And I see some of my associates up here, banks pay a lot better now. About 80% of the employees in our bank are incented in some way, right? So it's not just sit behind the desk. Even our tellers are incented to add value to the relationships, to find ways to help our customers. So financially, it's a much, much better place to be too. So Dean, with that, that's my story, or maybe more of it than you care to hear. I'd be happy to answer any questions or stay and talk to anybody about their careers or our bank. Okay, thank you.

Very good question. So we again use a training program. Our trainees start out in our credit department, and this credit department is receiving financial statements from thousands of companies around the country every day, right? And our analysts first start out by learning to look at trends within those financial statements. It's not all about financials, but on the balance sheet and income statement, they look for trends and what's going on. And then they learn about those trends. Well, you've got to ask questions to understand what's happening with those trends. They then work with our very experienced commercial bankers, and they'll go out on calls. An analyst in our bank might go out on calls on companies in six different industries in a week, right? And they're learning how to ask those critical open-ended questions. They may spend six months or a year hearing other people ask them. But the really, really, really good ones learn to take initiative. When they're on those calls, if they have a question, they go ahead and ask it too. And the banker's going, 'Wow, this person's got something going on here. We have another opening, we ought to be recruiting them.' But you learn by working with more experienced people and a process that really funnels a lot of that information through our training department. Does that answer your question?

Very, very good question. So a lot of common sense, right? Well-rounded academically and in terms of other activities. Someone who's really curious about how someone makes or loses money. If you're really, really, really curious, you don't have to have had the top score in accounting or finance or econ. If you're just a curious person, and then if you have good people skills, if you enjoy working with people and you show a curiosity in their business, and so it's really empathy. Do you have a lot of empathy? And if you genuinely are interested in what makes their business work or what makes their business not work, and you capture that information and you learn from it, one, the customers or the prospects are going to like you, and two, it's going to sell well, it's going to communicate well within the organization, and you have a very, very bright future.

Very good question. And over the course of the last several weeks, I've met with small groups of our people, 30 people at a time from different parts of our company, sort of talking about some things that have crept into our culture that we want to take out of the culture, that need to sort of reshape our culture just a little bit, with some very common themes of 'be here now,' not bringing the cell phones and iPads to our meetings. And there are a lot of other things I could go into. But anyway, I'll tell you, I talked to them about this very same thing. Our biggest asset goes home every night. It's not our buildings, it's not our collateral. It's our people. The people make all the difference in the world. It's the people that help develop the relationships that help bring customers to us. We have very, very, very bright, talented technical people that make sure that we have as good or better products and services as the largest banks in the country. It's the people. And this idea that because you're bigger you have smarter, better people, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way at all. We make sure that we find people that really enjoy working in sort of a team, almost family environment, and that are very, very intelligent and that like to bring new ideas and work together to help better the organization. And that's the key. We also have had the benefit of continuity in leadership in our company because of this one family that I mentioned, the Kemper family, that's really provided us good, sound guidance for many, many, many years. So we don't chase fads. We don't go out and just try to chase the quickest fad. 'Gosh, everybody's going to Florida, and that's where the fish are, so we ought to be making a lot of loans in Florida.' We don't do that. We sort of stick to what we know. And even our growth now regionally, it's very deliberate, it's very calculated, it's very measured, and we're growing incrementally. And we don't just go out and feel like we have to do things in big lumps and take huge risks that we maybe don't understand.

Inequality in what way again? Income inequality. So some of that is there are different regulations that encourage banks to make sure that they are making money available and treating people fairly within the markets. We think one of the biggest things that we do as a bank, and that we did through the economic cycles, is that we help educate our customers on if they can or can't afford something, right? And now there are a lot of new regulations coming out to make sure that bankers don't lend people more money than they should borrow. So our bankers, and we still have bankers in our branches, spend a lot of time helping educate our customers on how much they can afford and helping them budget. We have a lot of small business bankers. We have a whole group that helps people work with business plans and helps them finance their small businesses to help them be successful, to help them create jobs for other people. So we feel like that's one of the best ways that we can deal with income inequality: help people understand what they can and can't afford, but also help people create jobs. That's one of the things I'm most proud of, actually. When I deal with our customers, I love driving around town with my kids and pointing to a building and saying, 'See that building going up? We financed that.' We not just the building, but often we finance the company. We provide them operating capital. We're helping create jobs. So that's what we think is our best way that we can help tackle that issue.

Yeah, so for me personally, I got some of the buy-in by earning some credibility by cleaning up some messes early on and helping clean up some problems and taking on some roles that I didn't necessarily volunteer for but I didn't run from either. So I earned credibility by doing that and doing a good job with things that had been given to me. Then when I started stretching, I wanted to do a few other things outside the box. There weren't a lot of expectations from my superiors about the value of that, but by building up that goodwill and that credibility, you know, 'Okay, let's go ahead and let him play with this because he can't do much harm,' right? And so by always building that credibility, by being careful about my brand, hopefully then I was given a little bit freer reign. And certainly I think that's been the case. Six years ago when I was really pushing us to do some acquisitions in other regions, our chairman was quick to buy in. And I think he saw that I was very careful with the shareholders' money and said, 'Okay, well, let's try it. Baby steps, incremental steps.' So go ahead and do that. And I built up that credibility so he knew that I wasn't going to be putting too much at risk too soon.

Yeah, so our turnover for commercial bankers varies by market. In the markets I'm most familiar with, our turnover is less than about 10%. And we do it a number of ways. There are more formal ways and different things that we're doing. We do a lot of employee surveys now. We measure employee engagement. We ask our employees to tell us how they're feeling about the bank, if they feel empowered, would they recommend that a friend go to work for us? We want to get their opinions, but then you've got to really listen to that too and try to act on it. We're doing a lot more, we're doing a much better job than we did even five years ago. We're doing a lot of formal succession management planning. So literally for every management position within the company, we'll have a management succession plan three to five deep. And that helps us plan for loss of people for retirement or other reasons, but also those people that are in that management succession plan, it shows that they have a career path with us, right? And it shows that we are thinking about them and willing to invest in them, not just in a job but investing in their careers. With the trainees, the people that just join us, which is something that I'm again very, very, very interested in because had I not, if the bank hadn't done a training program for me, I don't know, I might be working in a feedlot in Iowa or something. But nothing wrong with Iowa, I love Iowa. But I personally get involved. I have breakfast every few months with our trainees, spend time with them. We have opportunities to go learn, to go on different calls, to do things. I grab them and say, 'Come on, let's go do this.' We get them involved in special projects. We have a leadership development program. We have two different types of leadership development programs for the people that really earn some credibility early on and show that they're really focused on career growth. We have very formal development programs that we put them into even after they get out of the training program, and they're usually available to be nominated for those programs as much as maybe 24 months after the training program, two years, three years after the training program. All the trainees have a mentor. They have a mentor, and it's usually someone that's maybe five years ahead of them that was in the training program five years before them that sort of made their way through and now they're doing something more directly involved with customers. So each trainee has a mentor to work with them like that. And I could go on. There are a number of different things that we do to try to keep investing, right? Because we all want to know somebody cares about us. And we don't just shove them over and say, 'Go over here and govern spread financial statements.' We just keep investing and keep showing them opportunities for growth.