Have you ever woken up on a Monday morning and said, “Let’s take the hill. Let’s go, kids. Let’s make this happen,” and you’re met with a barrage of excuses and stories? “I can’t because nobody told me. Boss, I got a hangnail. I need to go home early. My life is hard, don’t you understand?”

In a world where victimhood is so highly rated, people believe that instead of getting a result, a good story comes in kinda handy instead.

We have a problem as executives, and this is a common problem. And it’s called: the more we feed the victimhood paradigm, the more we have a difficult time accomplishing the results we need to accomplish for our organization.

But it’s a bigger picture than that. It’s not just that we’re not hitting the metrics because of it; it’s that we’re not saving the souls. Because if we don’t shift humans from being a victim archetype to something where they grow the backbone and they stand tall and they say, “I have no idea how to do it, boss. Give me a half an hour. I’ll have it figured out.” If we don’t show them how to be strong, how to be powerful, then every element of their life looks the same, and they’ll raise little victims who will raise little victims who will raise little victims. This is a ripple effect.

Learning how to be someone who says, “I can see this as impossible, but that’s why you put me on the payroll, boss, so let me add it. I will figure this out,” is something that feeds them. It feeds us. It feeds the organization. But as an executive, you’re going to have to be a different executive to combat that and move through that. And it’s one of the most difficult battles that you’ll have in your career as an executive, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not a battle worth fighting.

Decide every day to let your team know that you’ve got no ears for victimhood, that you are a stand for them being extraordinary, that you expect them to be an extraordinary banker every single day when they walk in that door and feel what it feels like to call home to their spouse and say something like, “Wow, I was great today.” Because nobody calls home and says to their significant other, “Honey, today I performed average.” They don’t do that. They call home when they kick some back in and took some names, and they had a blast doing it.

This is the calling of the executive: to learn how to bring forth from people that that they didn’t know that they had within them to do.

How do you take a part-time teller and make him or her into an extraordinary banker that can go out and command two- and three-million-dollar checking accounts every single week? Don’t tell me it can’t be done. I know a couple. Don’t tell me that you can’t take a young credit analyst and have them become your top lender within two years. Don’t tell me it can’t be done because I can name some.

It takes not only education of the right things, but it also means conquering the spirit and taking people past that little voice in their head that says, “I’m not enough.”

That is the calling of the executive: to take your team through that language to the language of power of, “That’s why you hired me, boss. Let’s go.” This is what it means to be a top-performing executive. This is what it means to be a top five percenter. Learning to be the kind of executive that has no ears for the victimhood, where you’re taking a stand for your people to be extraordinary.

I want to see you at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint Conference, where we’re gonna go through the shift of the mindset and how you, as an executive, stand strong with grace and love in your heart to take people to a level they never dreamed possible for them. I’ll see you there.

The post How Top Bank Executives Break the Victimhood Cycle [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

What if you were sitting on a gold mine of untapped potential for organic growth and increased profits?

What if you could get far more—and more predictable—profit and growth impact from your strategic planning process? After reviewing over 500 strategic plans, I find that most banks lack effective strategies, lack intentional congruence, and essentially have a list of goals but no effective way to achieve them.

If you’re the kind of leader who hires a brilliant facilitator and comes out with a well-written plan that sounds good but never really shakes the ground from under your feet for a transformative profit surge, you’re gonna love this.

Or maybe you are happy with your plan and doing well, but you wonder if you could enjoy even better results. Or perhaps you are the kind of leader who is frustrated that you spend a potload of money on the off-site facilitator, and it never gives you the breakthrough strategies that can power up your trajectory for decades. If any of these sound like you, keep listening. Here are the typical challenges that keep you from an even better year.

Most banks have a strategic planning book with a plethora of goals. The missing components are at least 25 different actual strategies that will bring earthmoving changes that get you paid more for doing business with the most desirable prospects in your market. That’s the point. In looking at hundreds of plans over the years, I can honestly say that I’ve not seen more than five total strategies combined on banks who were happy with their strategic planning process.

Yikes. That’s right. On hundreds of plans, only a total of five strategies. Imagine if they had a plan that actually made a difference.

Also, most plans lack intentional congruence. The BHAG, or the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, is not congruent with the psychographics and firmographics of the top two to three target markets. And the key initiatives are a disjointed list of to-dos. There is no alignment.

Additionally, the plan doesn’t account for an extremely relevant fact. If you are a normal bank, only 13% of your customers are profitable. Let that sink in. The problem is your plan doesn’t have solid and proven strategies to get more profitable customers like the 13%, nor does it get all their business at premium pricing. So even if the plan is executed well, it still puts the franchise value at risk.

