If you start from the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. Once you are king of the hill, though, where can you go? Many might rest on their laurels and enjoy the view, but Gary Head, chairman and CEO of Signature Bank of Arkansas, got up and left to build his own hill from scratch. It may seem like a strange choice, but he and his company are proud to march to the beat of a different drum.
Head was raised in Eureka Springs, which he affectionately dubbed “the cultural center of the universe.” His father was a rural mail carrier, and his grandfather had been in the savings and loan business but retired before Head graduated college. While he had little personal connection to the banking industry, he nevertheless felt drawn to it and his career path never deviated from that course.
He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration at the University of Arkansas, where he worked with long-time finance professor John Dominick. Dominick helped him to find a job after he graduated in 1982, a year of recession when interest rates were high and banking jobs were scarce. Thanks to the professor’s recommendations, Head was able to land a job at McIlroy Bank, the oldest bank in Arkansas, where he started as a file clerk, one of the lowest rungs of the ladder. It was his job to update the bank’s archaic credit file system, requiring him to sort through decades of old files.
“I got locked in a dungeon until I finished building a new credit file system,” Head said. “I couldn’t come out, so I worked really hard and a lot faster than probably some people might have because I wanted out of there really bad.”
The job that no one else wanted to do turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Since he had to read through every single credit file, he found the files of major figures in the state, such as Frank Broyles and Sam Walton. When he finished the new system and became a loan officer, he knew a little bit about every client who came in the door.
“I became a lot of people’s favorite person really quickly because I knew something about them that nobody else had ever bothered to know,” Head said.
With a promising early career, Head was recruited to First State Bank in Springdale in 1984 at the recommendation of one of his biggest customers and mentors, Jim Lindsey of the Walton Foundation. He remained there for almost three years and became vice president, during which time McIlroy was purchased by Jim Walton’s Arvest Bank Group. In 1988, again at Lindsey’s recommendation, he was recruited back to McIlroy bank, where he would serve as a finance executive until 1999, the year he was promoted to CEO. The following year, he earned a Master’s of Banking from Louisiana State University.
“I was incredibly fortunate to be named CEO of the bank that I started in [as] a file clerk,” Head said. “The worst job to have in the whole bank, that’s what they put me in. Next thing you know, at 39, I’m president and CEO of the bank.
“It’s very humbling. Most people don’t really understand, because if you’ve never done it then it’s difficult to explain. But all of a sudden, you have a lot of responsibility for a whole lot of people’s lives. You employ a whole lot of people, and they have spouses, children, or grandchildren that rely on their pay. And when you’re the leader, you’re responsible to set an example, to lead with distinction, to provide growth that gives everybody an opportunity to stay employed on a go-forward basis.”
Fortunately, Head had a great deal of help in taking on this responsibility, particularly from Broyles, who was a member of the board of directors. Broyles had been Head’s mentor for many years, and Head credits him with the best advice he has ever received or given: “Now listen carefully, you can never have too many friends. You never know when you’re going to need one, so you make friends all day every day.”
Head remained CEO until 2004, overseeing McIlroy Bank’s 2001 consolidation with the rest of the banks in the Arvest Bank Group, renamed simply Arvest Bank. Though he had made it to a position that many would envy, Head felt an entrepreneurial spirit stir in him.
“At 43, I woke up and decided I could do things differently and build something for my family and my friends’ families,” Head said.
He told no one at Arvest that he would be leaving until he already quit, believing that telling everyone and talking people into coming with him would be equivalent to stealing. Even so, some three dozen employees decided to follow him within two weeks of his departure, becoming the first employees of Signature Bank of Arkansas. He then raised $45 million in startup capital, and the company amassed about $100 million in loans within its first year – yet another case of old friendships coming in handy.
“We were very busy right from the beginning with building a bank,” Head said. “We didn’t know how to do it because there weren’t any rules, and there are no books on it, so we just kind of took off and made up the rules as we went along.”
Head has strong ideas about how to run a bank and he doesn’t mind if they’re different from how other people do it. His employees have always worn blue jeans to work, which was quite a shift when Signature Bank first started, although the culture of Northwest Arkansas has grown to become similarly casual.
Signature Bank is focused on businesses rather than personal banking. As such, it has fewer locations than most banks, typically with only one location for each of the seven cities it serves, with each bank having its own president.
The financial institution boasts a high level of diversity with 40% of bank presidents and 6 of 8 bank managers being women. As well, 60% of the lending staff are women, compared to the national average of about half that.
“A lot of women appreciate the fact that they can deal with other women at a high level, and a lot of these C-suite people moving into this area for these big companies are ladies. So, I think that spells well for our position,” Head said.
Head is also immensely proud of the company’s establishment of Banco Sí, the first entirely Hispanic-dedicated bank in the state. Opened in Rogers in September, every employee of the bank is bilingual, and all 20 members of the board are Hispanic, in order to better cater to the region’s largest minority group.
“I saw some people cashing checks in the lobby one day, and one guy was having to interpret for the whole group,” Head said. “Later, I found out that he was charging them to be their interpreter, and that gave me great pain. I’d rather that everyone have the same opportunity. I came from a family without any money, so I sure wouldn’t want to have to pay somebody to cash my check because I thought somebody was trying to fool me in a different language.”
Signature Bank sits just below being a $1 billion company and is expected to pass that threshold soon. Head believes it has the potential to make it to $3 billion someday. In the meantime, Head has no intention of ever selling the company.
“It’s a different thought process than some people in our business have, where you build something, sell it, then try to do that again,” Head said. “To me, a banker is like a doctor or lawyer or even a hairdresser. You don’t want to go in and have to explain what you want every time you get your hair cut. You want some familiarity. I think that to be a good banker you need to be familiar, so when a client gets ready to do something you already know about them and their financial situation.”
That idea about familiarity goes hand in hand with the number one business philosophy at Signature Bank.
“Get along or you’ve got to get along,” Head said. “That goes for our people that work here, and that goes for clients. If you’ve got all the money in the world but you’re not a very nice person and you’re rude to the people that work here, go somewhere else.
“All of our people get along. They’re not best friends, they don’t have to go to dinner every night, but we wear one uniform. And that uniform means that while we might not agree at the end of the day we’re on one team. So we can disagree, but we’re not going to be disagreeable.”
From the beginning, Head has excelled, thanks to a combination of hard work and the many friendships he has made. As CEO of his own bank, he has done his best to ensure the success of his employees by being the kind of mentor that the likes of Dominick and Walton were to him.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have been molded by some of the finest people in history. I got the benefit of being influenced, and it’s only fair that I try to help everyone I can,” Head said. “I try to help as many people as I can every single day because Coach Broyles said you can never have too many friends. You want to make a really good friend? Help them. That’s how you keep one. You take someone and you help them, and you’ve made a friend for a very long time.”
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