job description

I am the CEO of a federal credit union. I've been there for 15 years. I came in as executive vice president and was in the position from 1992 to 2000. Then I took over as CEO.

The company was formed in 1941, in the classic way that credit unions are formed. They were formed by small groups of five to ten people who put their deposits together and then lent them out in small loans. For appliances, refrigerators, that sort of thing.

Like other credit unions, my credit union was formed to help its employees have a better life. It was a time just after the Great Depression, when most middle Americans didn't have access to financial services, whether that was a checking account or a small loan. Loan sharks dominated that marketplace, so you would get a loan through them, or you wouldn't get a loan at all. Most people weren't able to own houses.

Eventually, Congress passed a law to create credit unions nationally. Most of the early credit unions were created to serve employees of government agencies, state governments, schools, and large companies.

My days typically entail some strategy, some managing of the people who report directly to me, and a great deal of communication. I spend a lot of time talking to people, both inside and outside the company.

I also spend a great deal of time involved in the community. It’s important for credit unions, as not-for-profits, to reach out to the community.

I spend some time with the directors' board, too. Board relationships are critical to keep things afloat. This morning I had lunch with the chairman of the board.

education & career path

I went to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. I got my bachelor's degree there, and the additional education I have has been through summer institutes at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Berkeley and Cornell. It's been incredibly important to me to be involved in those programs, but I didn't get a graduate degree.

I studied business and accounting information systems. At the time that was a technology background.

I was a full-time student in the late 1970s, and I became a part-time teller during the summer and Christmas breaks at a credit union in Washington D.C., where I grew up. They had an incredible leader who came into the organization, and credit unions were going through an amazing evolutionary process. Until the beginning of the 1980s, credit unions had very limited services. You could only have a certain amount you could pay out on loans; you were very restricted on what products you could offer. I had the opportunity to be there when this new guy came in, and he started expanding the products that credit unions could offer as the regulations started expanding. I had the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time and work on those projects.

The interesting thing about the company I was working for was that it was affiliated with the United Nations, so about 70 percent of the employees were foreign nationals, not Americans, who'd get an extended home leave every two years. They'd end up going away for six weeks at a time. So in those first couple years of working there I actually did almost every job in the credit union because they were gone for six weeks at a time. So I gained this broad base of experience very quickly.

Then I got assigned to a project that opened my eyes to most of the company, and that was a data-processing conversion. I had the opportunity to do that full time and be in school part time. I was put in charge of this conversion. The systems we used were much simpler than systems today, but during that time of changing everything over, testing everything and training everyone I learned a lot about the entire operation.

Later, other projects came up: checking accounts, certificates of deposit, credit cards, mortgages, and other projects. I got to do every one of those over the next 12 or 13 year period. I finished school and went from part-time teller to full-time computer operator to head of backroom operations to vice president of backroom operations. In the process of doing that and working with the technology, I sat as a volunteer on a directors' board for a computer company, and I met the CEO of the company I work for now. I got a job here, and it was just an incredible opportunity for me. The business expanded very quickly. We were about $450 million in assets with four or five branches, and now we're $3 billion in assets with 18 branches.

my day

Sure, let's look at tomorrow. These jobs are full-time commitments, and most days I’m up early, and work late. Tomorrow, I will get up and read a couple of newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and Newsday.

I'll come into work and have a meeting with the vice presidents to go over strategy and organizational updates. Those updates could be about what financial products or services we’re going to market, what rates we're going to set on products, what products we will review. We will review the service strategy initiatives for this week, review our financial numbers for this week, and any other pertinent information. Ten of us meet every Tuesday for two hours, and every week I send out a State of the Credit Union, which updates the employees on weekly matters.

Then I go into a meeting with our outside consultant for marketing, and we'll look at our marketing strategy.

Then I meet with the leader of a coalition on affordable housing to talk about affordable housing on Long Island and spend some time on that. I'm chair of an association of businesses that deals with affordable-housing and next-generation housing projects.

Then I will meet with our public relations firm and our marketing firm for an hour, and we'll talk about what we want to promote for our community image out in the marketplace as we try to build a community brand.

I have a meeting with an outside group tomorrow about foreclosures as the mortgage market becomes a little more dramatic. We did no sub-prime lendings so we're not at that risk, but because we did do home-equity lendings there are some foreclosures. We've had, believe it or not, one foreclosure in the last eight years, and we have three or four that could be foreclosing this time around. So we do have some risk and possibly some loss. We're talking to some outside consultants about how to mitigate some of that.

As a credit union we want to find ways to help people who can pay but who just got bad products. We want to find ways to keep them in their houses.

Tomorrow night I have a meeting for an art-museum board that I sit on, which has a children's program that I support. That's pretty much my day.

salary & lifestyle

I think that the teller position, where I started out, or the platform positions, the loan and member services representative jobs are the places to go. The call center is a great place too. But I think it is then important to have aspirations out of those positions to go to other places. It's not so important where you start as much as who you are and how you put yourself in a position to go to other places. If you're in a growing company like ours, you'll see there are plenty of places to go upward, but you have to find your way there.