Every bank faces these problems.

Thousands of strategic plans are lackluster and ineffective, without exception.

Let’s talk about strategic plans that actually work to bring you the most profitable prospects and convert them into your best customers. That’s the point.

There are four simple steps you need to take to get positive results.

Step one: Unlike so many strategic planning processes, you must start with an understanding of the psychographic and firmographic similarities of your top 100 most profitable customers. Then, to make sure your plan is about profit and not busywork, ensure that you base the entire thing on no more than three integrated psychographic and firmographic intersections of that group.

Step two: Forget everything you learned about strategic planning from school. That old model—mission statement, SWOTs, and goals—is ridiculously antiquated. We live in a world of disruption where non-bank competitors are vultures ready to eat the lunch of banks who still think a yearly strategic planning process is enough to drive growth and profitability. Heaven forbid if you are a bank that’s still doing the “we do the strategic planning process every two years” approach.

Have you ever seen a top 10% performing bank do that? Exactly.

Step three: Move to a one-page strategic planning process. Don’t think because it’s brief that it’s easy or quick.

If you do it right, it will be 10 times harder, but then you’ll work 100 times smarter all year. You’re packing a lot of punch in that one page with an extreme focus on the few things that matter.

Make sure there is intentional congruence so that all the elements of the plan are working together for an immediate profit boost. The buildout from the one page is where the magic happens, but you have to get the one page right first.

Step four: Get everything and everyone in a visible accountability system so that every team member in your organization knows what they need to do every week to align with profit.

To emphasize, here are the four steps again: One, align the plan to the most profitable customers and prospects. Two, forget the old models. Three, create intentional congruence in the one-page plan.

And lastly, four, create visible alignment of every person to profit.

Put a strategic plan into place using those elements, and you can relax and know that your plan will be implemented. You will get people away from being busy to being profit-oriented, which dramatically contributes to your bank’s bottom line, doesn’t it?

The post Your Bank’s Strategic Plan Is Missing the Strategy [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I’m Roxanne Emmerich. I work with elite banks—the 5% who refuse mediocrity—to grow low-cost deposits, explode margin, and build cultures that crush complacency.

Today, we expose a lie so embedded in banking, it passes as truth:
Strategic planning works.

Wrong.

What most banks call “strategic planning” is a bloated to-do list—paper-shuffled theater with zero accountability, zero alignment, and zero impact. It feels productive. It looks impressive. It does nothing.

I asked my grad school professor—face to face—“Have you ever seen traditional strategic planning work?” He paused. Then admitted:
“Nope. Not really.”

Exactly.

That’s why we built a different system. One designed specifically for banks ready to obliterate average.

This system aligns teams. It electrifies culture. And every move maps directly to profit.

The top 5% of banks use it. Religiously.

If you’re done play-acting with plans that gather dust, let’s fix it.
Book a strategy call now—and I’ll walk you through the exact framework high performers use to engineer results on demand.

The post The Strategic Planning Lie That’s Keeping You Average [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Let me start with the harsh truth. Most banks don’t have a strategy. They have a list. They call it a strategic plan, but it’s really a hodgepodge of projects and tasks cobbled together at the end of Q4 in a room full of people nodding and checking phones. If that hits too close to home, don’t worry. You’re not alone. But you are vulnerable.

Here’s what separates the top five percent from the rest. They build operating systems, not checklists. Let me give you an example. One of our clients, a five-hundred-million-dollar community bank, came to us with a sixty-four-item strategic plan.

They were proud of it—until we started asking questions. Which of these actually moves margin? Where are the lead measures? How do these lead measures tie into your key initiatives?

Which are the KPIs most important? How do those tie to your target markets? What is the BHAG, and how is everything tying into the BHAG? There was no connection between the parts.

It was a hodgepodge of a tossed salad on a sheet of paper. And when I asked them questions about how they were gonna make that work—crickets.

What they had was first-order thinking.

“If we do more, we’ll grow more.” That’s not how high performance works. As the book Intelligent Thinking explains, first-order thinkers solve the immediate problem without thinking through the long-term or hidden implications.

Second-order thinkers ask, “What happens next?” and “How does this tie into everything else?” That’s the difference between adding digital signage and engineering a culture that improves deposit acquisition by forty percent.

Within six months of switching to our Breakthrough Planning System, that same bank improved their efficiency ratio by twelve points, increased their premium pricing without attrition, and tied every initiative to one of five core performance drivers. They installed weekly rhythms to measure and adjust on the fly. And this isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now at banks across the country. The game-changers in banking are the ones who figured out that strategy is a living system—not a document gathering dust on a shelf.

