Doing double duty, Raymo focuses on leadership transitions

Every year, bankers step up to take on the responsibilities of the chair of their bankers’ association. They are bankers who volunteer to take on the extra work and additional meetings that go along with leading one of the industry trade groups for a year. They usually team with an association leadership professional who manages the staff and office, oversees the day-to-day planning, and sees to the actual mechanics of running the association. And on rare occasions, a trade group will call on the same individual to fulfill both roles. Meet Greg Raymo..Raymo was named chair of the board for BankIn Minnesota at its annual convention on Aug. 7, accepting the gavel from outgoing chair Tiffany Baer Paine, president and co-CEO of Security Bank USA in Bemidji, Minn. Consider two footnotable facts related to this transfer of responsibility. First, although a board member at First State Bank Southwest in Worthington, Minn., Raymo retired as CEO of the bank at the end of last year. Second, Raymo also is serving as president of BankIn Minnesota on an interim basis, until the group names a permanent president following the departure of Jim Amundson, who left the association in July to become CEO of United Bankers’ Bank in Bloomington, Minn. Raymo said the organization hopes to name a permanent president in the early part of this month.Since the middle of June, Raymo has been driving to the BankIn Minnesota offices in Bloomington some 135 miles from Worthington, to work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, returning to Worthington Thursday evenings. Calling the other members of the BankIn Minnesota staff friends, Raymo said he loves working with the association team. “It is really a privilege to be able to do this,” he said. Raymo, 66, worked at First State Bank Southwest for 27 years, having worked two decades prior at two banks in his hometown of Madison, Minn., population 1,500. Raymo said that while he was in high school, he got to know the president of one of the banks in Madison. Raymo was so impressed by the extent to which he became involved in community endeavors, that he knew he wanted to do something similar. “I was a sophomore in high school and I knew exactly what I wanted to be,” Raymo declared.Through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Raymo worked in Madison’s two banks, first at the State Bank of Madison, and then at Klein National Bank. Southwest Minnesota is farm country and things were so volatile for ag lenders that during one four-month stretch in the early 1980s, Raymo rode to and from work courtesy of the local sheriff. “There were so many death threats against me that I got picked up every morning by the deputy sheriff and he would come back at the end of the day to take me home,” Raymo said.Raymo had gone to high school with many of the young farmers; it was tough seeing some of his peers struggle through the crisis, but Raymo said working in the small town where he grew up offered opportunities. “When you are in a town the size of Madison, you get the opportunity to be the fire chief, the president of the economic development corporation, the mayor,” Raymo said. “These opportunities allow you to see things from a lot of different angles.”Raymo said the experience of being a banker during the ag crisis helped him to learn to “cross my t’s and dot my i’s. The experiences bolstered my career,” he said.Alvin Kooiman, former president and CEO at First State Bank Southwest, hired Raymo in 1997. Raymo said he respects and admires Kooiman, who encouraged Raymo over the years to get involved in the Independent Community Bankers of America and BankIn Minnesota, then known as the Independent Community Bankers of Minnesota. Raymo said he also is grateful to Amundson, who encouraged him to serve in the association chairs, even though Raymo warned him the timing would mean he would be chair during his first year of retirement. Well, so far it hasn’t been much of a retirement.BankIn Minnesota rebranded a few years ago, a much needed move, noted Raymo, given the previous name’s acronym brings to mind intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since then, the group has spent time developing a forward-looking strategic plan, and Raymo is adopting action steps from the plan as priorities for his year as chair.Membership engagement is a top priority, Raymo said, while his No. 2 priority is something he knows a little about: Succession planning. “I want to focus on succession planning for our industry. One thing I know from making business development calls to member banks is how many banks struggle with succession planning. We need to take an active role in helping bankers with their succession planning,” he said. Raymo said that at First State Bank, succession planning is a priority, with successors identified years in advance. And, at BankIn Minnesota, Raymo has been eying an early fall hiring of a permanent president since he agreed to the interim position job on June 17.