Season 2, Episode 3: Alice Frazier

Jack Hubbard  00:02

Banking, what a great industry. It's been at the heart of our economy since day one, fueling growth and helping America thrive. The Bank of North America was our first bank, established by Robert Morris, way back in 1781 over the years, banks have dotted our landscape in money centers and small towns where community banks have been a great partner. They've helped businesses grow, become a vital part of the communities they serve, and make families feel secure. We've sure come a long way from those old school ledgers, and now we offer cutting edge technology solutions. Regardless of all these advancements, banking remains a people business. 

I've been in and around our industry for over 52 years, racking up over 5 million air miles and spreading the gospel of performance, culture, development and trust based sales conversations. I've had the unique privilege to train and coach over 80,000 bankers, speak at state and national banking conferences in 49 states and teach at 13 of the nation's preeminent banking schools. Along the way, I've made countless friends. Now as a cancer survivor, it's time for me to give back. One way I'm paying it forward is through this program. Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. 

Welcome to Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. I'm Jack Hubbard, chief experience officer of The Modern Banker, and every week, I feature special guests to help improve your sales efforts and marketing approach, your performance culture and your bottom line. It's all brought to you by our great friends at RelPro and Vertical IQ, Alice Frazier is my guest this week. Alice is President and CEO of Potomac Bancshares, and Bank of Charlestown. Alice and I met nearly 20 years ago, and throughout her career, her leadership has helped every organization she's touched thrive from both a bottom line and a customer experience perspective. Alice earned a BS in accounting from Radford University College of Business, and served as a staff accountant to two major firms. 

She launched her banking career in 1991 graduated from ABA stone Graduate School of banking in 1996 and worked at local and regional banks before joining BCT back in 2017 Alice serves as a class A director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and is Vice Chair of the Independent Community Bankers Association. Now about BCT, the bank has won so many awards, It's too, too many to count, and while Alice puts those on her squarely on her grade team, it's Alice who leads the way today it's all about the we in community banking on Jack grants with modern bankers. Here we go. One of the unfortunate things about podcasting is you don't get to hear what happened before we hit the record button. And so let first, let me. Let me welcome Alice Frazier to the program. Alice, it's, it's great to see you. 

Alice Frazier  03:26

Oh, it's so great to see you, Jack. And so I'm really excited and honored to be here. 

Jack Hubbard  03:31

Well, back to you. And we were talking before we hit the record button. Take us back in our history together. When did we meet?

Alice Frazier 03:42

I was just mentioning to you, I thought about that this morning, and I think it was right around 2005 the organization I was going with in that time was really focused on developing its strategic initiatives around sales and needed to have a way to teach its sales leaders how to be sales leaders, but also how to have conversations. And you and your team were fantastic at that. For us, I learned so much at that point in time.

Jack Hubbard  04:12

Well. And we, we got to know, in fact, our first, our very first training client was F and M bank out in Frederick, Maryland, and we got to know Steve Hein, who has just blossomed like you have in his career as a community bank CEO. You know, relationships are at the heart of all of this. Isn't that true? Alice?

Alice Frazier  04:32

Absolutely, whether it's relationships with other bankers and friends that you can make, but certainly with your clients and the people that you build your business with, overall, Steve is fantastic. I am so glad to have met him through you in 2007 when we got to spend time on a panel discussion together. 

Jack Hubbard  04:52

It's really true. You know, I I always say that I'm an accidental banker. I didn't get into this industry. Desire, it was by chance. You started out your career as a CPA and walked us through your career. How did you go from CPA to banker and take us through some of the banks that you've worked for?

Alice Frazier   05:13

Oh, I appreciate that. It's so funny you say accidental banker, because when I speak for ICBA, I'd call myself an accidental banker, because I wasn't. I was also an accidental CPA. When I went to college, I was actually an equestrian major. First, I was going to ride horses for the rest of my life. Fortunately, that school had a business program attached to that major, and I took an accounting class, and it really made sense to me. I know it was the organization of it, the ability to just have things solved and go forward. 

So that was how I got into accounting. I didn't really even know much about that, but my family had a great friend, and he kind of guided me into the world of public accounting. And in the world of public accounting, I audited banks. And in 1991 one of my bank clients approached me about joining them, and this was at the S&L crisis, the tail end of that and the big thing at that point in time from the OCC was to have a loan review person. Have a loan review person, and so they hired me to start their loan review internal audit. 

