Page 281 - BWM March 2013

March 2013 | Business World Magazine | 281
when customers run into difficulty. Lober
said that became abundantly apparent at the
height of the economic recession a few years
ago. “What happened with the larger insti-
tutions is once a company’s numbers turned
negative, they didn’t care if the customer had
been with them for fifteen or twenty years.
If an individual customer or a particular in-
dustry suddenly fell into disfavor, some very
good clients were pushed out, pushed away.
We were able to pick up many very strong
business relationships that had been pushed
out of other banks,” said Lober.
“Like most community banks, we looked
at the person, we look at the history and we
said, ‘We’re going to help get you through
this,’” explains Lober. “We saw customers
in crisis from 2008 to 2012. As some of our
customers were struggling, our staff was say-
ing, ‘Ok, we have to help get that customer
to 2009.’ And when 2009 came, we said, ‘We
have to help get that customer to 2010.’ We
were not going to give up on them. We knew
they were phenomenal before this event
happened and our goal was to help them get
great again. We just had to get them through
that middle period. While the economy is
improving and businesses and farms are do-
ned into Consumers National Bank)