For more than 25 years, I’ve dealt with bankers that have supported my clients’ growth and successes.
Therefore, I feel highly qualified to know a great banker when I see one. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with many great bankers, and continue to meet dynamic new bankers who will definitely help my clients—and their clients—grow.
You know you’ve got a great banker when your banker:
- Is focused on helping your grow.
- Understands your business and industry so they can offer creative financing solutions to support your growth.
- Wants you to strengthen your balance sheet so they can lend you more money.
- Will disagree with your accountant if the accountant is aggressively minimizing taxes, thus reducing the strength of your balance sheet, and severely hemorrhaging your ability to grow and create more wealth.
- Is asking for reports that your management team should already be using.
- Has access to industry statistics to help you benchmark.
- Will visit you at your place of business
- Focuses on the relationship and provides you with advice.
- Responds to your calls and emails quickly, within one day.
- Doesn’t sell their services based on the lowest rate; that’s the sign of a commodity, not a trusting relationship.
- Has a full suite of services and people that can help you conduct various phases such as growth or transactions such as management buy outs, acquiring other companies, and expanding to other countries.
- Doesn’t try to sell you non-banking services and then offers to finance those services, which you haven’t requested from them in the first place. That’s a conflict of interest.
- Doesn’t change your contact person every six months.
- Has clients who’ve dealt with their bank for 20 or 50 years or more.
- Offers flexible financing during peak periods.
- Understands and is patient when you go through a bumpy patch.
- Alerts you to trends they’re seeing in your business or the industry that you might not see.
- Proactively shares advice and experiences from their other clients, always on a confidential basis, of course.
- Treats you like a valuable client and not a number or an interruption to their day.
- Understands there are many ways to generate success and doesn’t expect you to follow a single process or system.
- Has capacity to grow with you as you grow your business.
- Expresses appreciation for your business.
- Understands that cash isn’t king, it’s the ace!
- Is genuinely excited for your success.