A couple years later, they had a CEO transition, and the new incoming CEO made me a CFO, and from there, it just blossomed. I had a great run at the bank we first met at where I got a chance to do everything possible, work on M and A work on building branches, integrating mortgage trust, etc. But I never got to touch commercial lending or sale, true sales leadership. And knowing that I needed that to one day be in this seat, there was an opportunity locally for a very large regional, multi state regional to join them as an area executive. And I did that for a couple years, leading commercial lending a market for them in sales before then I went back to community banking in a large Washington, DC, MSA regional, until it was sold, and then I landed here. So that gives you kind of the nuts and bolts in a very quick way.

Jack Hubbard  07:30

You know, I'm curious about your feelings on this. You've had the opportunity to work for a very large bank, a very good bank, and a couple of community banks, and I'm, I'm, I always tell bankers, you need to be well rounded, not only within the bank in terms of the number of different positions and departments that you should you should be touching, but being at a big bank and being at a community bank, I think there's an advantage to that, isn't it? 

Alice Frazier  08:03

Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that if you're in a bank that's giving you a lot of opportunity, all in a community bank that's given you a lot of opportunity to move all around, and the bank itself is growing, not only in its asset size, but in what it's doing and how it's developing itself, moving from what I would call elementary school to middle school to high school. If it's growing internally, I think you can have a long, fantastic career. Now, did I benefit from going to a really large bank? I did, but I had one thing in mind, not only the commercial part, but I really wanted to understand how to affect culture when you really got so spread apart. How do you maintain culture in a company? And that bank was very good at that at that time, and really, I was absorbing as much as I could about how you communicate culture? How do you set the tone of culture, and how do you, you know, live it going forward? So those were what was important to me. I do think, you know, big banks give you some perspective, but I think there are some fantastic career opportunities in community banks long term. Yeah,

Jack Hubbard  09:17

no doubt. So fast forward, it's 2017 you become president and CEO bank of Charlestown. This bank started in 1871 with nearly $900 million in assets, maybe a little over and one of the three states. And one of the really cool things about you, and you got to go to the bank's website. It's very neat, neighbor helping neighbor. And that's really the essence of community banking. Talk about the Bank of Charlestown. I'm sure you're very, very proud of this organization.

Alice Frazier 09:52

I am incredibly proud. I'm incredibly honored to actually lead an organization that's 153 Years young, and I say that because we're still very dynamic. We're not, you know, looking in the past. We're always looking forward to it. And, you know, there's a great story about that neighbor helping neighbor. In 2018 we held our very first together on purpose day. It was a team building day. And we call it top day together on purpose. And one of the the purpose of that meeting, that day was to kind of come up with what we call, sort of our shortened mission statement. What? What does that mean? 

So the entire bank worked on that. Each table got to come up and put that together, and then we voted on it. So one table of eight people came up with is really rooted in tradition, growing neighbors, helping neighbors, growing our communities. And so we shortened that so it was really a team, Team thing. And if you think about our founding, 38 farmers and orchards just came together in 1871 to start a bank, because the bank had the banks that were here before were Virginia based banks, and Jefferson County was a Virginia county until West Virginia was formed, and then all of a sudden it was without a bank. And so neighbors were helping neighbors to form a bank. So it's very much who we are from the very beginning.

Jack Hubbard  11:24

All right, so your bank has had a great and rich tradition, but I gotta read y'all some of these awards. You won't believe it. And this is all since Alice has been here, best place to work, 2019, 20, 2020, 2021, and 23 Forbes recognized BCT as the best state bank 2018 and 22 the journal, local organization, local newspaper, selected the bank as the best bank, the Best Loan Servicing bank, and the best financial partner. Now that's really cool, but that's not enough, because in 2024 the bank was voted the winner of loudons, which is where you are headquartered, Loudoun County, favorite poll in banking, mortgage company, banker, and that was you, by the way and financial planner Mary Zabat, this is amazing. Talk about this success. What do you attribute all of this to?

