2009 Outstanding Women in Banking: Marcia Malzahn

Marcia Malzahn likes to "wear a lot of hats"—finance and information technology professional, mother and wife, lifelong learner, weight lifter and author, for instance. In fact, Malzahn wrote the book on work-life balance, releasing Devotions for Working Women in 2006..With her wide range of interests and natural exuberance it's easy to see why Malzahn stepped up to the 2005 challenge of forming Edina, Minn.-based Tradition Capital Bank with her friend and former boss Reid Evenson..The two had worked together at Marquette Bank in Minneapolis before it merged with First Bank (now U.S. Bank) in 1993. They kept in touch even after Malzahn left banking in 1999 to become the Y2K project manager for a 9,000-member church with 300 employees, at least as many computers, 11 servers and boundless uncertainty about what the new millennium would do to computer operations..In the summer of 2004 Evenson called her to say he had quit his job as a bank president and was going to start his own bank.."I said: 'That's awesome! You've always wanted to do that, congratulations!' He has no job and I'm congratulating him," Malzahn said..It was the kind of reaction Evenson noticed and appreciated.."He said 'thank you so much; you're the first person who actually congratulated me and didn't tell me I'm stupid for leaving my other job.'" He asked Malzahn to help him launch the bank..By then Malzahn had been promoted to I.T. director, then finance director overseeing I.T., human resources and finance for the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minn. But she was ready to move on because there was nothing left "to fix, make better or improve." She had been thinking about pursuing a role as CFO of a nonprofit organization..In September of 2004, Malzahn called Evenson and said that she wanted to get back into banking but didn't want to be in lending. "I want to be the CFO of the bank and I want to learn to run a bank as a business," she said..The following January, Malzahn started as the bank's first employee. "Reid worked with the board in raising all the capital. I created all the infrastructure for the entire bank. It was an amazing experience.".A prodigious planner and project manager, Malzahn put together a 17-page to-do list with 570 items. "Some took two hours, some took a month," she said.."I remember sitting down at home, because we didn't have an office [yet], and [asking]: what did I get myself into? How do you start a bank from scratch?".There were checks to design, regulatory deadlines to meet, teller lines to set up, job descriptions to write, core processing systems to select and hundreds of other details that demanded decisions and follow-up actions. Seven months later, Tradition Capital Bank opened to the public, with Marcia Malzahn as its senior vice president and CFO..Originally capitalized with $10 million, the bank today has $160 million in assets. "We were in the black in 14 months, which is really good for a startup," Malzahn said..The bank opened a branch in Minnetonka, Minn., last December. "It was a lot of work but at least this time I knew what I was doing," Malzahn said. The original two-person team has grown to 20 employees..Beside her work in the bank, Malzahn has been a member of Financial Women International since 1993. The group is scheduled to disband at year's end, but Malzahn is a founding member of a similar organization, formed in partnership with the Minnesota Bankers Association, called Women's Leadership Connection. It is scheduled to debut this month. She served on the advisory board for Wings of Africa, a nonprofit that focuses on vocational education for girls in Nairobi, Kenya, and was inducted in the Minnesota Women's Economic Roundtable in 2006. She recently went back to school, working on a business management degree at St. Paul-based Bethel University.Other 2009 Outstanding Women in Banking honorees include:Margaret Howard, Bank of Wolcott, IndianaLois Bednar, Bank Forward, Grand Forks, NDStefanie Kramer, Shelby County State Bank, Harlan, Iowa