Executive People - Dallas Business Journal:

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DESCRIBE YOUR FAMILY. I think of my family as a contemporarhy piece of art because we have a lot of different partws to it with a lot of different My wife, Cindy, is an entrepreneur, and she has her own business called The Enchanted Galleries. My middle son, Jay, works with her at the My oldest son, Chris, is a CPA, but he’s currently a CFO at a steepl company. And then the youngesty son, Ryan, is in the real estatw business. HOW DID YOU GET INTO THIS INDUSTRY?
I had an oldee brother who had gone into bankinfg andliked it, and I liked the idea that you have the opportunit y to be involved in a lot of different kinds of businesses in a WHAT WAS IT LIKE GETTING COMERICwA STARTED IN TEXAS? Because of the firstr acquisition that we made, which was Grand Bancshares, it was a greaft experience. The folks were very warm and receiving. We were fortunated to have a really good groupp of people who had the same idea thatwe had, and that was that we wantede to grow Comerica in Texas.
In the late ’80s and earlt ’90s, there was quite a banking consolidation here in and so we worked very hard those first few yearxs to take advantage of those opportunities to grow our The first bankwe did, Grane Bancshares, we negotiated to buy, but the next 15 bankxs were failed banks that we had bough t from the , and then we went back to negotiatesd transactions after that. We’re a consolidation of 21 bankain Texas. HOW HAS THE COMPANhY GROWN IN TEXASSINCE THEN? We have gone from abouyt eight banking centers when we first started to almost 88 by the end of this We had less than 200 and now we have about 1,209 people.
We had less than $280 million worth of loans, and now we have about $8 WHAT WAS IT LIKE FOR YOU WHEN THE HEADQUARTERaSMOVED HERE? Actually, that gave us additional resources to be even more We obviously got a lot of additionall notoriety around town in terms of having a large bank based in Dallads again. Texans want to suppor Texans. Having the headquarters here just solidifiesthat we’ree truly Texan. WHAT IS IT LIKE NOW TO HAVE COMERICA CEO RALPg BABBNEXT DOOR? We’ve really been able to identifh certain ideas that he gets involved in and certaijn areas that I stay involved in and been able to split our time and not be redundant.
This allowz us to really get an even broader spread and broader recognition through a much broader part of the communityg than we mighthave otherwise. HAS YOUR ROLE CHANGED SINC E THE HEADQUARTERSMOVED HERE? It might have changed a littlse bit because I’ve done everythingy I can to get everyone that’ss new to Texas introduced into the community through different gatherings and introductionxs and meetings with people in WHY THE INTEREST IN THE ARTS? I think that we all have a responsibility to give back to the communith and help make it a better place, and if we can contribute that way through our time and effortss and leadership, then we shouldd take advantage of that.
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO KEEP MANY OF THE SAME EMPLOYEEz FORSO LONG? First of all, we make sure they have challenging work, that they have the opportunity to grow, and then there’s corporate kinde of things like a good benefitr program. Also, we want it to be inclusive. We want them to be but we also look to have a diverse groupof people, and we believe that we’rw going to get better solutionss and better execution if we have a group of colleagues that reflect the communitie that we serve. WHAT KEEPS YOU AWAKEE AT NIGHT? Now there’s always new challenges each and ever day that you tryto anticipate, but they don’tf keep me up.