Alice Frazier 12:30

First of all, my backup. We're actually headquartered in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Loudoun is a new market that we heavily went into beginning at 18. And I bring that up so to be voted five years later in all of those categories in a market we were not even in, it was completely humbling and gratifying for all the work. I'll go back to what was already in place when I joined and I met with the board for this position was the intentional efforts on our people that our board I there's nothing I can bring to my board of directors that isn't going to help our people be the best that they can be, and taking care of them that they're going to it's barely out of my mouth and they're saying yes, so I'm going to start with our people. We spend a lot of time on helping develop them, helping them grow, making sure they're part of the team and that they understand that we want to create amazing client experiences, creating those relationships. I mean, everybody has a checking account, everybody can give a loan, we can all cash checks, we can all do online banking, but those experiences, that's what makes that difference. 

And so they are given every opportunity to do what they can do to make that experience amazing for the client. And with that, you know, as we're hiring, and we've talked a little bit about this, we are really looking for people that work in as a team. For us, teamwork is very critical. We have a culture. And it's funny, if we slip up and we hire a me, a me tends to opt out because they don't know how to function in that culture. And I'm always saying that we're a team of responsible needs accountable to each other, and because of that, they can always rely on their teammates, whether it's passing off a client or whether they need some help with something. And I think our clients feel that. I think people see that when they come in and we get tons of referrals and unsolicited comments on social media that it warms my heart, because I know it's about the people, and so my job is to take care of them. They take care of our clients and our communities thrive.

Jack Hubbard  14:54

Well, that sounds great, and I've seen you. I know you live this culture and. Very familiar with your bank, and I know all of what you said is true. Here's the challenge. We've got this industry that is perhaps not the most exciting industry in the world to join, but we need young people. How have you? How have your hiring practices changed a little bit, and what are you finding out there in terms of challenges with hiring young bankers?

Alice Frazier  15:25

Oh, gosh, you are so I think industry wide, we need to really do a better job of attracting bankers to this. I mean, it's a great career option. You can do so many things. We are very close to the local schools, universities. We have two very close to us, and so we bring in interns, and they get to do real work. In fact, one of our interns has stayed on with us part time this fall semester. And so we actually try to make use of interns. One of the classes at the local university, Shepherd university, they come in twice a year, and they get to see the entire bank. 

So it's those relationships, but that touring is led by our younger people and that's not enough, because once they're here, what we're finding about the generation is that they want to grow. They want to be able to see and be more in control of their own compensation. So we've put together several certification programs where they know, if we complete this, their earnings will go up by XYZ. So it's in their control. They see the whole career path, and they know where it's going. And so far, that's been very attractive to people. They like it, but it is a challenge. I mean, I'd love to see community banking really be something people aspire to, not something that becomes accidental like it was for us. But if we can get that, that would be fantastic.

Jack Hubbard  16:59

Well, and the we culture leads to my next question, community banking is all about, we being out in the community, networking, helping with projects and things like that. And you also talk, before we started recording, about accountability, and I love that word. And unfortunately, a lot of CEOs don't hold their people truly accountable. What do you do? What? What is the accountability for your bankers to be out in the community and getting involved in organizations?

Alice Frazier  17:31

You know, I think I'm very , very, very fortunate. I have a lot of folks. I'm not going to get the generations right. So I'm going to say in their 40s that they really grew up with people before them that were out in the community. So they're very engaged. And I'd like to say that they're always reaching back and pulling someone else along with them. And I'm going to speak about just last week's Jefferson County Fair. It's a week long event, and so, of course, we have a tent there, and we're manning that every evening, and usually there's two or three people, and we don't struggle too hard to get that filled. But in addition to that, we help the fair with counting all the money. And that's a long job, because it's after the fair closes and goes on, and there's people engaged and involved there. 

So I think it takes more effort to grow. You know, it's there, but we got to show people, and we got to grow them involved in it. The other thing we do is monthly, we celebrate anniversaries, and because we weren't getting all the young people out that we would like and even some of the back office people. That anniversary lunch is preceded earlier in the day. We go out and deliver for Meals on Wheels as a group, and so everyone has a chance to get that opportunity to feel good about giving back to the community. And what that's done is actually spurred on even more community engagement by people thinking about that.