Are you done mistaking activity for alignment? Are you tired of first-order thinking in your strategic plan that has no hope of actually creating the results—because you’ve tried it so many times before and it never has? Book a call, and let’s walk you through the planning system used by banks that are tripling cross-sales, growing NIM, and winning Banky Awards. Because more projects is not a strategy.

It’s a symptom of a problem.

The post The Strategic Planning Lie That’s Keeping Banks Mediocre [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Hi. I’m Roxanne Emmerich, and I work with bank CEOs and their boards to help them align strategy, culture, and execution.

This week, we’re diving into the critical trends your board must understand—or risk making growth decisions in the dark.

Let’s be honest. Most board packets are long on reports and short on insights. But the top five percent? Their boards drive growth with precision because they understand the levers that matter: culture clarity, strategic discipline, and real-time visibility into performance drivers.

Let’s face it: the board is there for strategic purposes. You’ve heard the insight: minds in, fingers out. We go to our boards to make sure that they’re driving strategies and giving us ideas about how we can attract more high-profit customers that are lower risk—how we can move into other markets. These are strategic issues that should be covered in strategic planning, where we are actually getting information from the board about how they can bring their wisdom in to make sure that this bank thrives.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is so many banks seeing their executive team and their board not gelling together.

That’s just simply not okay.

The board is not just here to rubber-stamp, and the executive team is not here to ignore the strategic insights of the board. The executive team is here to get the strategic insights of the board, weigh them, and build systems to implement those things. And that’s where most strategic planning goes wrong. See, most banks have strategic planners that are more accountants. They tell you what numbers to hit—they don’t tell you how to hit them.

That’s the whole point. By definition, a strategy is basically this: given limited resources, how do I accomplish a miracle?

And this miracle is what is defined—that is the strategy. And most banks have a strategic plan devoid of any of those strategies about how to get it done.

That’s what you need to be thinking about right now, because it is strategic planning season, and it’s time to do your best strategic plan ever. Not a list of to-dos like most banks. Not a list of aspirations without the strategies to make it happen. But instead, a workable plan that drives a performance culture, drives a higher net interest margin, less risk, more growth, and—for goodness’ sake—more low-cost deposits.

That’s the game of high-performance banking, and that’s what the strategic plan must be about as you go into this next year to make sure that you create a bank that’s a top five-percenter.

And that is the game. Right?

The post What Boards Miss That Can Tank a Bank [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Most bank CEOs tell me, “We have great people,” and yet sometimes they suffer not-such-great efficiency ratios, return on assets, return on equity. And what they’re really saying: “We have good people, but they’re not great because they don’t know how they tie to profitability.” Well, I get it. When I first started in banking, people showed me what to do.

I moved things from the left side of my desk to the right side of my desk, and I thought that was the job, and I just did the job with a person who had had the job before me because that was the training that I got. I didn’t know there was another way. It wasn’t my fault, and let me assure you, it is not their fault. They don’t know what a top five percenter does.

They don’t know that instead of going out and calling on a whole bunch of potential accounts, if they know how to identify a top one hundred most profitable next account, that could bring in next year’s six or seven or twelve or thirteen thousand dollars of bottom-line impact every single month after you bring it in. If they don’t know how to do that, that’s a problem. If they don’t know how to pull that customer away from your competitor and get premium pricing and the entire relationship, that’s a problem. So instead, what are they doing?

They’re walking up the street, up and down the street, calling on people or seeing what walks in the door, and as a result of it, they’re not bringing in the quality credits, they’re not bringing the entire relationship, and, God forbid, if we ever have to match a rate again, that becomes a problem.

It’s not just in sales within banks. Every person must understand how they tie to profit on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. But here’s the warning. And do I have little red flags? Are there fireworks going on here? Because there should be. Because when you hold people accountable for outcomes before they are ready, before they are winning, before they have the education, before they have the confidence, you’re going to have a mass exodus.

I probably have followed hundreds of sales training companies who totally mucked up cultures within banking organizations because they brought in the sales training and they said, “And these are the goals, and people should be hitting them, and if they don’t hit them, out you go.” Well, here’s the reality. No one thinks they can hit those goals, and the sales training is all done incorrectly because it feels like sales. When you’re a community bank, it should never feel like sales.

It should feel like helping someone along to make a better financial decision for them and to bring great value that far exceeds anything within your product line. It’s a whole new world of banking, and those who get out of commodity banking, those who get out of the same old, same old slugging of products and understand that now we have to bring true trusted advisor skill sets, those are the ones who will make it. If you want to be a top five percent, you have to figure out how to take your people and elevate them to the skill set of true trusted advisers. I had a CEO of a bank recently who was going through my trusted adviser certification, and he said these words. He said, “I thought I was a hotshot.”

