Your Plan Won’t Save You in a Merger—But This Will
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
What if you’re going about loan growth in all the wrong ways?
Now, you’re probably not doing it all wrong. But there might be some ways that you could be doing it a whole lot better. That’s because all loan growth is not the same. The quality of the deals that you’re bringing in and the desirability of those deals—because of their creditworthiness and their willingness to pay premium pricing—matters a lot. And yes, strategically speaking, most banks are not addressing that correctly.
They think that if they walk into your office and say, “Hey, Boss, we can do this deal as long as we match the rate. And by the way, the quality isn’t that good, so we’re taking some risks here,” that it’s the same as bringing in a high-quality credit, at premium pricing, with all of their business. There’s a big difference between doing it the one way and doing it the other. Sadly, for many people—and it’s not their fault—they’re still doing it the old way. It’s the way that I did it back when I started as a lender because I watched to see what all the guys did just like they do now. If they had a briefcase, I took my briefcase out, too. When they got in their car and called on people, I did the same thing.
That’s what I thought being a commercial and agricultural lender was until I learned that there was a much better way to do this. It’s to identify your next best customers—strategically—by figuring out the psychographics and firmographics and then making sure that you build a system where you close 90% of the time, even though they love their current bank, and even though they’re going to pay you more.
Well, in fact, I have been in banking, and I did run a bank. And I do work with some of the very highest performing banks in America. And many of them had been in the bottom quartile before we started working together. So I believe, very adamantly, that you can command premium pricing when you have the right loan growth strategies in place. And I also believe that most banks, and it’s not their fault, just don’t have the right strategies.
I hope you can join me at the BEST BANKS IN AMERICA™ SUPER CONFERENCE. We’re going deep into how to command premium pricing and get better loan growth by changing the strategies you use and how to go about it.
In addition to the day we’ll be spending on loan growth mastery, we’ll also be having all of the Best Banks in AmericaTM share their stories of how they command excellence in every area in their bank. I promise you, this is information you won’t want to miss.
I hope to see you in Naples, Florida, on April 21 and 22.
– Roxanne Emmerich
Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.
Come to the BEST BANKS IN AMERICA™ 7TH ANNUAL SUPER CONFERENCE on
April 21-22, 2022. It’s the ONLY Conference for top-performing banks—and those that aspire to join them! Register now!
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
Most banks pretend that culture can be delegated. Wrong. Elite banks weaponize culture as their profit engine. Here’s the system CEOs can’t ignore.
Roxanne Emmerich exposes the toxic lie behind most strategic plans—and the second-order thinking top banks use to pull away from the pack.
Your boardroom may be your biggest blind spot. Discover how elite banks fix strategy at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp.
Most boards are left out of execution—and it’s destroying performance. Here’s how top 5% banks fix it.
Forget templates. Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top banks burn the rulebook and build execution systems that deliver relentless results.
Hope doesn’t scale. Systems do. Find out how elite banks drive results with engineered behaviors and real-time accountability.
Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top 5% banks grow $100M+ in core deposits and triple cross-sales—without matching rates or chasing gimmicks.
Cross-selling isn’t a script—it’s a system. Discover how top-performing banks engineer daily discipline that triples products per customer and locks in loyalty.
One bank ditched fake smiles and vague reviews—and doubled profits in 12 months. Here’s how they built a culture that actually works.