When you first come into the organization as a teller or a loan and member services (LMS) rep, you have to find your way through it. There's not a lot of mentoring that goes on at that level. Your manager can help you, training can help you, or human resources can help you a little bit, but you have to find your way to that next position. You have to have drive.

I think starting out as an LMS rep., you can expect to earn in the $30,000 to $40,000 range. The assistant management positions start at $40,000 to $50,000. Management will be $60,000 to $90,000. Assistant VP is $70,000 to a little over $100,000. VP is a little over $100,000 to $150,000. Senior level staff is in the range of $125,000 to $250,000 depending on years and levels of experience.

I'm up early. I usually prepare for my work day around 7 or 7:30 in the morning. I arrive at work around 8 or 8:30, and I work until 6 p.m.. One or two nights a week, I will be out at a community event until 9 or 10. I have an eight-year-old son, so I try to limit those obligations to two nights a week and be home by 6:30 on the other nights. A couple nights a week, I'm going as long as 12 or 13 hours.

There's not a lot of downtime. But I'm one of the lucky guys who does what they love to do. I spend the downtime I have out playing basketball with my son or something. My leisure time is spent with my family, a little bit of church, a little bit of friends and family, a lot of travel. I collect art, so we go West to see art and that sort of thing. It's a wonderful life, but it's on the go.

And the evening activities, although they are a part of work, they are what I love. I'm involved in a lot of very interesting community activities. I also work with county executives and congressional representatives on local political issues. But that's all cool. I grew up in Washington D.C., so I like that.

pros, cons & trends

You get up each day, and you get to do something that really affects people's lives. And you get to do it in a way that is, I hope, professional and service oriented. The team that works here, that really runs this place, are just exceptional to work with. I'm very lucky to work with people who are very dedicated and smart. And it's cool to see them each day. I smile every day on my way to the office, and that's a pretty cool thing. Not everybody gets to do that.

We're in a really stressful financial marketplace right now. It's hypercompetitive on Long Island, and it always has been, but it's particularly so now. We've gone through a few years with very, very small margins because the yield curve has been flat. We've taken in deposits at almost the same rate as we're lending out, which is a tough way to make money. On top of that the mounting mortgage crisis that's going on can be a problem.

Credit unions are actually a lot farther along than their banking brothers in technology. When we came about and became full-service, banks had already been built on large mainframe computers and arcane systems for quite some time. Their check processing was on one system, their savings accounts were on another system and mortgages on another system. Credit unions came into being both as a small entity and at the right time in the technology curve where they could consolidate databases. Within those consolidated databases we have been able to provide more online and real-time transactions. And those things have been a marked advantage to us. We do some 30 million transactions per year. That's a lot of stuff pretty quickly. That includes online inquiries, ATM withdrawals, some very easy, fundamental transactions. But you do a lot of them, and you couldn't do this business without this technology. And credit unions happen to have had a better opportunity to do that than banks.

The fundamental difference is we don't have stockholders. The members own us, and we believe in that. Our members govern us and run the credit union through a volunteer board of directors. But it's more about that belief than it is about the governing structure. Because of that, when you sit in the boardroom or you sit in my conference room and you set these rates, you make a decision that's fundamentally different than a for-profit. The mission of a bank is to make a profit for its stockholders, and the mission of a credit union is to return value to its members.

When you make a decision it comes down to, are you going to maximize the profit for your stockholders or minimize the expense to your members? Will you charge a $30 fee rather than a $25 fee? Will you charge that a day after the loan is due or 10 days after the loan is due? If the member calls and asks, will you refund that fee? Time after time or will you only do it once and say that's a hard and fast rule? Those things are fundamentally different.

advice

There are a number of ways to get involved in a credit union. Coming out of college, you want to look at organizations that have management training programs and that are growing, which gives you the opportunity to move up. In our case there is a fair number of management training and mentoring programs, but you need an organization that grows. If you're at an organization that isn't adding branches, adding departments, adding products, it's very hard to move up because you have to wait for someone to move out. Look for a credit union that invests heavily in learning and is fundamentally successful.

You should study business and finance. You have to understand how you make money in the business. Understanding the balance of taking in deposits, putting them out in loans, understanding the risks in those loans and managing that portfolio is important. And learning how to manage people is more important than anything. Learn how to communicate and how to manage. Those are the things you need to know coming out of school.

It's also about constantly learning. You need to get up each day and read. You need to get up each day and listen to people and make decisions in a fair way. Organizations grow. And if you don't grow, you don't succeed. It's a process of learning, and that growth, that learning, leads to change. You change all the time. A lot of people struggle with that. Most people would like to think you get to a certain place, you graduate from school, you start in a company, you find a good position and stay there, but that's not the way it is. The truth is that you must keep changing and learning, and if you don't, you can't be successful in business.