“I’ve been helping bank customers for thirty years, and now that I’m taking this trusted advisor certification, and I’m realizing that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I really wasn’t very valuable at all.” And I’m thinking, if a bank CEO says that, just imagine what’s going on with your team members as they’re going out there slugging product lines as opposed to truly becoming the only banker they’ll ever need. If you want to be a top five percent performer, you’ve got to teach your team members to be the only bank that customer will ever need.

The post Build a Bank Performance Culture That Drives Profit [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Several years ago, I was invited to a friend’s house to help raise some money for a ten-year-old boy who was identified as someone who would probably be the best pianist in the world.

Because of his current abilities that were so far beyond what anybody—and this guy who was helping him had had many students through Juilliard—it was determined that this kid had some superpowers. But they said he will not be able to develop those superpowers unless he gets special training early in his life. And that’s what the fundraiser was for.

What I found most shocking was the young man did a concert, and I practically fell out of my chair watching this, thinking, I can’t even believe that a human could play like this, much less a ten-year-old. What could possibly have inspired this young man to be able to play the piano like this?

And then I learned a lesson. As he stepped away from the piano, he became a ten-year-old. He’s running around, he’s eating chocolate, he’s having a good time, he’s telling knock-knock jokes, and the whole time he’s playing with other friends, he has his iPad in his hand and he’s playing notes on his iPad.

He is practicing while he’s having conversations. He is practicing while he’s doing other things. His fingers never stopped going into that mode. He was always in the game.

I wonder if there’s something to be said for practice done to create exceptional behaviors, which creates exceptional performance. I gotta believe there’s something to that.

Sadly, in our industry, there aren’t enough people talking about this, there aren’t enough conversations, and there certainly aren’t nearly enough masters for them to study with to really get to be good at the craft of, “How do we bring extreme value to our customers in a way that we get to receive extreme pricing as well?”

Well, there are great opportunities when we figure this out. And I gotta believe that the banks that survive in the future are those who do figure it out. And so, it can be done. The question is, where do you get to go study with the elite best banks in the country and find out what they’re doing?

I bet you’re going to enjoy the panels at this year’s Best Banks in America Super Conference because, here’s the thing: they weren’t always some of the best banks in America in terms of performance. They just learned some things, and they kept their fingers on the keyboard, and they figured these things out.

And through the right practice of doing the right things that they did not understand before they started coming to the conference, they now are amongst the elite. And if they can do it, you can do it.

But most important, to get to the elite is one thing; to stay there is another. You’ll be hearing from people who have been elite performers for over a decade. Yeah, game on. That means during good times and bad times and disruptive times, they created a system that allowed for them to stay in the very top of performance.

And if they can do it, so can you. I hope you join the rest of them and get to learn from some of the other masters in the industry from the only conference that’s put on every year just for those who want to get to and stay in the top five percent of performers. Hope I see you there.

The post How Top 5% Community Banks Build, and Sustain, Elite Performance[VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Hi. I’m Roxanne Emmerich, founder of the Best Banks in America Super Conference and chair of the Institute for Extraordinary Banking. In this video, I’m pulling back the curtain on what separates the best banks in America from everyone else.

You’ve seen their names. You’ve heard the buzz. But what exactly are the Banky Award-winning banks doing differently? The answer: pretty much everything.

They don’t tolerate cultural drift, and they don’t chase volume. They engineer value, performance, and premium pricing. They use systems, not slogans. They align every role to profit.

They build magnetic cultures that make people want to stay, buy more, and refer. And when I asked them, “What’s their biggest difference?” many told me it started at Super Conference. And that’s where they first saw what a performance culture really looks like, then came back and built it.

Every year at Super Conference, I hear from bank CEOs, “Oh my gosh. I got two years’ worth of notes for implementation ideas.” And I hear from many, including Jill Moss from Farmers State Bank, who basically came the first year and said, “How will I ever be performing at the same level as some of these banks?” And then, two years later, having implemented those processes, they were recognized as one of the top banks in the country.

It’s about taking the good and making it great.

You’ll want to be at the Super Conference along with your executive team, and bring some board members too, so that you have a cohesive team that all understands: if you’re gonna play this game, play it to win and be one of the top performers.

Let’s face it. Only the top performers will be allowed the luxury of independence in the future. And as a community bank, one of your most important goals is to make sure that your name stays on that door for years to come and that you keep making a difference in your community.