Jack Hubbard  19:06

So that's innovative, and that's what I want to get to is the next question, when, when you and I worked at a bank together, one of the things we put together is cats, client action teams. I talk about this all the time. You've likely done a lot of innovative things like that. What are some things you've done kind of in an industry that's more conservative and certainly still regulated? What have you done to innovate on behalf of your clients?

Alice Frazier 19:38

You know, we use advisory boards, and every bank has had their touch and go with advisory boards, and those take work. You have to really cultivate those relationships. And so we do some things where we actually, instead of just holding advisory board meetings, we'll have a couple of those a year, but we actually hold more events that they can. Bring people to so they're happy hours, they're social opportunities, and nothing is sold there. It's just about starting a conversation. And so that has worked incredibly well for us. 

In fact, we have one coming up next week at our local baseball stadium and around our whole government contracting initiative and new business line we're in where we've started, invited a bunch of them and had our advisory board. They knew people that were in it, and they're just bringing them so we continue to stay focused on that and bringing value to the clients in different ways. I don't know if it's necessarily innovative, but no one really is doing some of those things in our markets right now.

Jack Hubbard  20:43

So you're in three states now. Fortunately, you're not more than an hour and a half away from any of your locations. Three states, I'm curious, as a CEO, you've got a lot of responsibilities,\ and you got to get out to those states as well. Talk about a day in the life of Alice Frazier, what do you do on a regular basis?

Alice Frazier 21:06

Oh, let me pull up my calendar and share with you the craziness of it. I have this fantastic assistant, Laura, that really keeps me straight. And if you think about getting out and visiting those offices that is so critically important in a community bank, because they are the team that takes care of the client. So actually, once a month, she schedules what's called Fun Fridays, and we'll visit two of our banking offices, and we'll have lunch with one, and then we'll have dessert with the other, and I just sit down with the team and just ask them, What do you need? And I will usually walk away with a list of, hey, I need a new coin counter. Or, Can we do this? Or, you know, boy, the refrigerator really needs to get replaced. All simple things that I'm always kind of astounded at. Why don't they just do it themselves? But they don't. 

And so we make things happen for them, and they feel really great, but really I am focused on being available for the team. We just met before this. We have our Monday morning meeting with the senior leadership team, and we're looking at the rest of the year forecasting for that. I'll go from here. I have some one on ones. I have some client meetings. Usually I'll have a couple of those in a week's time. And then there's, you know, community events. I serve on a hospital board. I serve on an EDA. I belong to something called an inner circle, aside from what I do with the community banking at Independent Community Bankers of America, so it's a big mix of things. I'm very focused on the culture of the company and the strategic initiatives and how we are maintaining that and building those foundations that last long, long beyond me, because the board's directive is independence, and that's why I'm here. I love that directive,

Jack Hubbard  22:56

so I'm a business owner, and in comes the president of the bank to my office. Whether I'm a prospect or I'm a client or perhaps a referral source. That's just awesome. Too many community bank presidents don't get out of their office and do that. But I want to explore. I want to explore joint calling for a second so you go out and make calls on the community, probably by yourself. But what about joint calls with your commercial bankers? How does that work at BCT, and what do I need to do to get on your dance card if I'm a commercial banker, and I want you to go out on a joint call with me.

Alice Frazier 23:44

So I'm going to start with that last question. First, all you have to do is connect with Laura and get on the calendar. I prioritize that because I know that in the community, that's a standout, and that's something and then I'm going to go back to actually do very few calls on my own. I always take a banker with me and in that, if it's something like tomorrow night, we have a dinner with a prospect and my director of government contract banking, I will get the conversation started. I will deal with it's a government contracting prospect. We'll go from there. I really turn over and allow him to do a lot of the talking, because we hire fantastic people. I'm just there to warm it up and make sure they're happy about being part of it. 

But if we get done with a call, and there are some things, we always will do a debrief and say, Okay, where are we going with this, what do you think you heard? What do I think I heard? And how can it go? Go forward? And so there's conversations that happen ahead of time, like I've already sat down with that banker. He knows why we're having that call, how I met him, what I expected, you know the conversation is going to be about. And then we'll debrief. And say, who's running with what at the end. And so those are, that is the way we operate in the in the company as a whole, whether, you know, we have a commercial banker going out with our Chief Lending Officer, they will do that work, or a senior commercial banker taking a junior commercial banker out, it's really about, we find that doing joint calling, whether it's you know, take a retail banker with a commercial banker, you tend to hear different things, but you all get the whole picture, which is really important.

