BancFirst Ohio Corp. hired, among other hawkers, a cigar salesman to staff its two newest branches in western Ohio next month. In fact, most of the employees at the new branches are salespeople -- not bankers -- by trade.
"It's easier to teach a nonbanker to be a banker than to teach a banker to be a salesperson," said Fred A. O'Dell, senior vice president of the $391 million-asset company.
"With that in mind, we've hired nonbankers."
The Six new hires -- three for each location -- will focus on four main areas: small-business lending, residential real estate lending, indirect auto and boat lending, and financial advisory services.
With an average of eight years of sales experience, they will attack the asset side first and seek deposit business from cross-selling, Mr. O'Dell said.
He's shooting for a total of $15 million in loans in the first year for the two locations in Newark and Heath, about 32 miles from the company's Zanesville, Ohio, headquarters.
Matthew Lytle, armed with four years of retail sales experience and a year and a half of outside sales, said that the main difference in his new job is, "We're marketing services and ourselves instead of a hard product."
The "financial center representatives" already have begun carving relationships with customers.
"We're going to be in all aspects of the business," said Robert Julian, who has five years of retail management and was a tobacco company sales rep for nine years.
"If I take care of them on the small things, hopefully they're going to call us first when they need that loan."
Mr. Lytle, Mr. Julian and their counterparts now are on the bank education fast track, learning in about two months what usually takes more than a year.
When the branches open, neither will have a traditional branch manager, which would counter the new strategy, said Mr. O'Dell, who is overseeing the new locations.
However, Daniel G. Bandi, an analyst at the Ohio Co., Columbus, said having no managers is the biggest challenge in the endeavor because the salespeople in both locations have to maintain a team focus.
Their compensation set-up might help: roughly 30% of the sales forces' pay will be incentive-based, with 25% to 30% of that amount depending on team efforts.
In addition to its new locations, BancFirst has 10 locations in the Zanesville area, and business lending centers in Columbus and Cleveland.
"If this is successful, we might change our [other] offices," Mr. O'Dell said.
BancFirst's management recognizes that amid industry talk of instituting sales culture in banks, sales is something certain people -- not necessarily bankers -- do well, Mr. Bandi said.
He also credits the company, which reported solid return on assets at Sept. 30 of 1.56% and return on equity of 13.75%, for not resting on its laurels.
"The worst mistake that they could make would be to sit there and do nothing," Mr. Bandi said.
"They have a strategy of where they want to go and how they're going to get there."
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