Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
WHAT DO POMERANIANS have to do with banking?
For David Reiling, CEO of Sunrise Community Banks in St. Paul, those miniature dogs were the key to gaining millions in deposits when he was scrambling for customers in California.
For Upsize readers, the story about the dogs takes the cliché out of the adage: Listen to your customers.
As Reiling tells it, when he was a young bank employee in Los Angeles several years ago he had very few customers. One day one of his customers called and said he needed to make a deposit, and he needed to go to the airport.
“I said, ‘I’ll give you a ride,’ ” Reiling recalls saying. He told the story as the “conversation starter” at Heartland Inc.’s Thought Leader Gathering in February.
It turns out the man was one of many wealthy Taiwanese who traveled back and forth to Hong Kong regularly.
“I got a sense of how much money these wealthy entrepreneurs had, going between Hong Kong and L.A.,” Reiling says, adding they all had the same needs. “They wanted bottled water. They wanted dry cleaning. And they all had little Pomeranian dogs but they hated the vet.” The vet was closed when they got back from their travels, and it was one more chore they didn’t want to do.
Reiling went to the vet’s office, where most of these business owners boarded their dogs. “I said, 'I have a deal for you. Can you deliver a dog?' They said no,” it was too expensive. “What if you doubled the price?” Reiling said. “They said no,” it was too expensive. “I said, what if you tripled the price?” because for these owners price was no object. And the vet said yes, at triple the price they could hire someone to deliver those dogs.
“So I took care of the dog situation and business came faster than I could take it,” Reiling says. “We had millions and millions of dollars coming from the Taiwanese. That business had nothing to do with banking. It was about listening to the customers,” he says.
It’s a lesson every business owner has heard a hundred times, but Reiling’s story shows we’re often listening for the wrong thing: specific needs that our products or services can fill directly, rather than general needs our customers have.
Reiling employed the lesson again when his father called, saying he was buying a bank in St. Paul and wanted his son to come home to run it. “It was called the Meridian, operated by a guy who owned half the Tropicana in Las Vegas,” Reiling says. “They were literally driving trunkloads of cash from their bank to the hotel,” rather than doing what bankers are supposed to do: take deposits and make loans, all in the same community.
“By the time I and my father showed up, the regulators had had it,” Reiling says. “I knew I could do it — coming from L.A., this was a walk in the park.” Renaming the place University Bank, he started getting to know the neighbors in the community where he grew up.
“We started to make loans to small businesses and people, and it started to work,” he says. But the bank needed more deposits. “We discovered there were people who had deposits with us because of what we were doing. They said, ‘You’re making loans in Frogtown, and I like that.’ And the deposits started coming in big time.”
You’ve heard it before: Listen to the customer. Reiling demonstrates how it’s done.
— Beth Ewen
editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
be***@*******ag.com
