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Do a few things very, very well Trevor Burgess took a cue from Chipotle to build a community bank that’s both traditional and entrepreneurial By Bill Streeter, editor & publisher
CEO’s space is like everyone else’s at C1 Bank. Green dog statues, bought as a toy for Trevor Burgess’s young daughter, are now in every location.
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en years of doing IPOs at Morgan Stanley gave Trevor Burgess a desire to run his own business. It also exposed him to a wealth of innovative ideas, which, along with his own, he’s bringing to bear at a Florida bank he now runs. Burgess, now 42, left Wall Street in 2007 and joined with one of his Morgan Stanley clients, Marcelo Lima, a Brazilian entrepreneur and investment banker, to explore entrepreneurial opportunities. In 2009, in partnership with two other investors, they invested $70 million to acquire Community Bank of Manatee, a bank on Florida’s Gulf Coast with assets of $260 million. Since then, Burgess, who became the bank’s chief executive, and Lima, a director, have acquired three more banks. Now called C1 Bank, the St. Petersburgbased institution has grow n to $1.5 billion with 31 branches, most of them on Florida’s west coast, with a handful in the Miami market. It is the sixth fastestgrowing bank in the country, and had first-quarter net income of $3.2 million. The bank went public last August. 14
BANKING EXCHANGE
July 2015
Burgess and his team have fashioned C1 Bank to be the bank for entrepreneurs. One of the companies Burgess helped to take public was Chipotle. A lesson he learned from Steve Ells, founder of the restaurant chain, was to do a few things and do them very, very well. So the bank largely focuses on business loans—large and small (it is a big SBA lender)—and overall has a limited range of products. C1 Bank is a beehive of innovation, with a tech lab and a headquarters office set up like a Wall Street trading floor. Q1. On C1’s website, it emphasizes client relationships. All banks talk about relationships. What sets yours apart? The three reasons that clients choose to bank with us are speed, service, and certainty. Not being a banker before was very liberating. I got to design an entire [loan] operation where the appraisal is the longest step in the process. While big national banks can take three-plus months to close a large commercial loan, we’re trying to do that in three or four weeks. And if we need to say “no,” we do it quickly.
The nex t leg is ser v ice. Too many banks have hired ex-telco sales people to become hawkers of loans. That’s not our shtick. We hire very smart, very capable loan off icers—relationship managers who are able to actually give old-fashioned banking advice to clients. Leg three is probably most important, and that is certainty—doing what we say we’re going to do. We hear from clients all the time: “ABC Bank promised me X, but when I got to closing, it was different.” We’re not going to be as cheap as a big bank. They have a much lower cost of funds. But we can have greater certainty because when we say we can do something, we are able to actually do it. But the proof is in the pudding, right? So last year, we grew new loans by nearly half a billion dollars. A billion-five bank adding $500 million of new loans means a lot people are choosing us. Q2. With that kind of growth—plus expansion in southeast Florida—how do you retain your three attributes? The number one challenge of grow th is maintaining your culture. We are