Editor's Note: The FDIC closed 140 banks in 2009, and Stillwater, Minn.-based Central Bank acquired four of them. In the 20 years preceding those acquisitions the bank had focused on growing a one-location bank (itself a formerly failed institution) into a flourishing suburban organization with six locations and more than $400 million in assets. But Central Bank's leadership team understood more than organic growth. It had lived through the 1980s, buying and fixing troubled banks across the region. It saw earlier than most the likely results of the economic collapse of 2008 and it prepared itself. In 2009 Central Bank transformed itself, tripling its number of locations and more than doubling its asset size in a string of acquisitions executed from August onward. Here is the story of what owner John Morrison, chairman Kurt Weise and president/CEO Larry Albert accomplished in the teeth of a great recession — and they might not be done yet. They are NorthWestern Financial Review's Bankers of the Year.