Jack Hubbard  25:32

Well, this doesn't happen by magic. You have no pixie dust over there in your communities. Training is, is a real critical aspect of this, you brought on a lady, and I know you had training before this, Hillary Blackburn, who's a real pro, and you and I have known her for a long, long time. Talk about training and how your bankers are getting what tools and skills you're teaching your bankers to get better at sales. 

Alice Frazier 26:03

Oh, gosh, so we did bring on Hillary. Her role is sales development, and she's also taken on the marketing function as well for us and the product. And she's an amazing person that can pack more in a day than anybody I know, and get great things done and what we need. We were not good at product knowledge training, or even our product knowledge amongst it, we have four business lines. We do have commercial banking. We have retail banking, the traditional components. We have a wealth and trust area which does quite well, and we also mark mortgages so secondary and portfolio mortgages. 

So for business lines, and we're just around $850 million, the bank is pretty hefty. We can get a lot done with just about anybody. But we didn't know how all these work really well. And besides which, for commercial banking, we are incredibly strong in cash management and treasury management for our clients. And so Hillary came on board. She spent 90 days going out and trying to understand everything that the bank wanted to learn. And she came back and created some micro training that occurs every other week, 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the afternoon. And these are, I would bite sized. 

You know, we all have Twitter brains these days. We don't have a lot of attention span, and they don't need to know all the details. They need to know enough to hear what a client is saying and move it to the next level and get it to the right person. So actually, August is the one year anniversary of micro training she has done. Let's see 26 of them. At this point in time, we get about 80% participation in the organization, which is fantastic in my mind. You always have to account for vacations or PTO, whatever, but they're all recorded and on our intranet. So there's that piece of training which is really important, and inside of that will also be some sales tips or things that you can do. But we do considerable training from a leadership perspective too. 

We have a person that works part time for us, and her whole piece is whole pieces around developing our leaders to be better at leading, better at Performance Management and really having the quality conversations every employee deserves and wants, so that they can be the best performers. And so I think combining all of that together has really been working well for us. I think the team feels well supported,

Jack Hubbard  28:46

So positive and what a great organization. Y'all you need to go to the bank's website. So let me shift gears a little bit. Give you a couple of numbers. 60% plus of the workforce is made up of women. 350 women of the 4000 plus banks in America are CEOs. So talk to me about how a female today can move up through the chairs and earn the right to have your position now

Alice Frazier 29:22

I'm going to be honest with you. It really starts with another woman reaching back and pulling along. And it doesn't mean that I was very, very fortunate. I had men that were great mentors to me, and then I had a mother who never saw anything in her way, no matter what her career would do. So she was a great role model for me and that perspective. So with her approach, I never had any fear at trying anything, and I had great mentors. But it does take, I think, as you know, women need to support women and men need. 

To support women and look around and say, Are there? And I think they do. I want to, I know they do. It's not a thing from that perspective. I also want to encourage women, as they're going through their career is to take initiative on things and don't, don't take a secondary seat if you get invited to the table, be part of that conversation, and really engage in that and if someone brings you to that table, be prepared and be ready to go. I think that sets you apart and moves forward. I think that the women tend to gravitate towards the operational roles in the bank. Sometimes it's because those roles don't have you out in the evenings, or they don't impede family time, etc. But I'm hoping that the industry begins to really understand that we have that balance necessary for us all to be part of that.

Jack Hubbard  31:00

That's a great answer. Here's another thing that's going on in community banking and all over the world, and that's AI. We talked a little bit about innovation before. What is the bank's stance around its bankers using chatgpt or other AI tools inside the bank.

