The lesson about digging in and committing to an effort? That one, Ron Witherspoon said, came straight from his dad.
“I can always remember him encouraging me not necessarily to follow his path but to go to college, get an education and then find a good company,” he said. “‘Don’t necessarily be someone who hops and skips and jumps around. Find a great company, and if you want to succeed in that organization … do it there.’ It was something that always stuck with me.”
Whether it is his work as the president of the central Arkansas market for Arvest Bank or his passion for revitalizing Little Rock’s downtown, Witherspoon is not afraid to put in the hard work. Of course, banking was never a predetermined destiny for him.
“I can’t sit here and tell you I ever graduated from college thinking I was going to go into banking, but I knew Arvest was a great company,” he said.
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Witherspoon graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville with a marketing management degree and made his first career stop at Dillard’s. That role took him from northwest Arkansas back to Oklahoma, which is when he began contemplating a change away from retail.
Established in 1961, Arvest Bank was still relatively new to the banking scene, and Witherspoon wanted to be a part of what came next.
“I felt like it was a ground-floor opportunity because, at the time, Arvest was still very small,” he said. “I was thinking about the opportunity for growth and expansion and being a part of something that’s still fairly young.”
In 1997, he started as a teller but also spent time in the call center and in various branches, all just “trying to be a sponge” to learn not only about banking and customer service but also the culture. He even flexed his degree by working briefly in a marketing and advertising role for the bank. After four years in Tulsa, he was able to move back to Arkansas to tackle a sales manager role in what was then a new market for Arvest.
“It was an exciting time because we were seeing a lot of mergers and acquisitions in our industry,” he said. “Arvest was going through a bit of a growth phase, as well. I knew, at least in my head, we’d have an opportunity to either build additional branches, or maybe some acquisitions might come along. We were actually able to do both.”
The subsequent years were indeed expansive and included the acquisition of Superior Bank in 2003 and the National Bank of Arkansas in 2013. Through those years, Witherspoon stayed true to his father’s advice and committed even further to the bank, serving as executive vice president and sales manager in Little Rock for 12 years, followed by eight years as the CEO and local bank president in Oklahoma City. In 2022, however, he decided he wanted to settle once and for all in Little Rock.
Now, along with occasional golf and visits to the races at Oaklawn (and, of course, easier access to Razorback football), Witherspoon has also dedicated a good portion of his time and energy to injecting new energy and resources into what he saw was missing in Little Rock when he moved back.
“The downtown I left seemed to have lots of energy and momentum and a buzz. The one I came back to was nothing like that. Nothing,” he said.
He referenced the city’s 3.8 percent dip in job growth downtown between 2010 and 2018 — and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I know COVID was bad for a lot of cities, but it seems like it was exceptionally bad for our downtown,” he said. “It looks old. It looks tired. It looks dated. I know Little Rock’s an old city, but it doesn’t have to look old.”
Witherspoon has been a big supporter of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership and the “Results for the Rock” 1 percent sales-tax initiative that appeared on the Nov. 5 ballot, but he sees the long-term solution through programs such as the Metropolitan Area Projects improvement plan, the transformational initiative he said “literally changed” Oklahoma City for the better over the past couple of decades.
“Whatever our downtown is dealing with and going through, it’s not sustainable,” he said. “It’s great that other areas of the city are doing well, but downtown is still the heartbeat of any city, and eventually, it can get even worse. The downtown area is one we’ve got to invest in.
“It won’t be anything we fix overnight, but it’s about having a vision. Doing nothing is not an option.”
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