That’s the end game.

So let’s raise the bar, and I’ll see you at Super Conference.

The post What the Best Banks in America Do Differently [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I’m telling you, I’ve heard it a thousand times. A CEO will say to me, “I am so tired of lenders walking into my office and saying, ‘Boss, I’m going to lose this deal unless we match the pricing.'”

Yep, this is true. At this point, it is true because they didn’t handle it correctly from the get-go. That lender got themselves into the position of having to match rate, and so yes, in fact, they’re in this mess. Maybe they can sweet-talk the customer into saying something like, “Well, you get me, and we have good people,” and maybe they can get twenty-five basis points more. But you can’t make a go of it and become a Top 5% performer with twenty-five basis points more on a loan deal, especially when you have desperate competitors pricing these things at crazy rates. And the deposit-rate competitors are just going through the roof on what they’re willing to pay. So margins are shrinking for those who don’t get it.

Don’t be that person. You need to be someone who gets it and understands we’ve got to have a four or even a five net interest margin—and it’s doable.

I can prove it. And you’ll meet many of these people when you come to the Best Banks in America™ Super Conference because there are many banks that are commanding well over a four net interest margin at a time when other bank CEOs are saying it can’t be done. And it’s true—they have a mountain of evidence. They really do.

Everyone is coming to them saying they have to match the pricing or they’re going to lose the deal. And it’s true. But there’s another mountain they need to climb: how to engage in those relationships correctly from the get-go so it doesn’t become about rate.

Listen, all you’ve got to do is watch the hard trend line. Dan Burrus, a dear friend of mine who is a futurist, talks about how being a futurist isn’t that difficult. He says, “Just watch the hard trend lines. They’ll tell you exactly where things are going.”

When I started this business, there were eighteen thousand banks. Now there are four thousand five hundred. I wonder where this is going. Yeah, we’re going to two thousand.

There are a lot of banks who are not nearly paranoid enough that they’re about to lose the name on the front of their door. They’re looking at the fact that they had a good year last year, which means nothing for this year because every year has its new challenges. Unless you pick yourself up and become a Top 5% performer among your peers, you’re always in a state of vulnerability.

So my buddy Dan Burrus talks about the trend line, and we’ve gone from eighteen thousand banks to four thousand five hundred banks.

We’re on our way to two thousand. There will always be two thousand great boutique banks that can command whatever premium pricing they want to and compete against all the desperate non-bank competitors.

And if you’re not on the path to becoming a Top 5% performer—one who can command four and five NIMs—you’re going to have challenges keeping your name on the door because we can see the hard trend line. We know where this thing goes, and denying it is not going to keep it from happening.

So please wake up to the possibility.

And here’s the thing: your team members will love you when you start commanding premium pricing because they’ll no longer feel like vendors. They’ll feel like partners, and they’ll love coming to work every day because, guess what?

It is fun to win.

The post Stop Matching Rates: How Top 5% Banks Command Premium Pricing Instead [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I bet your strategic plan does not have anything in it that says, “We want to match rates. We want to shrink our net interest margin.”

“Oh, what can we do to match the rates of our desperate competitors?”

Those words are probably not in your strategic plan, and yet the way that your plan is being executed demonstrates a reliable, predictable pattern, which basically means your people are still matching rates. So we need to address rate matching, not only from a decommoditization standpoint, but also how you handle this strategically at the same time.

I’ll tell you what—it’s really easy to do what’s normal in banking: sit behind the desks, wait for the requests, match the rates, or, on the deals that you call out on, take them through a typical sales process but then end up having to match the rates anyway.

What is it about your strategy that’s wrong? If you knew that, you’d say, “Roxanne, I’d have this fixed by now.” Well, of course. But how long can you live with not fixing the strategy that doesn’t allow you to increase your pricing?

There are many false attempts, and many people try very hard in their banks, as good bankers, to command premium pricing, and yet the job doesn’t get done. There’s always the next excuse.

“It’s the competitors.”

“It’s that nobody is loyal anymore.”

There are lots of excuses, but what are the strategies that are going to take you out of that? How are you going to approach things?

Strategy, by definition, is this: with limited resources, what do you need to do to make sure you hit an outcome? Most people only talk about the limited resources. The “doing” has everything to do with: Do you have the right sales system? Do you have the right differentiation?

Do you have the right attentiveness to the right sales system? Does everyone know how to follow it? And the proof is in the pudding, as my grandfather used to say. If you’re commanding great premium pricing, your people are doing all of those things right.

The post Stop Rate Matching: The Strategy That Protects Your Net Interest Margin [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.