Alice Frazier  31:22

Someone begins with chat, TPT we don't we don't have overarching people using it. People are using it. They're testing it. I will give you a little story around that. In March, I was struggling with our shareholder letter, and

Jack Hubbard  31:39

I was with my brilliant 32 year old son, he goes, Mom just just get chat GPT to write it. And I was like, Oh, come on. So he shows me how to do it. And lo and behold, if you were to look at our annual report, it was actually 70% written by chat GPT. I filled in other blanks and numbers. So that was pretty exciting, but we will use it to help us with job descriptions,

Alice Frazier   32:01

policies, some I know Hillary uses it a lot in some training materials that we're using in our relationship playbook we developed and her amazing client experience playbook. So we're testing it from that perspective of AI. Now if you move over to using our client data, we have bought and utilize claravis, which is taking all of our data and really given us that information in ways that we just could never have gotten before. And as a CEO, I so appreciate that tool, because I can dive into what is the company doing without having to bother somebody else. It brings it all together. We also partner with another company to kind of give us some other data access to whether we are we just did some pin drop maps to see how far our clients were outside of our primary footprint and things like that. So it's it's a growing tool for us. How we use it and go forward is still only just at the very beginnings.

Jack Hubbard  33:15

Well, another tool that people use often, and one that I'm obsessed with and love is LinkedIn. And interestingly enough, so do you? I see you post a lot of things on LinkedIn about the bank and commentary and different things like that. What would you say to CEOs about the importance of using LinkedIn as part of your role.

Alice Frazier  33:43

You know, as a CEO, we have responsibility to the brand of the organization, and for us, you know, to be, continue to be perceived. 153 years young, 154 years young, our engagement and utilization of tools that people go to on a regular basis is critically important. So I see that as much as branding the organization and helping people see us as an organization that is vibrant, growing in touch with the things that are going on. Plus, we can use that tool to bring value to clients that's critically important today. How do you bring more value to stand out and get away from a rate conversation, which is what you taught me so many years ago, and these are one of the tools to do it. So I think that it's critically important for us to be involved.

Jack Hubbard  34:43

It's great. So you've been so kind with your time. Let me ask you a couple of final questions. There have been a lot of articles written lately about the death of community banking, that this is a relic of the past. You're on the. Board of the Federal Reserve of Richmond, and you're the vice chair of ICBA, the Independent Community Bankers of America. Look into your crystal ball. Talk about the future of community banking, if you can.

Alice Frazier 35:16

I think it is still vibrant and has a place forever. Here's why. People want relationships. They want to know their banker, maybe in an early part of their career or their life. They don't feel it's necessary, but when they want to buy a house, many of the younger generations are starting businesses. They need bankers. They also want value, I mean, and I can point to other industries and I will, and they want experiences. So think about it. They go, they want value. They'll, they'll choose to go on vacations and create and go stay in places they can't stay, you know, or they want to stay and pay for that experience. And if we can create, continue to create, very positive, personalized relationship based experiences, they're going to come back to us. And that, that's what a community bank can do better than the large banks. With large banks may have all the bells and whistles, but we bring that personalized attention, and once they experience it, I think they begin to spread the word for us, and it will, and it will continue to grow. So is it challenging today with regulations every day? I think I saw a note from Rebecca Romero Rainey. There was 7000 pages of regulations just this year alone that we have to go through, yes, but if we can work through that, and we can continue to be advocates for tiered regulations, recognizing, you know, community banks as being different, we bring something other banks can't bring as community banks, and I think that's critically important.

Jack Hubbard  37:04

You need to follow this lady on LinkedIn. Alice Frazier, does such a great job with her bank, and she's always been we she's always been everybody else does it. But this lady is a great leader. I've seen her coach people. I've seen her work. Alice Frazier, you're amazing, and thanks so much for taking a little time out of your day to be beyond the program. Jack,

Alice Frazier 37:30

You are an amazing one, and I appreciate being here with you.

Jack Hubbard  37:33

Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Jack rents with modern bankers featuring Alice Frazier. Next week, I have the amazing privilege of sharing the microphone with Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter, Mark's author of several best selling books, including his newest, the making of a mind for sales. Need some practical ideas and resources around blending LinkedIn into the sales process. Well, you can find them at themodernbanker.com Subscribe to this podcast that's been downloaded over 50,000 times. Follow us on YouTube and join that free public library too. Now that library has replays of all my shows, all the jack grants with Brynne, more than 40 eBooks and much, much more. A big thanks, as always, to our amazing sponsors, Vertical, IQ and RelPro, who sponsor both this program and Jack Rants with Brynne. It's September 2024, and it's always a great practice to make today and every day a great client day.