Learning to Live with (or Without) Your Banker

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6. Does Your Banker Know You?
This is not a facetious question. In 15 years with her former bank, Protocall's Janis LeBude never knew who her branch manager was. "They just sent out a different loan officer each time the credit line needed renewing," she recalls. Jean Manary, president of State Credit Inc., an accounts-receivable-management company in Painesville, Ohio, wishes she could have "just one person assigned to deal with me for all of my services." The branch manager she knew left her bank, and her loan officer was recently transferred 30 miles away; now she doesn't know whom to contact. Her latest strategy is to call up a receptionist she's befriended at the bank and ask her to direct her to the appropriate person, depending on the nature of her call. "I can get what I want -- loans, lines of credit, leases," says Manary. "It's just a hassle!"

How close you want to be with your banker is, of course, a matter of personal preference. But most entrepreneurs agree that a solid relationship of some kind is essential. The number one reason cited by TEC survey respondents who had switched banks in the past five years -- ahead of "didn't understand my business" and "refused to expand line of credit" -- was "changed key officers too frequently." Among the switchers: Donald Boyken, of Boyken & Associates, who was assigned three different loan officers in eight months; and Robert Linford, president of the Linford Co., a construction company in Oakland, Calif., who had six loan officers in five years.

Company owners who do have a relationship with their banker still have very different ideas of what makes for a healthy one. Business-insurance broker Fred Armstrong likes the fact that he knows his banker well and doesn't have to see him on a regular basis: "We just make excuses to meet from time to time." On the other hand, Victorian Papers' Randy Rolston is glad to have a personal as well as a professional relationship with his banker: they meet for lunches, social dinners, and business occasions. Cindy Koehler, executive vice-president and general manager of Applied Computer Technology, can't see her banker unless she gets on an airplane. When her fast-growing $13-million computer-networking business, a three-time Inc. 500 company, outgrew its local bank in Fort Collins, Colo., Koehler found the best bank to serve her was in Minnesota (a branch of an Ohio-based bank, actually). "The East Coast time delay is the only glitch we've encountered," she says.

A number of company owners have had success with banks by seeking out kindred spirits -- fellow entrepreneurs, in other words. Entrepreneurial bankers? That may sound like an oxymoron, but they do exist. David Mason, a regional Entrepreneur of the Year winner in St. Louis, has been with the same bank since his six-year-old architecture and engineering business, David Mason & Associates, was a start-up. He credits the bank's openness to entrepreneurs to its own entrepreneurial origins: the bank was started 30 years ago by a visionary member of the community and has involved local businesspeople on its board and in executive positions ever since. "The medium-size entrepreneur is the target of this bank," says Mason. "It knows its market well."

There seems to be no consensus among small-company owners about whether it's best to bank with a small or a big bank. Some like the personal attention of a small community bank; others prefer the sophisticated cash-management or on-line services of a large regional or national bank. David Daly confirmed that recently in a straw poll of fellow TEC members in the Seattle area. Among those who had switched banks recently, half had switched from a local small bank to a large one, and half from a big bank to a small one -- and both camps swore it was the best thing that ever happened to them. "Just goes to show you it's not the banks; it's the people," says Daly. "Banks are beginning to learn that, but I don't think they've internalized it yet."

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